Ed note: This post is in honor of Marvin Broder, who died on May 24. From my dear friend and his daughter Betsy: A fervent fan of Cole Porter, family gatherings and salty jokes, my father graduated Yale when it still used a quota for Jewish students, entered the Navy before Pearl Harbor, worked with the Israeli navy at its inception and skied Tuckerman's Ravine and Mt Mansfield before they installed lifts. . . [He] often talked about his service in the Navy and his regard for the skipper of his ship. Not a skilled seamen, but a man of the arts, the captain would gather the officers in the evening and they would read poetry together. Thank you for your service Lt. Commander Broder. May your memory be a blessing. sdl
We mark this Memorial Day with an excerpt from David Lehman's essay "Peace and War in American Poetry."
1.
War and Peace: the title of Tolstoy’s massive novel of Napoleonic Europe trips off the tongue. Not so “peace and war”: the inversion of the customary word order represents a victory of hope over experience — or of the poetry of aspiration over the prose of sad actuality. As a subject for poetry, war has an immediate advantage over peace, because war entails action, whereas the experience of peace is an absence, not noticed until not there, like the absence of pain.
War was the first subject to quicken the pen of an epic poet. But the author of The Iliad knew that the scenes of the Trojan hero Hector in battle with Patroclus and later with Achilles would not be so remarkable if there were not also a tender scene of Hector bidding farewell to Andromache, his wife, and their baby boy, who is scared of daddy’s helmet. Epic poets have followed Homer’s lead, widening the scope of war inevitably to include peace – whether peace be construed as the absence of hostilities or as something positive in its own right.
In book XVIII of The Iliad, Homer describes the shield of Achilles that the lame god Hephaistos has fashioned for him. The shield depicts two cities – one embattled, besieged; the other functional, with a wedding and a court of civil law where disputants can settle their differences without violence. In layers of concentric circles the shield also shows some of the things conspicuously lacking in fields of battle: a vineyard, a herd of cattle, a circle of young men and women dancing, the bounty of the harvest – the fruits of peace.