Introduction
No matter how hard may politics try to depict war as heroic activity and the citizens’ participation in the war as direct manifestation and the proof of patriotism, war will always be an atrocity against all human beings. War is a bleeding sore on the body of human history, it will ache and cause suffering for people long after the end of hostilities. War does nothing but ruins peoples’ lives, causes pain, tears, and endless prayers for peaceful sky without bombers above people’s heads. Poets are people, who present the reflection of reality though their own prism of inspiration, and they also condemn war as the evil monster gorging everything on its way. However, each poet offers his/her own unique vision of war that comes from the depths of his/her mind. The poetry, analyzed in this paper presents three perspectives of war, which are congener and interrelated: war is depicted as blinding and senseless activity imposed from without (Hardy), as a crime against a human being that is innocent by nature (Jarrell), and as a clash of the peoples that destroys not only human lives but culture too (Levertov).
Discussion
Due to its brevity and symbolism, the message of the poem “The Man He Killed” by Hardy should be read between the lines. All separate aspects of the poem serve the main purpose: to show the futility and absurdity of war that is immoral and obscure. The poem is told in the first person, though the title presupposes third person narration. The speaker is, evidently, a soldier who is reminiscing about the day when he killed an enemy. The most awful thing that becomes evident from the very beginning is that the speaker and the dead enemy are alike. The speaker even supposes that they could have had a drink together (Hardy line 4). However, peaceful reflection is disturbed by the cruel reality: instead of a friendly chat with a glass of nipperkin the speaker kills the man on the battlefield because they are made enemies like chess pieces on a chess board that are ruled and moved by somebody else. The most awful thing is that the speaker really produces an impression of a manipulated puppet, a blind tin soldier, he shows no feelings saying that he “killed him in his place” (Hardy line 8). What really makes a reader’s flesh creep is that after the killing, the speaker draws a parallel between himself and the dead soldier again, emphasizing that both of them were “off-hand” (Hardy line 14), they had the same reasons to join the war.
Though the speaker maintains almost careless attitude to the war, the author’s bitter irony can be distinctly felt. The immorality of war is also shown due to the imagery of the poem. The speaker makes a pause and stammers when he wants to explain why he killed the man because there is no moral excuse for his deed. There was no animosity between them, there was no insult, they were at war and had to kill people who had never harmed them. This is ridiculous, it is evident, and the speaker wants to suppress this idea with the phrases like “just so”, “That’s clear enough” (Hardy line 11, 12). The use of the epithets “quaint and curious” that do not suit the evil nature of war also proves that there is no morality at war.
The idea of futility and absurdity of war as a murder is maintained in a concise but powerful poem by Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”. The speaker in this poem resembles the one from the previous poem, as he is also forced to take part in war for no apparent personal reason. The soldier is torn out of his “mother’s sleep” (Jarrell line 1) that is the state of peace and he faces the reality of war in the belly of his fighter jet aircraft. A very interesting choice is made by the author: all people are born in their mothers’ wombs before their births, and the soldier is forcefully put into the womb of war and he will never be born, he is doomed to death as war is erroneous in itself, it will never give birth to anything, it begets only death. This is why the soldier freezes in the belly of the jet while it is warm in the mother’s womb. When the soldier is awakened, that is also symbolic – he understands the evil nature of war, it is his enlightenment and he faces nothing but “black flack” and “nightmare fighters” while newborn babies see their mothers’ smiles (Jarrell line 4). The final line informs us from the soldier’s own lips that he is dead and this idea is uttered with the same tranquility as the previous soldier spoke about death, though washing out of the remains of a soldier of the turret is awful. The same atmosphere of detachment and absence of emotions can be observed in this poem but it is artificial too. The poet wants to tell us a story of the birth, short life, and senseless death of a soldier who dies just because he “fell into a State” as an innocent and helpless newborn child (Jarrell line 1).
Though the third poem, “What Were They Like?” differs a lot from the previous poems analyzed by its unique structure and absence of a personal story, it also depicts war as a tragedy that destroys the whole nations, their culture and history. A reader will never know who the participants of the dialogue about the Vietnamese are and it is, in fact, not important since the meaning of the questions and answers is the core of the poem. The questions asked in the first stanza cover different aspects of culture and life of the Vietnamese and the answers given in the second stanza all imply that the culture was destroyed by American troops. War is all-absorbing, it gorges culture and traditions, this is why the phrase “it is not remembered” is repeated several times (Leverton line 11, 19). The war has ruined everything, the mirrors are smashed, hearts have become like stones, and there are no more buds, which are the symbols of new life. The people after war will never be like they used to be before this pain, this is why laughter is bitter for them and there is only an echo of the past peace as the present is silent, it is empty, it is drained by the war. “The flight of moths in moonlight” can be interpreted as the farewell of innocent souls that will take the memories and cultural inheritance along with them (Leverton line 30). What is left? Only dead silence.
Conclusion
Taking this all into consideration, it can be concluded that all the poets condemn war in their own ways and the simplicity of their speech, brevity of the poems, and the richness of imaginary should not be interpreted as oversimplification of the evil nature of war, all these means are rather the intensifiers of the messages of the poems. Each poet is armed with his/her own “literary weapon” but all of them depict war as endless grief and unjustified cruelty. Three perspectives of the war presented by the poets: war as blinding, war as murder of the innocent, and war as devastation of culture all have the same cross point: war is shown as horrible evil.
Works Cited
Hardy, Thomas. “The Man He Killed”. Hardy’s Selected Poems. Toronto: Courier Dover Publications, 1995: 41.
Jarrell, Randall. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”. The Oxford Book of American Poetry. David Lehman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 609.
Levertov, Denise. “What Were They Like?” Making Peace. Denise Levertov and Peggy Rosenthal. New York: New Directions Publishing: 5.