A sad and sorely final yet incomplete tagline found after a poem in the Winter 1986 issue of The American Scholar:
“Edward Case’s work has appeared in various journals, including the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Modern Age. This poem was taken from a collection of recent work that he was preparing for publication at the time of his death last summer.”
It reads
like the epitaph on a stone in a cemetery one will never again visit. Who is Case?
Why have I never heard of him? How did he die? Here is the accompanying poem, “As
Grammarians”:
“This life
which is a sentence
Is also a
declaration.
We make the
sense of it
In our own
terms.
As
grammarians
We assert
our meaning,
In what we
decline,
In what we
affirm,
In the
conjugation of love,
In the
predicates
And
imperatives
And
ambiguities
Of prosaic
choice
We essay
briefly
To define
ourselves
Before the
stop.”
A clever
exercise in double-meanings. Not a syllable out of place. The author has taken
pains to make it work. No filler and nothing to excess. It leaves me wanting to
read more by this guy. Here is “1914,” one of four poems by Case published in
the October 1985 issue of The New
Criterion:
“The pearly
throat of that peacock age was torn
In summer
and its shriek yet grows, screaming
Unheard in
all our days and deeds, like static
From a
falling star, unseeming as the dust
Of space,
yet crying murder as it bleeds.
So the
voiceless moon imparting gravity
To frivolous
tides roils the world unseen
But never
hides its light nor ever slows.
“Slain then
the nightingale and the steed,
The garden
wall then fallen, the enchanted
Wood a
tiring room for weary death
And summer’s
lawn sown to widows’ weed.
For winter
came in August killing fruit and seed.
In that
broken season forever died the rose.”
“Winter came
in August”: The Great War changed everything and we’re still dealing with its repercussions.
Case’s poem reminds me of Ford Madox Ford, who enlisted in the Welch Regiment in
1915 at age forty-two. A year later, twelve days after the start of the battle,
he was sent to the Somme in northeastern France in time for the bloodiest
one-day engagement in English military history. Ford was blown into the air by
the explosion of a German shell, suffered memory loss and for three weeks
remained incapacitated.
Ford was hospitalized again with lung problems exacerbated by exposure to poison gas, and in March 1917 was sent home as an invalid. For the rest of the war he was stationed on the North Yorkshire coast, where he helped train troops. Ford was promoted to lieutenant and then to captain, and in 1918 held the temporary rank of brevet major. On Armistice Day, Ford was still in North Yorkshire. He was discharged in 1919. Ford went on to write the greatest of all Great War fiction, the tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28).
In a 1931
letter to T.R. Smith, Ford writes: “The world before the war is one thing and
must be written down in one manner; the after-war world is quite another and
calls for quite different treatment.”
Does anyone
know anything about Edward Case?
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