Teaching topic: World War II: Poems

They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom’s cause.

It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse –
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.

Source

A white sheet on the tailgate of a truck becomes an altar, 
Two small candlesticks sputter at each side of the crucifix 
Laid round with flowers brighter than the blood 
Red as the red of our apocalypse 
Hibiscus that a marching man will pluck 
To stick into his rifle or his hat 
And great blue morning glories 
Pale as lips that shall no longer taste or kiss or swear 
The wind begins a low magnificat 
The chaplain chats 
The palm trees swirl their hair 
The columns come together through the mud 

The time to mourn is short that best becomes 
The military dead. 
We lift and fold the flag, 
Lay bare the coffin with its written tag, 
And march away. 
Behind, four others wait 
To lift the box, the heaviest of loads. 
The anesthetic afternoon benumbs, 
Sickens our senses, forces back our talk. 
We know that others on tomorrows roads 
Will fall, ourselves perhaps, the man beside, 
Over the world the threatened, all who walk: 
And could we mark the grave of him who died 
We could write this beneath his name and date:

Epitaph

Underneath this wooden cross there lies

A Christian killed in battle. 
You who read,

Remember that this stranger died in pain; 
And passing here, if you can lift your eyes 
Upon a peace kept by human creed, 
Know that one soldier has not died in vain.

Source

Let me take this other glove off
As the vox humana swells,
And the beauteous fields of Eden
Bask beneath the Abbey bells.
Here, where England's statesmen lie,
Listen to a lady's cry.

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans,
Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy
We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate'er shall be,
Don't let anyone bomb me.

Keep our Empire undismembered
Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,
Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.

Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots' and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
Lord, put beneath Thy special care
One-eighty-nine Cadogan Square.

Although dear Lord I am a sinner,
I have done no major crime;
Now I'll come to Evening Service
Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown,
And do not let my shares go down.

I will labour for Thy Kingdom,
Help our lads to win the war,
Send white feathers to the cowards
Join the Women's Army Corps,
Then wash the steps around Thy Throne
In the Eternal Safety Zone.

Now I feel a little better,
What a treat to hear Thy Word,
Where the bones of leading statesmen
Have so often been interr'd.
And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
Because I have a luncheon date.

Source

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. 

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Source

Edith Sitwell's poem is based on the Blitz (1940-41)

Benjamin Britten's composition: Canticle III, Still falls the rain: The raids 1940. Night and dawn (Op.55) is based on Edith Sitwell's poem Still falls the rain.

Fog over the base: the beams ranging
From the five towers pull home from the night
The crews cold in fur, the bombers banging
Like lost trucks down the levels of the ice.
A glow drifts in like mist (how many tons of it?),
Bounces to a roll, turns suddenly to steel
And tyres and turrets, huge in the trembling light.
The next is high, and pulls up with a wail,
Comes round again - no use. And no use for the rest
In drifting circles out along the range;
Holding no longer, changed to a kinder course,
The flights drone southward through the steady rain.
The base is closed...But one voice keeps on calling,
The lowering pattern of the engines grows;
The roar gropes downward in its shaky orbit
For the lives the season quenches. Here below
They beg, order, are not heard; and hear the darker 
Voice rising: Can't you hear me? Over. Over -
All the air quivers, and the east sky glows. 

Source

If seeing her an hour before her last
Weak cough into all blackness I could yet
Be held by chalk-white walls, and by the great
Ash coloured bed,
And the pillows hardly creased 
By the tapping of her little cough-jerked head–
If such can be a painter’s ecstasy,
(Her limbs like pipes, her head a china skull)
Then where is mercy?

Source

(Artist, author and poet Mervyn Peake was one of the first war artists to enter the Belsen concentration camp after its liberation.)

Autumn journal by Louis MacNeice

Written in 1938, this poem is a snapshot of life before the outbreak of the second World War in 1939. It is an epic poem - 24 cantos in all. This clip is from Loopline's Imprint series. It includes readings of cantos XVI and cantos XXIV and it was aired on RTÉ in 1999. See cantos VII for reference to Hitler. 

The great hunger by Patrick Kavanagh

First published in 1942. Read the full text here