War and Peace

Offering dragons quarter is no good, they regrow all their parts & come on again, they have to be killed.

In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark.

We must love one another or die.

But from each crime are born bullets that will one day seek out in you where the heart lies.

there are so many people dead and so many sea-walls that the red sun used to split, and so many heads that the boats hit, and so many hands that have closed around kisses, and so many things I would like to forget.

Treacherous generals: look at my dead house, look at broken Spain.

War is like love, it always finds a way.

i sing of Olaf glad and big whose warmest heart recoiled at war

Red lips are not so red As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons.

Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry, The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do is warn. 1

Still falls the Rain— Dark as the world of man, black as our loss— Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the Cross.

Who will remember, passing through this gate, The unheroic dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate— Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I’d toddle safely home and die—in bed.

Soldiers are citizens of death’s gray land.

Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later… some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men’s lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.

There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all.

Since thou 2 and those who died with thee for right Have died, the Present teaches, but in vain!

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep. War is kind.

A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.

I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.