by Eliot · Cluster: Disillusionment · First World War · Italy
Abstract
Section header collecting the occasional/war poems; the present text is Defence of the Islands, a Dunkirk-era patriotic memorial in verse.
Connections
Motifs: Death, Sea Themes & Concepts: War and its Cost, Nationalism and Patriotism Forms & Genres: Free Verse Historical References: First World War
Testo integrale / Full text
OCCASIONAL VERSES
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.