Richard Vallance
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Vallance Review 39
November 2004
Recessional: Rue of Thought in Flanders Fields
Rudyard Kipling, John McCrae and Helga Ross
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
Rudyard Kipling, "Recessional" (June 22, 1887) [1]
INTRODUCTION
As with the November 2002 and 2003 Remembrance Day Vallance Reviews, covering sonnets by the early twentieth century British poet and progeny, Rupert Brooke, and the early twenty-first century American poetess, Sondra Ball, the Remembrance Day 2004 Vallance Review once again commemorates the dreadful tragedy of war. We know the tragic count, even with our eyes closed: the loss of countless millions of precious human lives in both the World Wars, of civilization's most cherished values and possibly even the life of our small Earth in its fragile grandeur. This year, we feature the contemporary poet, Helga Ross, whose sonnet, "Rue of Thought" reaffirms humankind's all too often unexpressed need, at our dire peril, never to forget the awful scars of war.
Helga Ross and Rue of Thought
Woes, verse wastelands, by these will we be known?
Fading footprints poetize the decades
we've bridged with barren missive, arid moan,
lofty sounds leading injury parades.
Myriads self-impale on poetic swords,
bemoan their beings, pains unparalleled,
flailing what peace prosperity affords!
Such, the bards of ages would've marveled.
Lest we forget [1] holocaust Phoenix flies,
history's ashes of wars pile up behind.
Who but authors tell truths of time, whose cries
might redefine our directions, maligned?
We have to have coetaneous art to last!
Honours: architects, of our honest cast.
© Helga Ross 2003
Historical Precedent: Rudyard Kipling's Lyric Hymn, "Recessional": (1887)
In a recent telephone conversation with the poet, I learned from her that she had already finished writing her sonnet before it suddenly dawned on her that she had unwittingly used that memorable phrase ringing its knell on us November 11 year in and year out, "Lest we forget" [1], a phrase whose original historical context she admits she was quite unaware of. Realizing this, our poet googled the internet, there to discover that the words serve as a refrain in memoriam of the war dead in Rudyard Kiplings's stirring Anthem, "Recessional", composed on June 22 1887. It behooves us to cite this justly famous memorial eulogy in its entirety, in order to establish what historical and poetic links, explicit or implicit, lie between Kipling's nineteenth century eulogy and Helga Ross's twenty-first century sonnet.
Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional"
867. Recessional June 22, 1897
GOD of our fathers, known of old-
Lord of our far-flung battle-line-
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine-
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies-
The captains and the kings depart-
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
Far-call'd our navies melt away-
On dune and headland sinks the fire-
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe-
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law-
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard-
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard --
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
While Helga Ross's sonnet directly quotes that all-too memorable phrase, "Lest we forget" from Kipling's "Recessional", her poem seems to resonate still more deeply with yet another justly famous eulogy for comrades fallen in war. I refer of course to the Canadian physician's lyric encomium, "In Flander's Fields", which he composed while on the battlefield in France, prior to his tragic death from pneumonia and meningitis in a Belgium field hospital on January 28, 1918.
John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields" (January, 1915)
In Flanders Fields [2]
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
John McCrae (1872-1918) [Italics mine]
Whereas Rudyard Kipling's eulogy speaks volumes for the repressed Romantic values of the Victorian Age he so epitomizes, John McCrae's profoundly moving ballad for his war dead companions and dear friends is even more poignant, if for no other reason than that McCrae had to live through the dreadful, shocking experience that was the Great War. His lyrics strongly echo his own stark fears, his own deep sense of loss of friends and loved ones ("Loved, and were loved, and now we lie...) Almost uncannily, McCrae's impassioned words vividly recall to mind Rupert Brooke's practically identical lament in his haunting sonnet, "The Dead", which we reviewed in the November 2002 Vallance Review, where he with all his heart so tellingly grieves,
These had seen movements, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended [Italics mine]. [3]
There is also his stark realization that soon, soon enough he himself, like so many of his fallen comrades, may very well be counted amongst the dead, as indeed he was to be, dying of pneumonia in a Belgium field hospital in January 1918, an uncanny replay of Rupert Brooke's equally tragic death from blood poisoning on The Day of Resurrection, Easter Sunday, April, 1915.
What is at play just beneath the surface in both Rupert Brooke's exquisitely tragic sonnet and in John McCrae's stunningly tragic lyrics is the phenomenon known in poetic circles as the male creative anima, as contradistinguished from the female poet's animus, which, as we shall soon see leaps to the fore in Helga Ross's latter-day sonnet. What, if any, is the fundamental psychological difference between the male poet's anima and the female's animus? Definitions abound, but here are a couple to whet your imagination:
The Anima is the personification of all feminine psychological tendencies within a man, the archetypal feminine symbolism within a man's unconscious. The Animus is the personification of all masculine psychological tendencies within a woman, the archetypal masculine symbolism buried deep in a woman's unconscious [4].
and again...
Archetypes and the Individuation Process:
According to Jung, one must get in touch with the Shadow and Anima/Animus before one can truly get in touch with the Self... passim... Jung referred to this initial step as "the First Act of Courage". And the first thing that is necessary in coming to terms with one's own shadow is simply to acknowledge that it exists. It sounds obvious, but there are those for whom the thought of actually having a darker side to their nature is extremely uncomfortable (italics mine). [5]
The distinction is subtle, but it has a profound impact on the emotional and psychological implications of these respective poems for us as readers. In Rudyard Kipling's rather formal Victorian anthem, even the male anima is not much in evidence. Here is perhaps one reason why: for this reviewer at least, Kipling's eulogy falls emotionally short. The same cannot be said for any of the other three poems we feature here. In all three of the latter poems, all the poets, male and female alike, actually do come to grips, at least in so far as any human being can, in the face of intense suffering, with the dark or shadow side of their creative selves. With our two male poets, Rupert Brooke and John McCrae, that dark side is the driving anima of their compelling creative energy. With Helga Ross, it is her shadow animus that drives her to such a pique of passion that she well nigh frightens us out of our wits!
Both McCrae's lament and Rupert Brooke's deeply haunting sonnet throb with their very real, highly impassioned personal grief and suffering at the dirty hands of war. There is no escaping war for either of these tragically doomed poets, both of whom died in the Great War, while, notably, Rudyard Kipling escaped the scars of World War I, and lived to a ripe old age --- witness again to the lesser impact of his own war eulogy, however well crafted it may be. It is indeed characteristic of male poets who are plunged headlong into War and into its garish violence and suffering to long for and cherish just those feminine values, those "feminine" traits and their own "feminine" emotions they so sorely miss when suddenly and probably forever deprived of family, friends, loved ones and wives. And that's what makes their poetry so emotionally stirring! Summarily, then, these two great male poets, both of whom lost their precious lives for others in the Great War, have spoken the very words their female companions, lovers and wives fear the most, the tragic loss of those they love most in life!
Nor should we really be surprised that Helga Ross, in her own stead, should call upon and eventually find the emotional resources within herself to compose a sonnet equally as stirring, though on an altogether different psychic foundation, that of the feminine poet's animus.
Here shall we see our female poet rightfully proclaim aloud those very fears that haunt us males, we who trudge off to war so valiantly, only to lose our lives, all the while stuffing our own love, and our fondest memories of our loved ones deep within the recesses of our wounded hearts -- unless of course, we just happen to be as staunchly courageous as the likes of Rupert Brooke and John McCrae, in whose poems the anima has so poignantly and so tragically mirrored back Helga Ross's heart-rending refrains.
While Helga Ross hearkens back to some extent to the examples set by her two forbears cited here, the implications of war her sonnet evinces take an altogether different, and in some ways, even more ominous tack than do either of the previous lyrics. While Rudyard Kipling's eulogy laments the consequences of war and the sins of humankind that inexorably drive us into war, and John McCrae's more poignant lyrics evoke even more vividly the actual horrors of war as experienced by a soldier who was forced to fight in one of the world's most vicious wars ever, the Canadian poet's sonnet lays bare before our sore eyes all of the baggage inherited from the internecine wars that beset the twentieth century from beginning to end. And on this already depressing leitmotif she has superimposed the stark consciousness of the early twentieth century's confrontation with an even fiercer devil in tattered disguise: I speak of none other than international Terrorism in all its nastiest avatars. Our contemporary sonneteer has, it seems, suffered a profound shock through the osmosis her very blood has infused into her well nigh caustic sonnet. Indeed, as John McCrae has so starkly reminded us,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The well of horror only grows deeper as the blood-stained centuries relentlessly march on. There is no escaping it. She verily underscores humankind's total incapacity to escape our own vengeful nature,
Myriads self-impale on poetic swords,
bemoan their beings, pains unparalleled,
flailing what peace prosperity affords!
The implications here are scary enough. If indeed "myriads self-impale on poetic swords", then even we, the poets ourselves, likewise end up impaling ourselves on these self-same Damocles swords! Again, there is simply no escaping this. Even the hardest fought peace is merely won at the expense of the waste of our lusts in action, as we wage all-out war on one another again and again, on the international, intranational, social, interpersonal and, yes, sad to say, personal and internal psychic levels. Every one of us seems hell bent on a battle ground of inner psychological warfare that would make the very angels quake. On paper the moral code looks clear and neat enough; but the same document written on the "living tablets of the heart" is often a sorry tatter, particularly in the mouths of those who talk the loudest. We are told on every side that evil is evil and that there can be no hesitation in condemning it, but that does not prevent evil from being the most problematical thing in the individual's life and the one which demands the deepest reflection. (italics mine) [6]
Yes, our sonneteer has drunk from the bitter dregs of the collective unconscious, where,
Deviation from the truths of the blood begets neurotic restlessness, and we have had about enough of that these days. Restlessness begets meaninglessness, and the lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not yet begun to comprehend. [7]
This has to leave us wondering, even aloud, whether there is any possible exit for humankind out of the shell-shocked Halls of Valhalla. Sword in hand, our sonneteer puts her bloodied thumb firmly on our collective nasty sore, when she declares, rising inexorably to her conclusion,
Who but authors tell truths of time, whose cries
might redefine our directions, maligned?
That question is not merely rhetorical. It is her rallying cry to her fellow humans to wake up, to take heed, lest we do indeed "forget', and drown ourselves in the sea of our own mutually shed blood. It is a portrait well-nigh Goyaesque. So it can be no pretty picture. Here then is the "shadow side" of C.G. Jung's collective and our individualized personal consciousness, the stymied well of our collective human denial bubbling right up to the surface.
Yet, is all mere hopelessness? Must her message end on such a sour note? No, surely not. For in her rhyming couplet, in the sonnet's powerful conclusion, she reasserts the poet's prophetic claim as the "vates" (prophet or seer) of the ages, when she firmly proclaims:
We have to have coetaneous art to last!
Honours: architects, of our honest cast.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his ground-breaking treatise, The Defence of Poetry (1821), comes to what is essentially the same conclusion, when he boldly declares on at least three occasions (two of them cited here):
§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.
and again,
§342 Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World. [8]
Yet, more than two millennia before Shelley, the greatest of all epic bards, the poet who perhaps described the horrors of war in more vivid and gorey details than any poet before or since, because he was on all too familiar terms with it, Homer, in his Iliad, also proclaims:
And among them uprose Calchas, son of Thestor, who had knowledge of all things that were, and that were to be and that had been before... [Homer, Iliad, I:68-70]
Make no mistake about it: "poets are the unacknowledged legislators" of humankind. Why so, "unacknowledged", you well ask? We are the Cassandras of the World. Our prophecies, like those of Homer, like those of the poet-prophets of the Old Testament, Isaiah and Jeremiah, and like the Delphic and Sybilline prophecies of ancient Greek and Rome have always gone pretty much blithely unheeded, and always, always at our dire peril. Will humankind ever change our bloody tune, our relentless march to war, our "injury parades"? That remains to be seen. It is consummately to be hoped for.
But there is more. Sometimes, in certain historical eras, throughout whole centuries, even the poets themselves do tend to forget, do lose touch with the harsh realities of life's bitterest conflicts. They do so, not by denying them, but by either reveling in them outright, as attested by the violence that has infested the television and motion picture media for at least the past quarter century, or by allowing us, in our envious moral sloth, to be cast down and utterly dejected, to be depressed en masse, as a race, in our collective unconscious. That too is one of the dark undercurrents scoring through Helga Ross's unsparing sonnet. Our early Third Millennium poet is indeed lamenting outright the powerful penchant of so many of the twentieth century's poets to wallow in anxiety and despair, to trumpet their Angst and fear in the face of an apparently hopeless paradox, that there appears to exist no way whatsoever out of the quagmire of war. And that worldview, that poetic perspective dragged so much of the previous century's poetry down, down, down into a miasmus of hopeless, often faceless terror, from which there was no redemption for the dearth of faith in the beyond characterizing so much of their work. Now, whether or or not we, as poets in the early Third Millennium, can drag ourselves back up out of that horrid tarpit is anyone's guess. But one thing is certain. As "the unacknowledged legislators of the world", as its nastily finger-and-tongue wagging Cassandras, it appears to be our bounden duty and ethical responsibility to continue raising our collective hue and cry against the warmongering follies of humankind. Whether again such books of lamentations as our poetry will have any lasting effect on the collective unconscious of humanity as a whole is open to serious doubt. But we must never fail to keep on struggling against the natural tendency for humanity to slide willy-nilly into its own death throes.
Once again, the great English poet and poetry critic, Percy Bysshe Shelley, accurately highlights the crux of the tragedy when when he laments, in The Defence of Poetry (1821):
§142 It is not inasmuch as they were Poets, but inasmuch as they were not Poets, that they can be considered with any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. §143 Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure, passion and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been atchieved (sic). §144 For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and therefore it is corruption. §145 It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. §146 At the approach of such a period, Poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the foot steps of Astræa [9], departing from the world. [8]
Shelley's is a dire warning to all poets everywhere in the entire world in our present day and age, a knell which we fail to heed at our own dire peril as poets. But will the poets of the world, its dark Cassandras, fail to heed the rallying cry to wake up the sleeping dead? I think not, for in the longer term, poets never have failed in this, our unwilling mission foisted on us by the gods, to proclaim our own self-inflicted judgement day.
Conclusions
Have we come full circle? Can the vicious circle of war and peace, peace playing tag with war ever be closed? It would, I fear, seem not. The whole paradox of our human frightful human lust for war and our equally ceaseless visceral struggling for peace strike home right at the crux of Helga Ross's stark sonnet, at its volta, where at the very outset of the tercet, she flatly declares,
Lest we forget holocaust Phoenix flies,...
The implications of this strongly concatenated phrase, which falls on our ears like a ton of iron, are scary enough. God forbid if we forget! We did, for almost a decade, before the Second World war. And what were the dire consequences? -- none other than the Holocaust and the loss of millions upon millions of Jewish, civilian and soldiers' lives on every and all sides, not to say the least the perversion of the Atomic firestorms unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki! Yet, there rings a tiny note of hope in this same verse. Our sonneteer leans on exulting (or on second thought, does she?), "Phoenix flies...". From the ashes of war, however horrific, even the First and Second World Wars, even the destruction of the Twin Towers in NYC on September 11 2001, there arises the Phoenix, emblem of courage in the face of war, bravery in the face of death, recovery from the most awful of war's hellish nightmares and the restoration, however fleeting, of peace. Sadly though, the Phoenix also flies, which is to say, it flees at the onslaught of the next looming war, a war which we all know from vast past experiences, is only a heartbeat away.
Still, even in the face of such relentless tragedy, there may yet be a flicker of hope for humankind. There are a few nations on earth, albeit only a few, where peace seems to reign, at least internally, throughout most of their history. Canada is one of those nations. While Canada leapt into the fray in both World War I and World War II, long before America, neither of these wars ever touched Canada's own native ground. Wars have been few and far between on Canadian soil, at least since the Great Rebellion of 1837. And Helga Ross, true to form as a Canadian poet, returns to the fold, dons her sheep's clothing, and in true Canadian style, composes a sonnet for us that is bound to soothe even the most savage breast. This is yet another Canadian sonnet par excellence. And it is on this note that we choose to foreclose our review on war, ushering in the uncanny peace that seems to hover forever and anon over the untold solitudes of the vast Canadian wilderness.
Night Vision
a Canadian sonnet
At the edge of the lake where shadows lay
luster of slate, restive, alone, he waits,
his mood tempered by gloom; reflects the gray
that still water of opaque depth creates.
She should be here by now, this much is clear.
Seeing desire she couldn't disguise,
light of longing unveil her eyes, the tear:
To balk his blunt demand - rueful surprise!
Hours ago, hadn't she sought him out?
Returned his fevered gaze too pleased to hold?
Sure of himself, demand overcomes doubt:
To meet, eager for more, revealed and told.
Hollow sounds in the dark; shrills the alarm:
She races to reach him - wakens - breaks charm!
Helga Ross 2004
Ironically, only in a nation such as Canada, where even the individual is swallowed whole by the immensity of the land, can such peace steal upon us in the moonlit shadows peering through night, not merely in the full glare of daylight. Strangely too does our sonneteer return to the less threatening psychic realm of the anima, as she seeks out and discovers her male lover. And on that quiet note of love redeeming, allow me, dear readers, to draw this review to its conclusion.
© by Richard Vallance October 25 2004
 | Coming in December 2004!
George Frederic Handel's
"L'Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato"
after John Milton's twin pastoral elegies,
"L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" |
REFERENCES & NOTES:
[1] Bartleby.com. Recessional - Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), British poet: from, Quiller-Couch, Arthur, ed. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900, © 1919
[2] The Heritage of the Great War: the making of the poem, "in Flanders Fields", by John McCrae
[3] Vallance Review 15, Poetry Life & Times, "Rupert Brooke's, 'The Dead' "
[4] ANIMA/ANIMUS: the archetype of contrasexuality
[5] Jung Psychology Theorists GA Contents: Process of Individuation
[6] Jacobi, Jolande & Hull, R.F.C., eds. C.G. Jung: Psychological Reflections: a New Anthology of His Writings 1905-1961. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, © 1953, 1970. xvi, 379 pp. [Bollingen Series XXXI]. ISBN 0-691-01786-7 (pbk.) pg. 245.
[7] Ibid. pg. 252
[8] RPO: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Defence of Poetry, Part The First (1821)
[9] Astraea Astraea: Greek Goddess of innocence and purity. According to the Greeks, Astraea left Earth and became the constellation Virgo the Virgin.
The Vallance Review is frequently cited in our Canadian sonnet journal, SONNETTO POESIA ISSN 1706-4524. To read the current issue or any back issues, you may visit the sonnet journal's Home Page here:
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