‘down in the terraces between the targets’ Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitchlike King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.^2This old man’s sardonic anachronism occasions the idea that though ‘All perform
their tragic play’, his theatrical characters, ‘If worthy their prominent part’, will
not succumb and ‘break up their lines to weep’. Yeats contrasts tragic stage figures
that embrace their fates with a clear-eyedsangfroidto those who die as chance
would have it, unawares, like the ‘accident and incoherence that’, as Yeats has it
elsewhere, ‘sits down to breakfast’.^3 His lines, and his anthology comment too,
are themselves a protest against a mechanized world in which stoic heroism and
aesthetic poise might be imagined as outmoded. Yet what Yeats also glimpsed were
the changing conditions in which other conceptions of the heroic or the humanly
significant would be obliged to make their way. In what follows, I glance back at
Yeats’s remark in the light of difficulties in attributing meaning to the foreseeable
accidental deaths, the collateral damage, produced by total war, and attempts by
poets to find meaning in the fates of those who can only stand and wait.
First, though, no suffering should be dismissed as merely passive. With instinctive
energy, the hurt body and mind fights, to the extent of its capacity, to minimize
pain and promote recovery. Further, passivity of a dedicated or committed kind
has provided classic poems with a concluding focus. Yeats will not have been
unaware of Milton’s line, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’,^4 or, probably,
of Hopkins’s curiously similar lines in which ‘there went|Those years and years
of world without event|That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door’.^5 Since poems
in their energizing shapes are not passive either, there seems no earthly reason
why patience and endurance cannot be a poem too. But can clumsy ineptitude
or calculatedly casual killing? Whatever the circumstances, though, the suffering
of victims will be active, as the remorse of agents can be; and enduring both may
well require as much focused energy as is available. Even weeping and crying are
part of a human confrontation with losses that are likely to be felt as wrongs—as
indeed they tend to be when ‘Aeroplane and Zeppelin’ pitch their ‘bomb-balls in’.
At scenes where there are many casualties, those not crying out are the ones the
medical personnel must fear for most.
In his anthology introduction, Yeats rides his hobby-horse about how ‘tragedy is
a joy to the man who dies’. Yet he too had written some protest poetry—as when,
in lines from ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘a drunken soldiery|Can leave
(^2) Yeats, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, inPoems, 341.
(^3) Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for my Work’, inEssays and Introductions(Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1961), 509. 4
John Milton, ‘Sonnet 16’, inJohn Milton, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 81.
(^5) Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘In Honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez’, inPoems and Prose,ed.W.H.
Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 67.