But the lyric poet does not willingly record the ruin of society. Most lyric poets want to live a private life: they want to write about the twists and turns, the ecstasies and depressions, the savage needs and wonderful satisfactions, of their emotional life. Love and passion, anger and loss, joy and despair: these are the realm in which the lyric poet works. But the poet’s predicament is that there are times when the world – the social world in which we all live – impinges on the poet. Society has its claims, not merely on individuals, but also on art. These claims are not merely the demands of tyrants or state authorities who say to the artist, ‘do this or do that, write this way or that way.’ There are other social demands: those who suffer indignity and injustice, especially at the hands of the society in which they live, have a right to be heard, and to ask the poet to forego his or her private vocation in order to record the sufferings of victims of social wrongdoing and oppression. (Often poets, open to the world and rebellious against its injustices, are themselves the victims of this social oppression.) Poets need to testify to that suffering and record it so that others – those who are ignorant of or blind to the suffering, those future generations who might otherwise not comprehend the suffering of the past – can see just how deep was the tide of human suffering, and how many perished in its flooding waters. Walt Whitman’s description of the poet’s role, written in America in 1855, is still relevant today: “Through me many long dumb voices,” he wrote, “voices of interminable generations of slaves…voices of the diseased and despairing…voices…of the rights of them the others are down upon…”Motto
This, then is all. It’s not enough, I know.
At least I’m still alive, as you may see.
I’m like the man who took a brick to show
How beautiful his house used once to be.
He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished
The stained cape of his heart as history charged.
But the order of the acts is planned,
The end of the road already revealed.
Alone among the Pharisees I stand.
Life is not a stroll across a field.
Is there a way to break through numbers and into compassion? In the nineteenth century, there was a shared belief – more widely shared among women readers and writers than men – in the power of sentiment. In Walt Whitman’s “Come Up from the Fields, Father,” a family in the American Middle West receives a letter informing them that their son has been wounded in the bloody American Civil War. Whitman himself actually worked in military hospitals throughout that war, often writing letters like the one received in this poem. He felt, deeply, the pain of war and the poignancy of its brutality. Here is a brief excerpt from his diary of the war years:On the first page
a report of the killing of 120 soldiers
the war lasted a long time
you could get used to it
close alongside
the news of a sensational crime
with a portrait of the murderer
the eye of Mr Cogito
slips indifferently
over the soldiers’ hecatomb
to plunge with delight
into the description of everyday horror
a thirty-year-old farm labourer
under the stress of nervous depression
killed his wife
and two small children
it is described with precision
the course of the murder
the position of the bodies
and other details
for 120 dead
you search on a map in vain
too great a distance
covers them like a jungle
they don’t speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero at the end
changes them into an abstraction
a subject for meditation:
the arithmetic of compassion
The poem is so direct it needs no explanation. (I have edited it in the interest of space, so that it is one-third its original length.)
The results of the late battle are exhibited everywhere about here in thousands of cases (hundreds die every day,) in the camp, brigade, and division hospitals.. . . No cots, seldom even a mattress. It is pretty cold. The ground is frozen hard, and there is occasional snow. I go around from one case to another. I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours, if he wishes it.
Come Up from the Fields, Father
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.
Open the envelope quickly,
O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,
O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!
All swims before here eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better.
Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,
The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)
See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.
Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave
and simple soul,)
While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
The only son is dead.
But the mother needs to be better,
She with thin form presently drest in black,
By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking.,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing.
O that she might withdraw, unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.
This yr there is a gray stone wall damming my stream, and when
the falling leaves stir my genes, I pace my cell or flop on my bunk
and stare at 47 black faces across the space. I am all of them.
they are all of me, I am me, they are three, and I have no sons
to float in the space between.
Here, in conclusion, is one of the poems from “Requiem.” This is the ninth poem in the sequence, the section just before the climactic poem which unhappily depends too much on context to be cited apart from the rest of the poem. In section nine, the magnitude of the poet’s suffering leads her to the brink of madness, as well as to total defeat. Her life is owned, controlled, by the state, by circumstance, by history.In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):Instead of a Preface
“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
IX Already madness lifts its wing
Already madness lifts its wing
to cover half my soul.
That taste of opiate wine!
Lure of the dark valley!
Now everything is clear.
I admit my defeat. The tongue
of my ravings in my year
is the tongue of a stranger.
No use to fall down on my knees
and beg for mercy’s sake.
Nothing I counted mine, out of my life,
is mine to take:
not my son’s terrible eyes
not the elaborate stone flower
of grief, not the day of the storm.
not the trial of the visiting hour,
not the dear coolness of his hands,
not the lime trees’ agitated shade,
not the thin cricket-sound
of consolation’s parting word.