sarah cole
body with war. The fact that people create the materials of their own annihilation
inno way lessens the affective resonance of a universe that seems itself to explode
at humanity’s expense. More generally, the attempt to find language that might
match the ‘impetuous storm’ of ‘Maniac Earth’ in uproar, to register the experience
and aesthetic features of force at its most compellingly destructive, seems a nearly
ubiquitous feature of twentieth-century verse about combat.
Paradoxically, to perceive force is also, as we have seen, to encounter the
peacefulness that attends war. W. D. Ehrhart, an American poet who served in the
Vietnam war, captures the paradox with precision. ‘One Night on Guard Duty’, for
instance, posits the image of a quiet calm that enfolds within it shrieking chaos:
The first salvo is gone before I can turn,
but there is still time to see the guns
hurl a second wave of steel against the dark.
The shells arc up,
tearing through the air like some invisible hand
crinkling giant sheets of cellophane among the stars.
The night waits, breathless,
till the far horizon erupts in brilliant
pulsing silence.^29There it is, the silence, coded by terror but also by beauty, the breathless waiting of
the night, following the anthropomorphization ofthe gigantic war, with its invisible
hand;^30 yet the sense of eerie beauty in the scene is deeply troubling, since the
‘brilliant pulsing silence’ on the viewer’s side must, on that ‘far horizon’, mean a
ferocity of crushing force for those being attacked. And Ehrhart of course knows
this; his poem turns on the various contradictions that force distils (O’Brien: ‘the
truths are contradictory’), as, for instance, the bodies on the watching side of an
artillery raid being linked, through the night itself, to those waiting to be destroyed
on the other. Indeed, as we think of how the very elements (night, sky, silence)
simultaneously extend a sense of deep peace and terrible destruction in this poem,
we might turn to a very different kind of lyric, one that also imagines the soldier in
a state of rarefied, distanced calm, where the quality of tranquility depends entirely
on the facts of impending death (but this time it is the speaker’s own death that he
imagines), W. B. Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’.^31 The second half of
the poem runs as follows:
(^29) W. D. Ehrhart, ‘One Night on Guard Duty’, inTo Those Who Have Gone Home Tired(New York:
Thunder’s Mouth, 1984), 7. 30
The ‘invisible hand’ is an obvious reference to Adam Smith. Its usage here suggests not only that
economic principles might be silently guiding the war, but also, more surprisingly, that the invisible
hand of the market-place might also have something to do with war poetry. What this does to the
position of the partially passive observer i 31 n the poem is an open question.
W. B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, inThe Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London:
Dent, 1990), 184–5. The poem, along with several others, was written in honour of Robert Gregory,
who was killed in the war. Gregory was the son of Yeats’s long-time associate and friend, Lady