'When Young Men Go to Die'

Like most lifelong civilian Americans, I have never fired a gun in my life. I owned a BB gun when I was a kid and often fired my brother’s pellet gun. My experience with firearms is entirely second- or third-hand via the movies, which give me the illusion that I know something about guns. My father kept his .45 automatic pistol and a box of ammunition, both dating from his time in the Army Air Corps during World War II, in his bottom dresser drawer. We hefted it and admired its seriousness when no one was home.

On Friday I received an email from a guy I don’t know but who presumed to know me. He urged me to advocate for the repeal of the Second Amendment from the Constitution. It didn’t seem to be a form-letter. His message was long and personal and carried a tone of barely suppressed hysteria – precisely the approach we ignore when any cause du jour is involved. He didn’t seem stupid but he did seem nearly fanatical, and for no personal reason (the gun death of a family member?) that he mentioned.

In 1943, at the age of forty-three, Yvor Winters was safely beyond draft age but he tried to get a commission in the Army. He was turned down because of the tuberculosis he had contracted two decades earlier. He was nagged by a guilty sense of patriotic obligation, joined the Citizens’ Defense Corps and served as its zone warden for Los Altos, Calif., where he lived. Winters wrote “To a Military Rifle”:

“The times come round again;

The private life is small;

And individual men

Are counted not at all.

Now life is general,

And the bewildered Muse,

Thinking what she has done,

Confronts the daily news.

 

“Blunt emblem, you have won:

With carven stock unbroke,

With core of steel, with crash

Of mass, and fading smoke;

Your fire leaves little ash;

Your balance on the arm

Points whither you intend;

Your bolt is smooth with charm.

When other concepts end,

This concept, hard and pure,

Shapes every mind therefor.

The time is yours, be sure,

Old Hammerheel of War.

 

“I cannot write your praise

When young men go to die;

Nor yet regret the ways

That ended with this hour.

The hour has come. And I,

Who alter nothing, pray

That men, surviving you,

May learn to do and say

The difficult and true,

True shape of death and power.”

 

I would ask my correspondent to consider five simple words from Winters’ poem: “And I, / Who alter nothing . . .”