by Eliot · Cluster: War and its Cost · American Civil War · Battlefield
Abstract
WWII occasional piece written after Dunkirk, memorializing British war effort by land, sea and air; patriotic elegy for the war dead.
Connections
Topoi: War as Glory Motifs: Death, Sea Themes & Concepts: War and its Cost, Nationalism and Patriotism, Heroism Forms & Genres: Free Verse Historical References: First World War
Testo integrale / Full text
Defence of the Islands
Defence of the Islands cannot pretend to be verse, but its date — just after the evacuation from Dunkirk — and occasion have for me a significance which makes me wish to preserve it. McKnight Kauffer was then working for the Ministry of Information. At his request I wrote these lines to accompany an exhibition in New York of photographs illustrating the war effort of Britain. They were subsequently published in Britain At War (the Museum of Modern Art, New York 1941). I now dedicate them to the memory of Edward McKnight Kauffer.
Let these memorials of built stone — music’s
enduring instrument, of many centuries of
patient cultivation of the earth, of English
verse
be joined with the memory of this defence of
the islands
and the memory of those appointed to the grey
ships — battleship, merchantman, trawler —
contributing their share to the ages’ pavement
of British bone on the sea floor
and of those who, in man’s newest form of gamble
with death, fight the power of darkness in air
and fire
and of those who have followed their forebears
to Flanders and France, those undefeated in de-
feat, unalterable in triumph, changing nothing
of their ancestors’ ways but the weapons
and those again for whom the paths of glory are
the lanes and the streets of Britain:
to say, to the past and the future generations
of our kin and of our speech, that we took up
our positions, in obedience to instructions.
A Note on War Poetry
A Note on War Poetry was written at the request of Miss Storm Jameson‚ to be included in a book entitled London Calling (Harper Brothers, New York, 1942).
Not the expression of collective emotion
Imperfectly reflected in the daily papers.
Where is the point at which the merely individual
Explosion breaks
In the path of an action merely typical
To create the universal, originate a symbol
Out of the impact? This is a meeting
On which we attend
Of forces beyond control by experiment —
Of Nature and the Spirit. Mostly the individual
Experience is too large, or too small. Our emotions
Are only ‘incidents’
In the effort to keep day and night together.
It seems just possible that a poem might happen
To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry —
That is a life.
War is not a life: it is a situation,
One which may neither be ignored nor accepted,
A problem to be met with ambush and stratagem,
Enveloped or scattered.
The enduring is not a substitute for the transient,
Neither one for the other. But the abstract conception
Of private experience at its greatest intensity
Becoming universal, which we call ‘poetry’,
May be affirmed in verse.