'Losing the Present and Living in a Ghost Story'

 R.L. Barth tells me his friend and fellow Vietnam veteran Warren Hope, the poet, teacher and literary scholar, has died. In 1988, Barth and Hope, with the late Turner Cassity, published Mainstreaming: Poems of Military Life. Now Barth has written “Short-timer: An Elegy” -- for Warren Hope (1944-2022): 

“Ten days, I’m gone. Meanwhile, I crouch

On the steep slope by the LZ

Each dawn, watching as the troops slouch

Down to the choppers, though I see,

Behind the greasepaint, too few who know me.

 

“Cautious, in helmet and flak jacket

(There’s no such thing as too much care!)

I pinch a Lucky from its packet

And smile, then feel my longer hair,

Moustache, clean face. Where are they going? Where?

 

“Who cares! The hump-backed men embark

Up the vibrating ramp; and yet,

Despite myself and the half-dark,

I whisper, ‘Only nine?’ and fret,

‘One rifle’s missing from the silhouette.’

                                     “25 v. 2022”

 

Among the poets of World War I, Edmund Blunden seems to have been a gentle, thoughtful, dreamy man, who would name two of his children John and Clare, after the mad poet John Clare. He saw continuous action from 1916 to 1918, and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. In November 1968, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, Blunden wrote in the Daily Express:

 

“I have of course wondered when the effect of the Old War would lose its imprisoning power. Since 1918 hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story. Even when the detail of dreams is fantasy, the setting of that strange world insists on torturing.”

 

In 1966, eight years before his death, Blunden wrote “Ancre Sunshine,” possibly the last poem written by a veteran of the Great War. It includes these lines:

 

“Here half a century before might I,

Had something chanced, about this point have lain,

Looking with failing sense on such blue sky.

And then become a name with others slain.”

 

In a 1994 essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Hope writes:

“[T]he fact of publication, while fixing the wording of poems, alters their context and meaning. Publication in fact severs poems from the contexts in which they originally arose and gives them the chance to live in any number of new contexts—contexts that may not have even been foreseen by their author. But this severing of poems from their original context does not represent a clean break. Something of that original context lingers with them as they take on a life of their own, separate from their author and the circumstances that compelled him to write.”

 

Those of us without experience of war must read the words of those who have survived such experience with tact and humility, and with some historical understanding. Self-righteously militant pacifism is at least as lazy and stupid a stance as bellicose jingoism.