Richard Vallance

Vallance Review, April 2003 Rumours of War and War: "Libya" by L. Challoner, Bombadier © reviewed by Richard Vallance, 2003 INTRODUCTION “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” — in his speech to the United Nations, General Assembly, September 25th., 1961. John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) Assassinated. [6.1] With the prospect of an incendiary war in the Middle East all but a dead certainty by the time of this writing, much to my chagrin, and yet through an informed sense of duty, I have decided to dedicate the April, 2003 Vallance Review to an obscure sonnet by a practically unknown “part-time poet”, an infantryman of the Second World War, L. Challoner, Bombadier in General Bernard Law Montgomery’s Eighth Army in the hard-fought, exhaustive Allied campaign against Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Army in North Africa, 1942-1943. First of all, allow me to clarify — this is not meant to be a critical review of a sonnet, and certainly not of this sonnet, in the normative literary sense of the word. I shall neither analyze the sonnet nor shall I either extol or denigrate its poetic merit. That is not the aim of this month’s review. What then is the point of our exercise, if we can call it that at all? There has been a long chain of war poems and sonnets in the repertoire of English, European, Canadian and American literature, broken at times by intermittent periods of peace, from the Seventeenth Century onwards. What is historically striking about such “war” poems is: as the centuries have progressed, the tone of despair, the irony and the bitterness they have evinced has generally become ever more sombre, until at last, today, as we enter the Third Millennium, it has become painfully obvious that certain war-mongering Imperialist governments seem hell bent on their eventual destruction, and along with theirs, sadly, that of everyone else besides. We only wish this were not true. But to think otherwise and worse yet, to profess otherwise, would be paramount to sticking the proverbial ostrich’s head in the sand. No responsible person in this fractious world of ours can afford any longer to do so, except at his or her own peril. Is there any way out of this senseless impasse? Will the Peace Movement prevail? Heretofore, it has been one hell of a struggle. It is anyone’s guess. I for one am in no position to prognosticate. Unfortunately, the record is clear enough: humankind has always been eager to make war, on any pretext, but far less inclined to maintain peace at any costs. And poetry, right from the time of Homer's vivid war Epic, The Iliad, onwards, has always reflected this tragic paradox most dramatically. Yes, in this time of darkness, even war poems and sonnets can shed a little light on the bitter political schisms which rend our world. It is only by allowing the feeble light of the smallest candle to shine even in the darkest night that the searchlight of Truth ever comes to bear upon us. In such a light, may we allow our sonnet to speak for itself? The Sonnet, as it appeared in the original book, 1944 [1]: FROM: Only 1,500 signed copies of this book were ever published. This little tome contains only 27 poems, one of which is anonymous, and two authored by L. Challoner. Of the 27 poems, 2 are sonnets. The book itself was published as the result of a Christmas 1942 poetry competition amongst the North African Allied troops. 493 poems from 297 entrants were received; only these made it into print. Regardless, all were composed by soldiers in the thick of war, who were exposed to unrelenting brutality, blood and gore and, all too often, Death. Whether the poems are great or not is scarcely the issue here. What matters only is this: we know that these amateur poets were all active participants in one of the nastiest campaigns in one of the direst wars in all history. Many of them probably perished. And that’s what makes their poetry, whatever its literary merit, such a poignant memorial to past and present war, in today’s bellicose environment. HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS In Chapter 12, Section 5, “The Historical Evolution of the Sonnet: 5 – Thematics and Athematics, of my latest book, Canadian Spirit Voices, there is a lengthy passage discussing socio-political sonnets, with a subsection dealing specifically with “war” sonnets. Permit me to draw your attention to one passage directly pertinent to our review: …the English Civil War, which brought about… passim… the Protectorate of the Commonwealth under the stern Puritan dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) [7], thoroughly revolutionized the sonnet thematically, by introducing a subject heretofore unheard of in its repertoire, namely; politics! John Milton, who was a Republican sympathizer for some time, penned several politically inspired sonnets. At least one of these sonnets is particularly memorable for the violence it portrays, and its unflinching denunciation of a barbaric massacre. This is, of course, Milton’s justly famous, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” [8], from which I cite most of the caustic Octave: John Milton, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered Saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold; Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old, When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones, Forget not: in thy book record their groans Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled Mother with infant down the rocks… Chapter 12, Section 5, “Thematics and Athematics”, of Canadian Spirit Voices proceeds to invoke further examples of war incited sonnets, many of which would spring up again in the early Nineteenth Century, when several illustrious English poets would inveigh against war in the most caustic terms. I also touched upon this thorny matter in an earlier Vallance Review [3], where the following revolutionary sonnets were cited, with their URL links: 1. William Wordsworth, “England, 1802” 2. Ibid., “MILTON! Thou shoulds’t be living at this hour:” [4] 3. John Keats, “Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison” 4. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Sonnet: England in 1819” 5. Ibid., “Lift not the painted veil from those who live” 6. Ibid., “Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte” Even at the outset of the Nineteenth Century, the “eternal note of sadness” [7, Arnold] had already acquired a prominent voice in both English and continental poetry and sonnets. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s, “Ozymandias” Yet, the most memorable of all these period sonnets was undeniably Percy Bysshe Shelley’s, “Ozymandias of Egypt” [5], in which the poet subtly and ironically denounces the mighty and the powerful, bringing to mind such great Empires as Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Persia and, of course, the vast Roman Empire itself, in his (almost literally) shattering conclusion: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. The commentator at this WEB site wryly (and I think, aptly) concludes, of this sonnet, “Thus any powerful person can see from these ruins what happens to power. Nothing will be left of it except dust and fragments.” [5]. Touché. Ironically enough, this is the second sonnet in this review, which is set in the desert environment. I can assure you my choices were deliberate. Now, “Ozymandias”, although composed at the outset of the Nineteenth Century, is a thoroughly forward-looking, prophetically modern sonnet, not only for the moral quandary it poses for the reader, but equally for its remarkably modern style. It reads more like a sonnet of the early Twentieth Century than of the early Nineteenth. No loving “thee’s” or “thou’s” here; no maudlin sentimentality — only the senseless arrogance of human hubris. No, this sonnet, which stands head and shoulders above most poems of its ilk in the repertoire of English literature, ends on a particularly sour note, reminding us pointedly that, where “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” [6] Matthew Arnold’s, “Dover Beach” Apart from “Ozymandias”, perhaps the most notable of anti-war poems composed in the course of the Nineteenth Century is Matthew Arnold’s profoundly disturbing, “Dover Beach”, which is not a sonnet, but which I must cite for the simple reason that it stands, especially today, as a stark prophetic reminder of what Arnold was already conscious of, namely; that the world was rapidly sinking from the heights of the great achievements, so eminently embodied by the ideals of the Classical Civilization of ancient Greece, into a barbaric age such as had never been witnessed before in the history of mankind. The bloody Crimean War, which Arnold had already had the misfortune to live through in his lifetime, the Boer War of 1899, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and, in our latter days, the first (1991) and second (2003) Iraqi Wars — and I have omitted so many other recent wars just as brutal as these — all, all of these stand as stark and cruel reminders of the poison hemlock Arnold is forced to drink, and asks us to quaff in our human empathy, to end the despair this elegiac poem so powerfully conveys [7]: And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. [1867] The Sonneteers of the “Great War” And yet, if John Milton’s, Shelley’s and Bombadier L. Challoner’s sonnets, along with Arnold’s elegiac lament, “Dover Beach” all goad us to the inescapable conclusion that war and the dogs of war are the fated lot of mankind, throughout our so-called “civilized” history, it was to be the poets of World War I who were to bring to the unwilling attention of the world the full magnitude of the tragedy, horrors and inhumane brutality of all wars. For the “War to end all wars” was the world’s first (and apparently not the last) World War, a war that was to engulf all of Europe and even North America and much of the world in a bloody melée that massacred millions of soldiers and civilians. So what else is new? I would refer you not only to The Sonnets of World War I at the Sonnet Board, where the deeply disturbing and often wrenching sonnets of the likes of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke are featured [8], but also to the November, 2002 Vallance Review [9], in which Rupert Brooke’s tragic sonnet, “1914 IV The Dead” is sympathetically reviewed at length and in depth. It was in fact at that time that I first focussed attention on the already festering crisis in Iraq and the impending prospect of a highly volatile war, of which the dire consequences are all but unimaginable. Implications for Today? Well, aren’t they glaringly obvious? As Percy Bysshe Shelley himself pinpointed in his Defence of Poetry (1821), it is the ethical duty of the poet-prophet to cast his or her net of the Imagination beyond the confines of the present era, and to dare conceive realizable ideals, if you will, for which no finite place or time or civilization can elsewhere or otherwise find the rhyme or reason: §28 Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. §29 For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the forms of the flower and the fruit of latest time. §30 Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. §31 A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions(,) time and place and number are not. (Italics mine) So, I pointedly ask, are there in our valiantly toiling world poets and sonneteers amongst us ready and willing to assume the task of writing of those eternal truths which indeed may have the Power Infinity wields, to burst through the dyke of temporal power, and expose it for the shameful sham it is? Anyone wish to take up the challenge? I somehow think so. Postscript: The Vallance Review originally scheduled for April, 2003, “The Sonnet and Music: Part 3”, has been postponed until the September, 2003 issue of Poetry Life and Times. References and Notes: [1] Verses by Members of the Eighth Army. Poems from the Desert: a Collection of Poems Written by Members of the Eighth Army While Serving in the Western Desert From December 1942 to February 1943. London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., © 1944. 45 (46) pp. [autographed, with a forward by General Montgomery] NOTES: 1. This sonnet was, in fact, only the 16th. poem ever to have been posted on our Yahoo sonnet group, Describe Adonis (Message 16 of 3236 – 01032001). Significantly, I posted it by mimetic association immediately after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias ( [4] below). 2. If you search the book’s title on the Internet, you will find numerous sources, such as antiquarian bookstores, from which you may order it. [2] I have previously treated this historically ground-breaking sonnet at some length in my new CD-ROM book, Canadian Spirit Voices, Chapter 12, Section 5, “Thematics and Athematics” = rv12-5.htm on the disc, published by Kedco Studios Press, Las Vegas Nevada, © 2003. ISBN: 1-878431-44-7 [3] Vallance, Richard. “Capel Lofft’s ‘The Sports of the Field’ and its Implications”, in Poetry Life and Times, Vallance Review, March, 2002. [4] Apparently, Wordsworth was at least in part driven to write this lament from having himself read Milton’s momentous sonnets and, one may speculate, perhaps even, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” [5] Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Ozymandias: Overview [6.1] John F. Kennedy (1917-1963). ”Mankind must put and end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” —in his speech to the United Nations, General Assembly, September 25th., 1961, from: Ratcliffe, Susan, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Thematic Quotations. Oxford: The Oxford University Press, © 2000. ISBN 0-19-860218-9 pg. 403 [6.2] Lord Acton (1834-1902), in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, April 3rd., 1887, op. cit., pg. 301 [7] Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” in, The City as Hero: Victorian London in Life and Literature [8] The Sonnet Board: Sonnets of World War I [9] The Vallance Review, November, 2002. In Commemoration of Remembrance Day, 2002: Rupert Brooke’s, “The Dead” (1915)