My graduate thesis concern religion and patriotism (of particularly the American variety). In Chapter Two, I used that to examine war poetry.
Presented here is the section of Chapter Two about “The Ironic Turn in War Poetry.”
Religious-patriotism vociferously fought against the modernist voice in ironic war poetry. For over a millennium leading to the Great War, Catholicism maintained a hegemonic stranglehold on religious-patriotism. But in the centuries following the Renaissance, the Catholic Church shared a contested hegemony with the Reformation and England’s Anglican Church whose almost endless intrusions into Catholic territory threatened its territorial dominance. But rather than territory, another threat born of existentialism became the greater threat. During the movement to modernism, the Catholic Church and Pope Pius X published the 1907 encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis which condemned modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies” (qtd in Cadegan 99). This encyclical condemned the entirety of modernism everywhere it faced its presence. So immutable was Catholicism’s power base that it believed modernism threatened its very existence for modernism intruded upon every level of society from the political, cultural, social, and intellectual (Cadegan 99-101). Catholicism along with England’s Anglican church and those of the Reformation all felt threatened by the rise of modernism voiced by the new war poetry. Such voices not only questioned the relationship between the church and patriotism but nurtured a self-aggrandizement among the readers to question religious-patriotism, and afterwards it cascaded through modernism and foreshadowed the post-modernist metanarrative dissolution.
Canadian poet John McCrae’s In Flanders Field may not be the war poem most believe it to be. McCrae wrote the definitive war poem In Flander’s Field. So definitive that its poppies have become synonymous with Western veteran celebrations. American author Jonathan H. Bens strengthens its normal romantic reading to support the glorification of war and “man’s relationship to man” (81). But a close reading sees a meaning far removed from its worshipful incorporation into current culture and assists the reader to see how romantic war poetry evolved into the ironic. Instead of “man’s relationship to man,” it becomes man’s relationship to ideology:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
For centuries prior to the Great War, poppies have provided opium, heroin, morphine and other narcotics derived from its flower. McCrae undoubtedly knew this and notice his description of the poppies’ actions from the first two lines: they blow between the crosses on every row. Ironically McCrae creates a picture of the poppies broken from their earthly tethers just as they must to become narcotics, and they swirl between the crosses on every row. This swirling symbolizes a mixing of the drug with the soldiers. He uses the Christian cross to represent not just Christianity but also a country. England among other countries appropriated the Christian symbol onto their nationalized sacraments from their flags to their coats of arms that accompanied every crusade originating from Europe that killed millions. Another religious symbol is the bird. Birds symbolize God. In North America, the Lakota and Dakota tribes believed the lark symbolized their God Itokaga. Bird singing also represent the voice of God. The lark guides the soldier into the religious-patriotism symbolized by the war’s nationalized Christian cross. But what that does to the soldier is the most remarkable statement of stanza one. The drug of religious-patriotism and God’s voice may be scarce heard but it is a priori to the sound of gunfire. Now the soldiers can be led quietly, like sheep, into battle and death.
McCrae’s second stanza gives voice to dead’s regret. Their living through dawn to dusk gave them a cyclic nature of constant birth and death. How they once loved and were loved most curiously lacks an object. I would argue from my reading of verse one that that object is God and country. They loved God and country so completely they followed it to their deaths and believed God and country would protect them as seen from the earlier examples of Psalm 2 and For All We Have And Are. Love disappeared, and they now lie in death. McCrae use of the present tense we lie is a double entendre. “We lie” presents them suffering an ongoing death, for as long as war rages, soldiers continue to die. Secondly, the use of the cross to mark the grave of each soldier is itself a lie that religious-patriotism is honorable. The soldiers speak that by lying under the cross they lie as to the meaning behind their death. They no longer represent that meaning; it is a lie.
McCrae’s last stanza again gives voice to the dead. Asking the reader to quarrel with the foe is a strange poetic wording. Quarreling is argument, not a battle. It is not a battle of armaments but one of narratives. McCrae noticed this clash of narrative and so did Catholicism. But both populate opposing battlefields. For McCrae, the foe is the religious-patriotism that has led many to death under its banner of the Christian cross. So now the soldiers plead to the readers not to break faith with them, but to have faith in the fight against the those who pave war with such narratives. McCrae then cautions with “We shall not sleep” signifying that for long as we follow religious-patriotism, people will continue to populate “In Flanders Field.”
The ironic reading of John McCrae’s In Flanders Field spoke out against religious-patriotism. Other poets speak in various forms about patriotism, religion, and the dangers of religious-patriotism. Some focus on people. Others focus upon the metanarratives of patriotism, war, religion, or some other. The poems presented here begin with Great War poems and progress through World War II, the Vietnam War, and ends with reactions to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in America. These poems will help underscore the ironic nature of modern war poetry and its most distinctive voice.
Poet Charles Hamilton Sorley did not lack for learning from his Scottish father, a moral philosopher. Returning from Germany to England after the 1914 outbreak of war, Sorley enlisted in British Army and found himself entrenched in France where his twenty-year-old promising life ended at the Battle of Loos. But his love of the pure patriotism outlined is well displayed in his poem To Germany:
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other’s dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fights the blind.
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other’s truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm,
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.
Sorely felt the narcotic pull of religious-patriotism. His use of blindness, the confinement of thought, and stumbling all implicate how religious-patriotism, like a narcotic, numbs our senses, clouds our thoughts, and stumbles one forward like a prisoner tied to and dragged by a horse. Sorely doesn’t blame Germany, nor the German soldiers, for he sees the ideological tapestry that encapsulates all within a realm lacking free choice, for to him it is nothing but where “the blind fights the blind.” The peace he describes isn’t an armistice or surrender of one foe to another, but a greater peace of “new-won” eyes and a “truer form.” Notice the use of truer versus true. Truer signifies an escape from one ideology but still constrained; it is a continuum of growth. Having escaped religious-patriotism and having embraced a pure patriotism, Sorely looks toward a world apart from past metanarratives where the former enemies embrace each other in the solidarity of humanity. But until then he warns as war poets often do of the continuing effects of religiously patriotic darkness, thunder, and rain.
The common trope of rain introduces the next poem of Edith Sitwell’s. Symbolic of darkness, discontent, foreboding, and impending doom. Every literary genre uses it to include the realm of war poetry. British poet Edith Sitwell’s poetry used this trope and countered Fussell’s view of feminist World War Two poetry as simply reportage “such as they were” (qtd in Stout 163). She also felt it necessary to change her “aesthetic . . . to confront the effects of war (Dorr 141). Having lived through the Blitzkrieg against London in 1940, Sitwell penned Still Falls the Rain:
Still falls the Rain—
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss—
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.
Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed
to the hammer-beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet
On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and
the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.
Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there,
have mercy on us—
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.
Still falls the Rain—
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,— those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad
uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear,—
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh… the tears of the hunted hare.
Still falls the Rain—
Then— O Ile leape up to my God:
who pulles me doune—
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree
Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world,— dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar’s laurel crown.
Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain—
‘Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.’
All its themes fall beyond my scope here, but several ironic passages support this argument. Sitwell equates man with darkness and its “nineteen hundred and forty nails” upon the cross signify how society has abandoned a pure Christianity in each of the (approximately) one thousand and forty years (at the time of the poem’s authorship) since Christ taught his belief of love and instead embraced a religious-patriotism. Sitwell makes the religious obvious, but the patriotism not so much. But when she transitions the non-discriminatory, non-nationalistic heart pulse of life to a “hammer-beat,” she turns innocent life into the beat of war drums that often instill within troops a patriotic fever. Lastly even Sitwell sees the ideologically controlled. While she believes that Christ, in the purity of belief, bears the wounds of all even those who propagate self-murdering ideology. Sitwell saw how ideology spreads and how it kills its adherents hence the “self-murdered.” In the final two lines of stanza four, she mourns the “sad uncomprehending dark” whose “self-murdered heart” was the victim of the Christianized patriotic ideology. Sitwell didn’t rage against Christianity, she raged with the same rage many have when Christianity engages with politics. That is, its ill-advised union with patriotism.
The next two poems by Australian Frederic Manning and American David Harsent validate poetry’s growth from romanticism to irony. British poetry scholar Bonamy Dobrée claims eighteenth-century patriotic and religious poetry lack “metaphysical tension: there is no conflict, no simultaneous apprehension at different levels” (Dobrée 3). Manning and Harsent exhibit that multi-level tension and take direct umbrage against religious-patriotism. Here is Manning’s Grotesque:
These are the damned circles Dante trod,
Terrible in hopelessness,
But even skulls have their humour,
An eyeless and sardonic mockery;
And we,
Sitting with streaming eyes in the acrid smoke
That murks our foul, damp billet,
Chant bitterly, with raucous voices
As a choir of frogs
In hideous irony, our patriotic songs
Manning’s use of Dante integrates a religious element into patriotism. He burdens the dead with the truth that they are now more alive than those still live who cannot stem the “foul, damp billet.” Or in other words the house in whose inhabitants fall victim to the drug-induced, “acrid smoke,” narrative of religious-patriotism where one croak follows another without narrative choice. They have replaced intellectual accommodations with base desires, and whose recitations have lost all meanings. For Manning, religious-patriotism is irony.
Harsent turns his attack openly upon religion in Snapshots (1) but recognizes a certain religiously patriotic cycle:
Troopers dead in a trench and a river of rats
Topers dead in a bar and a flood of reflections
Lovers dead in bed and a shift of maggots
Snipers dead in the trees and a cowl of crows
Travellers dead on the bridge and a gaggle of gawpers
Oldsters dead on a porch and a downpour of flies
Deserters dead in a ditch and a raft of chiggers
Foragers dead in a field and a jostle of foxes
Children dead at their desks and a month of Sundays
Every line of Harsent’s snapshot of life portrays ideology as death. He opens with troopers which introduces patriotic elements. People see the sacrifice patriotism provides for freedom, but in that freedom, there remains nothing but death. As Harsent proceeds down the litany of freedom turned death, he comes to religion and juxtaposes actual death with a metaphysical death. The children haven’t died from religious ideology, but herein lies the true irony of Harsent’s poem and a much-nuanced move. What is a month of Sundays? Denotationally a “month of Sundays” represent a long time. Harsent uses it here to represent a religious learning that dwarfs or eliminates other learning. It is an indoctrination of religion that creates a death because the child is dead to any other counter-narrative. And when those children become fully indoctrinated, they become the troopers from line one and poem begins anew.
Denise Levertov advances this story from the World Wars to Vietnam. She focuses upon religious-patriotism’s effect on the other. American poet Gibbons Ruark admired her writing through his own verse, “Your poem, I cry, is all body” (Ruark 482). True to Ruark, she focuses this poem upon a single cultural body. Denise Levertov was the daughter of a Welsh mother and Russian Hasidic Jew who was held under house arrest during the first World War. She was born in England and served as a civilian nurse during the blitzkrieg of London and moved to America becoming known as an American poet. Levertov was politically active during the 1960s and 1970s and wrote the poem What Were They Like:
1) Did the people of Vietnam
use lanterns of stone?
2) Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
3) Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
4) Did they use bone and ivory,
jade and silver, for ornament?
5) Had they an epic poem?
6) Did they distinguish between speech and singing?
1) Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not rememberefd whether in gardens
stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways.
2) Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,
but after the children were killed
there were no more buds.
3) Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
4) A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.
5) It is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants; their life
was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
6) There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.
Levertov doesn’t write about religion or patriotism, at least directly. She does, however, show the effects of religious-patriotism. I argued in chapter one that religious-patriotism must always find a scapegoat, find an enemy. What Levertov does with this poem shows the effects of one country’s religious-patriotism against another. As shown above the Vietnam war had a paradigm shifting effect upon the American landscape, but in Vietnam, religious-patriotism destroyed a culture, and Levertov doesn’t hold anything back in describing the horrific events. Just as religious-patriotism seeks to silence contrary views, she shows how it silenced a country.
Twenty-first century post-modernism and post-postmodernism poetry continue the poetic irony introduced at the onset on modernism. For the last two poems, the US Library of Congress documents and provide links to notable 9/11 poetry. There have been very few days where every American experienced the same battlefield. September 11, 2001 was one and December 7, 1941 another. The last two poems originate from the pain of 9/11. African American activist poet Amiri Baraka provides a provocative examination of exactly who we are and lastly Susan Birkeland’s powerful poem provides the closure for section three.
Never the one to avoid controversy, Baraka believes that Somebody Blew Up America, but he doesn’t know who. Literary critic Harmony Holiday claims Baraka throughout his poetry “projects his own inadequacy . . . and recenters blame and praise” (175). This poem is no different as he questions his, therefore humanity’s, inability to prevent the 9/11 attacks. His long poem asks a vast litany of who questions trying to uncover the culpable party responsible for the blowing up of America. And he doesn’t pull any punches towards anybody. The poem is way too long to list in entirety, but I will list several lines to illustrate my points.
Who made the bombs
Who made the guns
Who bought the slaves, who sold them
Who called you them names
Who say Dahmer wasn’t insane
Who? Who? Who? (lines 47-52)
The rest of the poem asks similar questions to most every atrocity around the world, and while it does touch on certain conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, they shouldn’t detract from Baraka’s message that we all need to look inward at everything we believe. It is a poem of ironic self-criticism for the body of humanity. It asks about patriotism and religion and how they contribute to evil around the world. It asks us to recognize how ideology is spread and used. It asks why we must accept religious-patriotism. It asks who is responsible as we continually seek the scapegoat that religious-patriotism creates.
Who twist your mind
Who think you need war
Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth
Who said “America first”
Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national
oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty.
Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful (lines 69, 72, 84-87, 164, 207-213)
The entire poem creates an ironic look at our own selves and our own convictions. The closing stanzas of Baraka’s remarkable self-critical poem creates the ironic view that no one listens nor cares, and in that he creates the ironic view that religion and patriotism are empty speak. His reference to an owl and its repetitive onomatopoeia “who” sound numbs us to these important questions, and until we listen – introspectively – these questions will continue to plague our complacency. After all, other than an ornithologist, who cares about the questions owls ask?
Who you know ever
Seen God?
But everybody seen
The Devil
Like an Owl exploding
In your life in your brain in your self
Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog
Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO who who
Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo! (lines 214-226)
Baraka not only points out the irony of continual scapegoating but asks in a most Kafka-esque examination of humanity: who are we really and are we really a humanity worth saving.
Susan Birkeland takes a similar role ironic turn as Baraka on 9/11, but instead of asking who, she asks what now. Dedicated to Birkeland’s “truth and beauty,” her San Francisco North Beach community celebrated her joyful life lost to cancer at forty-five (Susan Birkeland). Susan Birkeland presents the closure that positively ties up this exploration. Here is her Jesus Poem:
If I'd been trapped in one of those towers,
and I had a cell phone,
I'd have called my sister and brother
and told them I'd loved my life,
loved them, always would, and to
thank everyone for being so good to me and
to take no avenging actions,
nor support the avenging actions of others,
but to let me die with the dignity of my faith.
Then I'd step out into the air,
something opening beneath me,
the last fall of my life.
It's hard to say what I'd be feeling,
surprise, mystification, terror, glory,
but I'm sure I wouldn't be angry.
In the last moments
there's nothing to fix,
no protest against the speed of the fall.
I imagine I 'd be filled with
something beyond terror,
a feeling which is
(from where we stand)
intolerably bright.
Birkeland attempts to interject her consciousness into the greater body of everyone trapped within the fateful World Trade Center towers. Twenty-six hundred and six people died in those towers. They represented a vast multiplicity of faiths and ethnicities and Birkeland grants them a solidarity of voice independent of anything less than the whole humanity. Each person left behind many loved ones and Birkeland describes their feelings: “I’d have called my sister and brother / and told them I’d love my life.” Her use of brother and sister is clear, but ironically, she doesn’t use mother or father; she believes everyone is her brother and sister. She plainly juxtaposes a personal relationship into a pure patriotism. Additionally, and speaking on behalf of all her brothers and sisters, she desires “to take no avenging actions, / nor support the avenging actions of others.” Birkeland knows what many ironic poets before her have known that war and vengeance have a cyclical nature. Most importantly, she doesn’t condemn religion but simply asks “to let [her]die with the dignity of [her] faith.” Birkeland doesn’t identify her faith and therefore ironically subsumes dignity into all faiths. With a love towards her brothers and sisters and the legitimacy of each religion, Birkeland embraces pure patriotism. Birkeland doesn’t seek any self-consideration for herself, her faith, or her country. She merely seeks a peace where anyone in any country can live and worship peacefully without the prejudicial self-consideration of state, religion, and ethnicity. Additionally, and most ironically, her “last fall” from line twelve is the last gasp of religious-patriotism. In line seventeen, she claims “there’s nothing to fix.” Birkeland wants us to let religious-patriotism die, don’t try to revive it or fix it. She wants the brightness to overcome the atrocities that history has recorded under its narrative.