Note: A young university student was given a poem of mine as a subject for an essay in which the poem is analyzed. She had been given my e-mail address with my permission. After a brief e-mail correspondence, there remained so many unanswered questions that I decided to answer them all in an essay of my own. I encourage the student to use this essay merely as a springboard for her own thoughts and criticisms. The poem in question is as follows:
KILLED FAR FROM HOME
Does it really matter that they're dead
as you too will be, clay perhaps
in fifty years or five minutes?
It's a moral outrage to be killed at twenty.
Frost will slay me in about a week,
says the rose. Me, I last centuries;
is it a moral outrage to cut trees down
when we're sixty-five and just
getting splendid? And isn't the man
who gets rid of me to build a patio
innocent as lightning? Regarding
those slaughtered, women and men, many more
are sacrificed to mayhem on the roads.
Still. And how many did
they kill?
Still. They were more than roses and trees
and now they are less. They won't have children
to say no to old men whose children don't serve
and yes to the God in themselves. It is wrong.
Not so, says the stone, there is no wrong.
Isn't will more than what elements have?
Chaos begins above roofs and looms endless;
does that mean that chaos must rule from within?
Put down the bible and pick up an ax--
Split me open, says driftwood, and you see
them again. I mourn them still. One lad
I hope is passing a football to daughters
and sons on a nearly-identical planet
while another is writing a poem
with a happier ending:
Justice, peace,
chosen
at last! Home, light-years away.
Dear Indira Halilovic, Baltimore, June 20, 2012
I am responding to you as a poetry blog entry, which helps me not only not to lose my thoughts (e-mail is much less formal) but also enables me to keep the analysis of the poem in a safe place, namely in cyberspace.
You are obviously a very capable student and have raised many good questions in your e-mail. Instead of answering your questions in turn, I've decided to provide you with a line by line analysis of the poem. This should answer all your questions. If not, please do contact me.
First, I would like to restate my opinion that the technical aspects of a poem--the music, the rhythm, the versification, the surprises--are what is essential in poetry; such aspects are secondary, albeit important as well, in prose. I realize that papers or articles about a specific poem usually are concerned with what the poem says more than how it is written. Since I wrote to you that meaning is also very important in poetry, I am pleased to assist you in discussing what the poem is about.
Since I proceed musically when writing a poem, the meaning is not always clear, I readily admit that. But it is there. An American critic, Helen Vendler, wrote that many of the best poems are obscure at first reading, and are well worth a second, third, etc. Poetry is often not as direct as prose; "Tell the Truth," Emily Dickinson wrote, "but tell it slant." Only a poet would have written that.
Regarding obscurity in poetry, I refer you to the great poet Paul Celan, who stated that his poems were messages in a bottle. Some people will get the message, some people won't. (Readers should be able to derive aesthetic pleasure from the artistry of a poem, even if some of the meaning remains unclear to them.) Poetry doesn't explain, it expresses. The message, in many good poems, however, is there. Another complication: the meaning often cannot be adequately conveyed by prose. I will quote here a line by Celan which I find fascinating. "Sieben Rosen spaeter rauscht der Brunnen." An inforgettable line, but what does it mean? It has been translated into English as "seven roses later plashes the fountain," which captures the beauty of the original as much as ba-ba-ba Bom captures the beauty of the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
I refer you to a line 6 of the poem, "says the rose. Me, I last centuries/" The first three syllables form an anapest, unstressed, unstressed, stressed. This serves to announce and emphasize the utter majesty of the flower. It is part of nature; the poem, however, addresses the problem of human identity, the ego. So "Me" is emphasized; these six syllable are dactyls, stressed, unstressed, unstressed; stressed, unstressed, unstressed. Here the arrogance of egotism is expressed musically, it is not explained. There is a subtle rhyme here, "centuries," with "Me." The stress of "centuries" is less than that of "Me" but this is an ironic understatement. "Centuries" is not forever; the "me" is not immortal. Then, only in the next line, do we find out that the reference is to a tree. The joke is on us; the egotistic illusion of the importace of the self is absurd; death soon disabuses us of that notion, and death comes a lot more quickly to us that it does to trees. I am giving you this example of a technical aspect of the poem, and will now proceed with an analysis of what the poem says.
The title of the poem refers to the young men and women who have been killed in the Iraqi and Afghani conflicts. As I mentioned, the "inspiration" for this poem was my having watched a silent roll call on public TV, during which the names, ages and ranks of the dead were displayed. Of prime importance, of course, were the photos--"So many wonderful young people are being killed, " I thought, "and for what?"
The protagonist of the poem tries to divert himself--nature won't let us brood over tragedy for too long, it's too painful. Here is the "consolation:" death is everywhere and will come sooner or later to us all, so what's all the fuss about?
This argument won't do. The protagonist, in the next stanza, refers to the tragedy of those deaths. But then nature speaks: "I, the rose, last much less than twenty years. The tree, longer, but it must also die." What next comes is a hidden reference. The tree, aged sixty-five, is, roughly the same age in tree years as a human of twenty. The hidden reference: I was sixty-five when I wrote this poem. Things are going very well for me, but I, too, of course, especially since I'm much older than twenty, can die at any moment.
The reference to the man who cuts down the young tree as being "innocent as lightning" is important. A bit of Hindu philosophy here: we are the product of our genes and of our environment. Our beleif in ourselves as independent moral agents is bascially an illusion. Humans can be destructive, yes, but so can lightning be destructive--in the last analysis there is no difference. If this concept is too odd for you, start with the fact that every part of us--whether of the mind or of the body-- is a part of nature, too. (The fact of not being a moral agent, is, however, only
ultimately true. If we don't accept ourselves as moral agents on the human, relative plane, human life is not possible. Nature is inhuman, but from our perspective, human beings, though part of nature, are also more--and unfortunaly sometimes less (Hitler) than nature.
The whole poem is an elegy for those so brutally killed. That the man who cuts down the tree, like the rest of us, is not ultimately an independent moral agent softens the protagonist's rage against those who sent the young people to war. But it is not convincing. The poem, as you can see by now, is a dialogue between soemone depressed by the sesnseless killing and another--probalby another aspect of the protagonist's self--who is trying to console him. (In much the way Job's friends tried to console him.)
The "friend" advises him to console himself by the fact that these deaths are taken out of context; death kills many more in traffic accidents as it does in war (--at the moment, that is.)
But the protagonist is not convinced; his response, "Still," is a protest against superficial consolations. The would-be provider of consolation then states that the dead soldiers had killed others; they are not innocent. "Still" the protagonist replies.
Now, being dead, those who were once humans are now less than live roses or live trees. Stanza six is important.
The young dead will not have children, some of whom might have become wise enough at the age of twenty to say no to the old men who send the young to war while their children don't serve in the armed forces at all--this is a reference to militaristic politicians. "Saying yes to the God in themselves" is another way of saying 'stand up for what's right even when it is not expedient to do so.'
In stanza seven, it is inanimate nature's turn to be personified. There is no right and wrong, the stone states; everything is nature, everything is one. In the next line, the protagonist shoots back: human beings have will which puts them in a category above nature. But he is not sure; he asks it as a question. The next two lines are clear in that their concepts have already been explained previously in this essay. Nature is (ultimately) chaos, but that is and isn't our nature. The stone goes on to console the protagonist with a reference to Jesus's statement in the Gospel of Thomas that if 'you split open wood you will find Me there.' Just as the surface of a black hole contains all the information of what has fallen into it, nothing is ever lost. What lived once one finds in life once again--and everywhere!
The protagonist finishes the poem. Still, he is not consoled, even with this great consolation.
The poem ends with a reference to one of the latest theories of cosmology. Some physicists believe in what they call "eternal inflation." Inflation goes on creating universes forever, an infinite number of them. Some of them are going to have the near-exact configuration of our universe. In other words, I am also writing to you from another universe, where our doubles reside. They have even estimated how far a replica of our universe might be; as you might have expected, it is very far away indeed. The protagonist imagines that doubles of the dead are alive and well somewhere in a universe where human civilization is much more just than our own. (If this is true, though, it might as well not be, since the great distances do not allow any form of communication between the two worlds.) The peaceful universe is presented here as a secular version of heaven. Since the protagonist thirsts for justice, he does not feel at home in the brutal world in which he lives, but can only feel at home in that other universe--which, alas! he will never be able to contact. That is why he says, "Home, light-years away." (Thus the "home" in the title is not really his home; perennial estrangement is part of the human condition. Every Eve and Adam knows that!)
Granted this inner dialogue is a little unclear--since the poem can at best be viewed as dialogue within the protagonist--his "friends" are located in his brain, thoughts trying to cheer up other thoughts--I felt that I could not use italics or quotation marks..
The poem may be an example of Celan's message in a bottle. I hope I have taken the message out of the bottle and made some of the obscuities of the message more clear. (Understanding every nuance of meaning is not necessary to the enjoyment of a poem, but it helps.) Good luck on your paper about this poem.
Sincerely,
Thomas Dorsett
Addendum: author's response to Indira Halilovic's paper:
Dear Indira Halilovic,
My apologies for the late response; things have been busy here. I enjoyed reading your article.
First of all, I was impressed by your language abilities. Your English is very good. A few minor errors, e.g. "loose" instead of "lose,"
but, overall, your English is correct, and, even more important, you are able to express your ideas in this language clearly and precisely.
I would indeed like to apologize for writing a difficult poem. My first emphasis is always on melody, rhythm and surprise. What kills poetry, as well as any other art, is boredom--one must entertain in a poetic fashion, which is avoiding sounding prosy; in poetry, prosy equals boring.. This means that the semantic movement might sometimes have to be a bit recondite and indirect.
You are so right in many sections! For instance, that "says the rose" is an anapest which emphasizes (American spelling) the rose as a "majestic part of nature" indicates that you are beginning to read poetry the way it should be read. "says the" is read more quickly, the movement being slowed down considerably by the word "rose" with its long "o". This must not be given undue emphasis, however, lest it become too precious.
Your pragmatics section, is, I think, the strongest. The last paragraph, before the "conclusion" section,is very insightful. I like your quote form the Torah--but you don't have to write "Jewish Torah" there is only one--a minor point though, the quote is technically not part of the Torah at all. The Jewish bible consists of three parts: the Torah, which corresponds to the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament; the prophets--this includes Isaiah; and the writings. In Hebrew these are Torah, ,Nevi'im and the Kethuvim--these three words form the amalgam, Tanakh, which is the Hebrew word for the complete Jewish bible. But that's a minor point.
Some things I didn't agree with, but that's the way it should be. For instance, you wrote, "Man is less governed by instinct; man is considered a rational animal." This pertains more to Greek philosophy than to Hindu philosophy. In Hindu philosophy, everything is consciousness,satchitananda. This philosophy states that while the individual ego is of importance to a person, it has no ultimate reality--even during life.
Here's something that might make the poem a little clearer to you--not to say, that it isn't quite clear to you already. When I was your age, I first hear the great chorus from Handel's Jephtha, "Whatever Is Is Right." The music was sublime but I was furious. My life was difficult at the time, and the world, then as now, is full of suffering. How could things be right they way they are?
The answer is that life is a paradox. On the plane of ultimate reality, everything is right. But not on the plane of individuality--although suffering may be ultimately an illusion, we still feel it. After all, this is the plane, with the exception of moments of so-called "cosmic consciousness" on which we live.
The protagonist of the poem, who, of course, lives on this plane, is full of sorrow because of those killed in war. It is so overwhelming that his inner voice tries to console him with a view from above--that is, there is no evil, and since there is no individuality there is no cessation of individuality which we call death. It doesn't work; he is too caught up with their deaths. The only consolation is a thin one: somewhere, some place, things might be better. This is not his home, due to all the injustice, but a home somewhere, very far away, just might exist. So it ends on a note of hope.
It is very true, of course, that you classify this poem under the rubric, "vers libre" Whitman on one side of the Atlantic, and Manley Hopkins on the other, created a poetry that is more in tune with heightened speech, and thus freed poetry from the regular meters which they though were suffocating it. Hopkins did it in a way that seemingly preserved meter--"Sprung rhythm" he called it, and I'm sure you are familiar with this. Whitman was even more radical. They were both, though, exquisite poets, which means that they had exquisite ears for language. They paid attention to every word. (Although Whitman like Wagner, has his longueurs, both knew what they were doing and balanced these with sections of pure delight.)
You are on the right track and wrote a good paper. If you want to develop your ear--and sense of graphology--may I suggest that you read Frost, Wylie, Geoffrey Hill, Hopkins, Marianne Moore, etc.
I enjoyed your paper on several levels and wish you a lot of success.
]
]By the way, my sister-in-law, who is visiting from India, was a professor of English literature there, wrote the following comment;
The analysis of sound and rhythm is quite insightful. The stair-climbing analogy is an interesting reading of the structure of the poem, but I'm not sure that there is a "coming down" in the last two stanzas. The thrust of the poem is that there is no consolation to be gained by these deaths. The confusion of voices emphasises (British and Indian spelling) this insight. Not that death will come sooner or later to all, but that the deaths of ones so young in wars is irreconcilable with questions of justice and peace.
There is no consolation here--it is a bleak comment on the nature of our war-town world, on our reality.
Best regards to you, (Keep reading and writing!)
