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….            

 WE WILLED IT NOT We willed it not. We have not lived in hate, Loving too well the shires of England thrown From sea to sea to covet your estate, Or wish one flight of fortune from your throne. We had grown proud because the nations stood Hoping together against the calumny That, tortured of its old barbarian blood, Barbarian still the heart of man should be. Builders there are who name you overlord, Building with us the citadels of light, Who hold as we this chartered sin abhorred, And cry you risen Caesar of the Night. Beethoven speaks with Milton on this day, And Shakespeare's word with Goethe's beats the sky, In witness of the birthright you betray, In witness of the vision you deny. We love the hearth, the quiet hills, the song, The friendly gossip come from every land; And very peace were now a nameless wrong-- You thrust this bitter quarrel to our hand. For this your pride the tragic armies go, And the grim navies watch along the seas; You trade in death, you mock at life, you throw To God the tumult of your blasphemies. You rob us of our love-right. It is said. In treason to the world, you are enthroned, We rise, and, by the yet ungathered dead, Not lightly shall the treason be atoned. _John Drinkwater_