Poetry, and what is going on in Ukraine
War is raging in Ukraine. Although Auden famously wrote, “For poetry makes nothing happen,” he knew that it did important things, that it spoke to our ears and minds and what was in our hearts. That poem, “In Memory of William Butler Yeats,” tells us two other things. The stanza which contains the line I just quoted ends in this fashion:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Poetry is “a way of happening, a mouth.”
That poem as a whole ends up considering late Yeats, whose authoritarian politics Auden did not share:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
“Praise.” Poetry can do this, too.
As I began by stating, war rages in the Ukraine – and none of us knows how to comprehend it. Sometimes, strange as it seems, poetry helps. So here are two parts of two poems.
The first is dire, and is by Robert Lowell. I had thought to send out a letter about his poem, “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” and embarked on three letters about three Lowell poems so I could send the following passage out, since it haunts me. But I reconsidered. You will get a letter about one of those poems, shortly, but not letters about all three: I left “Waking Early Sunday Morning” behind, undone. Instead of commentary, I have decided to send out the final two stanzas of that Sunday morning poem without commentary. You probably don’t need my comments. Lowell saw the difficulties of our times; although he was responding to the war in Vietnam, his augury of what we live with rings true for me as the conflict in Ukraine rages. He is right, as we see so clearly, nightly, on our television screens: “our children… fall/in small war on the heels of small/war.” [To my horror, Vladimir Putin even uses as blackmail the threat of large nuclear war . . . so maybe more than small wars are what we must envision, now.]
No weekends for the gods now. Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life ...Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.
Let me end with this, an even more powerful stanza from long ago. (It was suggested to me by my friend David Grubin.) The lines are by Sappho, and comprise the opening of Fragment 16, as translated by Anne Carson. The poem continues with classical references to Helen of Troy, and then turns to a more personal vein. But no matter. These opening lines resound with a deep, deep truth.
Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
what you love.
Sappho wrote that twenty-seven hundred years ago, and still we need to hear and heed what she says. War is not the answer. Life’s promise is more than armies and armaments. So let me repeat Sappho’s lines:
Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
what you love.