'Thinking of Young Men Whom I Had Known'

In 1943, at age forty-three, Yvor Winters was safely beyond draft age but tried to secure a commission in the U.S. Army. He was turned down because of the tuberculosis contracted more than twenty years earlier. A guilty sense of patriotic obligation nagged him. While teaching at Stanford, he joined the Citizens’ Defense Corps and served as its zone warden for Los Altos, Calif., where he lived. The Corps was organized in 1941 as an emergency war agency and some 11 million American civilians volunteered. In a May 10, 1943, letter to his friend the poet Louise Bogan, Winters writes: 

“I could probably go into the merchant marine as a crew member, but I can hardly take a job voluntarily that will pay me too little to support my family . . . Meanwhile I sit around & watch the kids go. All I can do for civilization is try to counteract a little of the effect of Lewis Mumford & our new School of Humanities, which is a god-awful mess.”

 

A month later, in a letter to the Los Altos postmaster, Winters writes: “I gave courses at the Los Altos grammar school, which 35 [Civil Defense] workers out of a possible 200 completed. Since I have been Zone Warden, I have spent on an average of 12 or 14 hours a week driving about the Zone, or on trips to San Jose, on problems of organization. Most of the Precinct Captains have contributed a great deal of time and some money . . .”

 

In “Moonlight Alert,” dated June 1943, Winters recounts a night during wartime on the West Coast:

 

“The sirens, rising, woke me; and the night

Lay cold and windless; and the moon was bright,

Moonlight from sky to earth, untaught, unclaimed,

An icy nightmare of the brute unnamed.

This was hallucination. Scarlet flower

And yellow fruit hung colorless. That hour

No scent lay on the air. The siren scream

Took on the fixity of shallow dream.

In the dead sweetness I could see the fall,

Like petals sifting from a quiet wall,

Of yellow soldiers through indifferent air,

Falling to die in solitude. With care

I held this vision, thinking of young men

Whom I had known, and should not see again,

Fixed in reality, as I in thought.

And I stood waiting, and encountered naught.”

 

Today in the United States we observe Memorial Day.

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]