As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poets’ Corner  

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed, artists who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other, writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy, writers of not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and the maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets, musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.

And then the war drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for….            

ITALY IN ARMS


Of all my dreams by night and day,
    One dream will evermore return,
The dream of Italy in May;
    The sky a brimming azure urn
    Where lights of amber brood and burn;
The doves about San Marco's square,
    The swimming Campanile tower,
    The giants, hammering out the hour,
        The palaces, the bright lagoons,
The gondolas gliding here and there
        Upon the tide that sways and swoons.

The domes of San Antonio,
    Where Padua 'mid her mulberry-trees
Reclines; Adige's crescent flow
    Beneath Verona's balconies;
    Rich Florence of the Medicis;
Sienna's starlike streets that climb
    From hill to hill; Assisi well
    Remembering the holy spell
        Of rapt St. Francis; with her crown
Of battlements, embossed by time,
        Stern old Perugia looking down.

Then, mother of great empires, Rome,
    City of the majestic past,
That o'er far leagues of alien foam
    The shadows of her eagles cast,
    Imperious still; impending, vast,

The Colosseum's curving line;
    Pillar and arch and colonnade;
    St. Peter's consecrated shade,
        And Hadrian's tomb where Tiber strays;
The ruins on the Palatine
        With all their memories of dead days.

And Naples, with her sapphire arc
    Of bay, her perfect sweep of shore;
Above her, like a demon stark,
    The dark fire-mountain evermore
    Looming portentous, as of yore;
Fair Capri with her cliffs and caves;
    Salerno drowsing 'mid her vines
    And olives, and the shattered shrines
        Of Paestum where the gray ghosts tread,
And where the wilding rose still waves
        As when by Greek girls garlanded.

But hark! What sound the ear dismays,
    Mine Italy, mine Italy?
Thou that wert wrapt in peace, the haze
    Of loveliness spread over thee!
    Yet since the grapple needs must be,
I who have wandered in the night
    With Dante, Petrarch's Laura known,
    Seen Vallombrosa's groves breeze-blown,
        Met Angelo and Raffael,
Against iconoclastic might
        In this grim hour must wish thee well!

_Clinton Scollard_