War and literature
By Al Creighton’s
Here in the twenty-first century wars, insurgencies, terrorist violence, guerrilla warfare, genocidal dislocation, massacres, murderous attacks against humanity, war crimes and criminal carnage of various sorts rage unchecked right in your backyard. Wherever you live these insurrections recur right next door.
FARC guerrillas who dishonour and bring disrepute to the name of Marxism, have been pillaging and kidnapping, perpetuating instability and bolstering the drugs trade in cocaine for more than 40 years. Criminals of similar ilk protect their empires with reigns of terror and slaughterings in Mexican border towns. The poor of Haiti have hardly had rest since Dessalines and the betrayal of a powerful 200 year-old revolution. African leaders and “conscious”(?) blacks elsewhere aid and abet Robert Mugabe in his destruction of a nation and terrorism against his own people by refusing to condemn him.
Modern-day slavery and the most horrendous forms of human trafficking ravage Europe, the very heart of ‘civilization.’ The map of the world is contaminated by red pocks marking the location of these several wars and insurrections, some of them very old like Northern Ireland. Other examples are notoriously well known: Sri Lanka, Darfur, the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and half a dozen former Soviet Republics.
Little has changed over the past two-and-a-half thousand years. Ancient Greece, claimed by Europe as one of the ‘cradles’ of ‘civilisation’(?) despite what Walcott calls its “deciduous beauty” and its great heritage to literature, learning, philosophy and the arts, was a notoriously warlike and war-torn peninsula. So much so that the best products of its artistic wealth, the playwrights, wrote satires about it and the two great books of its premier poet are about an unending cycle of godlike wars.
Much of the great verse of the traditional African civilisations and the songs of the griots celebrate warriors and the lineage of warriors. The main part of the epic, oral and written poetic tradition of the mediaeval times grew out of a need for sustaining courage, heroism and inspiration in a world plagued by continuous warfare and despotic kings and lords which all conspired to shorten life expectancy and make survival uncertain.
Since the Athenian explosion in the fifth century bc the worst of humanity has always given momentum to the best of poetry. That sequence in Homer in which Ulysses returns home after 20 years and sets about the slaughter of the Suitors has to be among the most savagely brutal pieces of violence in literature. Half of the Holy Bible’s Old Testament is about warfare in which men and armies cut down people, whole states and cities, wearing “the whole armour of God.” The Bhagavad-Gita, sacred book of Hinduism is a text about war.
And it is this particular bellicose quality of the world that drove much of the work of a poet described in Wikipedia as “an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.” He is WH Auden. More serious critical opinion counts him as one of the important poets of the rise of the modern/modernist era in the first half of the twentieth century, but hesitate to use the word ‘greatest.’ Eliot, Pound and Yeats are always placed well ahead of him.
Although he signed himself and went by the name WH Auden, he was christened Wystan Hugh at birth in York, England in 1907. After some years of excursions into ideological, political, philosophical and religious shifts, he moved to the USA where he became an American citizen. However, although he himself edited and antholigised, producing books of American poetry, he seems to have been excluded from many important collections and publications of American verse.
Auden (February 21 (York, England) – September 29, 1973 (Vienna, Austria), grew up in a period when the world was wracked by changes; what the modern poets saw as a particularly faithless, directionless period which left fragile mankind drifting in vulnerability. Auden, sometimes associated with socialism and the editor of A Book of Socialist Verse, took note of the steady rise of fascism and political turbulence, particularly leading up to the Second World War. The effects of this is the subject of many of his poems.
One of these, The Shield of Achilles, first published 1953, is one of his masterpieces. The poem is actually set in ancient Greece during the time of Athenian glory as described by Homer. But it also bridges the time gap to show stark similarities between the 5th century bc and the twentieth century. It is about war, showing the outstanding contradictions in the pastoral notions of heroism and greatness held by the Greek society about itself and the realities of war that shatter that polished, Arcadian complacency. Auden, however, wants to address contemporary times, so he sews into the poem, scenes of devastation, totalitarian dictatorships, lands laid waste, suffering and indifference that he saw as characteristic of modern society.
He draws on Greek mythology. In the poem, Thetis, the mother of one of the greatest Greek heroes, the all-conquering warrior Achilles, goes to Hephaestos, an armourer, maker of the protective clothing and instruments of battle, to make a new shield for her son. It was customary that these shields were carved and decorated with pictures depicting heroism, greatness, nationhood and the beauty of civilisation. Thetis looks over Hephaestos’ shoulder as he worked and is surprised to find that instead of the beautiful pastoral scenes that she expects, he is carving out ugly scenes of torture, destruction and human suffering.
from The Shield of Achilles
by W H Auden
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of
neighbourhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
[. . .]
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked
a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved
nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and
bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
[. . .]
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy, a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a
third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.