Battle-Retrospect, and Other Poems/Ode in a German Cemetery
ODE IN A GERMAN CEMETERY
Where Many Victims of the Great War Were Interred.
Rancour grows chastened in these groves of death,
And clamorous recrimination hushed,
Our pain disarmed by pain,
We can but leave upon these graves the wreath
Our mortal foes by mortal visitation crushed
Have woven for their slain.
Still to this day,
Driven by their bitterness, they come to pray
And kneeling in the wind-blown grass
Grope vainly for relief,
And as I pass
Rise in distressed confusion and sore grief.
What did these know of empire's sordid ends,
Markets and routes and ancient rivalries?
Balance of power and dark expediencies,
Reasons of state,
The vain hallucinations of the great?
Why should these make amends
For others' wrongs?
What guilt for all this ruin here belongs?
Or if some taint of envy or of hate
Were theirs, yet even so,
Which is the greater misery, sin or woe?
Muse on these mute inscriptions, each of which
Stands for a life past divination rich
In poignant exploitations
And eager explorations
Of its allotted freehold in the Day;
Rich in those naïve essays of the heart,
Forlorn, confiding gestures
That of this dark enigma make assay,
And tendril-like adventures
Whereby we grope and sound and prove
Whether some circumambient Love
Greet and reward our motion to aspire.
Muse on each acted part;
Forgotten exultations, rage, and smart,
Their faith's extinguished fire,
And little triumphs that none think upon,
And protests smothered in oblivion.
Muse on this epitaph that meets the eye,
Strangely familiar in its alien tongue,
"These for our homes did die,"—
Two brothers loved of nameless folk, who won
This as earth's final comment at Verdun,
In that stentorian month whose havoc flung
Its hundred thousands down to Acheron;
In that inordinate reaping
Of these our fields beneath
When twilight was congested with the hosts
Of death's dim, swarming envoys bent upon
Prodigious inroads down life's fertile coasts,
Its virgin prairies sweeping
In far incursions where no scythe had shone;
Till earth was cumbered with the oppressive weight
Of such a garnering underneath the sun,
Such high-heaped sheaves of death;
Till one by one,
Borne off across the stars in phantom state,
Death's groaning wains conveyed
The great ingathering to the realms of shade,
And throngs unwonted choked the Stygian gate.
...Races of men, co-heirs of earth's duress,
Children of night, and orphans of the void,
Ringed 'round with menace and with mystery,
Condemned at birth to death in loneliness,
Proscribed and hunted, trampled and destroyed
By the blind furies of the earth and sea—
Why still increase the overwhelming odds
Against us—add this self-inflicted curse—
That we should hunt each other in the path
Of cataclysm, stay to vent our wrath
One on the other in the middle-way
Of swift annihilation, tear and slay
Beneath the onslaught of the universe,
Wage civil war, our seats stormed by the gods?
E'en the wild beasts forego their lust for blood,
Fleeing in panic through a blazing wood....
Mysterious is the lot of common lives
Lost in the mass,
Anonymous as leaves or blades of grass
In the thick verdure of humanity,
And inexistent to the powers that be:
Such were these all;
And so like leaves they fall,
Or one by one,
Or, when some storm of retribution drives
Over the face of mankind at the call
Of surcharged passions,
Unnumbered from their humble holdings wrenched,
Before the blast they run,
Creatures of life's blind impulse and its altering fashions,
To the deep drifts of still oblivion;
Save where their thought survives
In that sequestered spot where they were known,
In some frail fort of love 'gainst death and time entrenched.
Even their vices were not all their own,
Inevitably sown
In childhood's hospitable tilth
By the thick-flying seed
Of man's continuing legacy of ill,
His cherished heirlooms of disease and filth,
And rank depravities of ancient date,
And unimpaired inheritance of hate,
That generation unto generation still
Contrives to will.
Errors, obscenities and passions breed,
With germs of violence rife,
As in a culture fitted to that end
In human life,
Nor need man to their breeding his impulsion lend.
Then, fallen foe, and friend,
Sleep,
Sleep in repose,
And you, you suffering mother, cease to weep.
What though we late were foes?
We fought in nightmare, as in dreams we live;
Best to forgive.
Aspiring howsoever, you, or I,
The great world weaves its tentacles of ill
Into our hearts, the solidarity
Of mortal evil claims us 'gainst our will,
And with it sinning, with it we must die.
Yet those who in the world-old process caught
Bring thither self-renunciation, aught
Of loftier aim, of loftier ideal,
Of loftier thought,
And bear the common curse, the shared ordeal,
The common retribution, undeserved,
These in all lands, all times, all causes, these
That law by innocence appease;
By their sublime attractiveness they win
The world from its fatality of sin,
And from the common lot
Desiring no exemption,
Their blamelessness with mighty power is fraught
When joined with pain,
For so Redemption,
Redemption lifts its mighty cross again!
So swerved
By love's vast leverage from its ancient grooves
And changeless cycles of eternal wars,
The planet moves
To grander revolutions among softer stars
And skies unblasted by the beams of Mars,
To placid periods under milder rays,
Pacific seasons, august nights and days.
Munich, July 1921.