the fury and the mire the baby (so neatly foreshadowed in his orders) for a gun; or that ‘It kind of cracked
[him]up’. Certainly, the poem does not crackmeup. It would tell us—even if we
did not know that Lowell never served in Vietnam—that his testimony is second-
hand. In this, it is strikingly unlike his poignant and powerful poem ‘Fall 1961’, that
bears first-hand witness to a father’s fear in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis:
All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
Iswimlikeaminnow
behind my studio window.
Our end drifts nearer,
the moon lifts,
radiant with terror.
····
A father’s no shield
for his child...^10If, like me, you feel more for the American father and his child than for the
Vietnamese mother and baby, it might be that the poet felt more. Few parents
can feel as much pity and terror for a mother and baby seen in a newspaper or a
television screen as for a threatened child of their own.
It does not follow, however, that a poem of first-hand witness will necessarily be
better—more moving because more focused—than one of second-hand witness.
Tennyson did not see the Charge of the Light Brigade other than with his mind’s
eye, but his lifelong absorption in Arthurian legend and chivalry enabled him to
take his place, imaginatively, with the ‘Noble six hundred’. He feels—and enables
us to feel—fury, and horror, and pity, and amazed admiration:
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.^11(^10) Lowell, ‘Fall 1961’, ibid. 329.
(^11) Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, inThe Poems of Tennyson, ii, ed. Christopher
Ricks, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1987), 511–13.