War & Poetry
We all admit that war is a bad thing, but let us also concede that pitching a battle has the merit, from time to time, of bringing forth good poetry. Is there some communion between the two?
I don’t mean, of course, that the literary possibilities offered by the prospect of combat are normally computed in the casus belli. It is not as though Agamemnon and his friends, conferring on a recent affront from the Trojans, turned at length to a poet sitting over in the corner and asked, “Well, what about it, Homer? If we go lay siege to Troy, do you think you could do a thing or two with it?”
Nor is it reasonable to suppose that one of the commanders at Balaclava, stymied by the superior position of the Russians, suddenly blurted out, “Blimey, you know, it’s only half a league onward. Why don’t we just send the Thirteenth Hussars down there right in the face of their artillery? I say, Tennyson old thing, that should get the old literary juices flowing, what?”
When I suggest a communion of battle and poetry, I mean, rather, what Keats had in mind when he wrote of “the clanging harp of war.” Literary history testifies to a mysterious affinity between the marching tramp of armies and the pen’s long marshalling of measured lines. There is in each case a true cadence, the resolute and disciplined falling of feet pushing on toward the settlement of a thesis.
It seems a thing of nature, then, that when reasonable men perceive this or that affront to lie beyond endurance—when they feel compelled to steel their souls for the terrible ordeal of combat and put into ordered thought the reasons that compel them to draw the sword—they also take hold of the pen, often enough, to record in words of elegance the destiny, even the drama, of their enterprise. Such has been the case in every tribe and tongue.
This plain fact does not imply, of course, that the value of the poetry thus produced is necessarily proportioned to the weight of the conflict that produced it. That notion is absurd on its face. Not every great and significant war produced even a single line of memorable verse, whereas, on occasion, the muse has been overly generous toward the most insignificant battles ever fought.
The example I have in mind right now comes from Numbers 21:27–30, and because the Bible took the care to record it, I must do at least as much:
Come to Heshbon, let it be built;
Let the city of Sihon be repaired.
For fire came forth from Heshbon,
A flame from the city of Sihon;
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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