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PART 6: OTHER WARS |
O Come Love These Warring Armies Dave Cunliffe Come join in the angels naked march. O come love these savage warring armies Come carrying giant mandal banners, O come love these fearful warring armies Come ready armed with flowers, bibles, buddhas O come love these trembling warring armies
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INDEX the first world war
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INFORMATION HISTORY But this was also the decade of peace marches and demonstrations, love-ins and sit-downs, peaceniks and flower people, freedom rides, Hare Krishna, kaftans, Afghan coats, love beads, and doves. And the Beatles, of course. Like Dave Cunliffe, the writer of this poem, many people turned to eastern religions and practices to dissociate themselves from war. The founder of Buddhism, born over 2,600 years ago in India, was a prince, but at the age of 30 gave up the luxuries of court life and the pleasures of marriage to become a hermit. After years of what the modern world calls 'the simple life', he came to the conclusion that meditation and contemplation were the way to enlightenment. He also preached the pacifist and nonviolent doctrine of 'ahimsa': doing no harm to living creatures. Love of that all-embracing kind seemed (and still seems) to many people to be the only answer to aggression, confrontation and war. 'Make love not war' could be taken further: 'Make war against war'. One poet remembered that 10 years back, in 1957, a brother poet 'was challenging poets to react to nuclear warfare, inviting us to resist our rulers. I remember at the time thinking - "well, I am reacting in my poems". Then I thought - "and nobody knows it".' In the 1960s poets of America and Britain stood up, declared their war on war, and were counted. IDEAS Michael Horovitz: 'I thought I would just write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, and scribble magic lines from my real mind...writing which brands "bomb" the most obscene word, as it represents the most obscene impulse in our civilisation. Public feeling is inevitably aroused by work that speaks out loud and clear against cruel, violent, public obscenities very few can really believe in.' Ted Hughes: 'Poetry is beginning to represent, as an ambassador, something far greater than itself...The idea of global unity is not new, but the absolute necessity of it has only just arrived, like a sudden radical alteration of the sun, and we shall have to adapt or disappear. If the nations are ever to make a working synthesis of their ferocious contradictions, the plan will be created in spirit before it can be formulated or accepted in political fact. And it is in poetry that we can refresh our hope that such a unity is occupying people's imaginations everywhere, since poetry is the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential.' Can we still be convinced that poetry can have this sort of power? Can the poet and the poem speak directly to the reader as thought, not just as experience, and as incitement to positive action, not just as thought? Does present-day poetry need a different language, different outlets, now the great poetry reading sessions of the Beat poets (in halls seating 6,000, or in the open air - in cities, not just in folk festival fields) are over? Are we more influenced by song lyrics, from Joan Baez to Pulp and Radiohead? Is poetry too private? The message from the 60s poets is still relevant. 'Created in spirit before accepted as political fact': that's exactly the way, and perhaps the only way, that peace can be got and held. Does poetry have a role in this? Can it? Should it? If so.... |
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