It provokes the usual war-story reactions of passive, useless, silent grief, pity, a sense of hopelessness in the face of the wasted life and the knowledge that for every one of the millions who died there is a story like this one. I note that every one of the five stanzas ends with a line about death, regardless of the subject matter of the preceding eight lines. In The Sugarbag Years, an oral history of New Zealand's experience in the Great Depression, there is a story about a young man who went through medical school during the Depression sleeping in people's basements. He graduated, went off to the war and was killed. For some reason I have chosen this particular story to touch me, possibly because I can understand the struggle of studying in such conditions and the wasted academic effort resulting. But that does not make me immune to other, similar stories. I suppose you get used to it eventually.
I don't get Ted Hughes. Never have. Probably never will. Six Young Men is a poem about a photo of - yes - six young men relaxing together on a Sunday not long before they all went off to war and got killed. At the time I thought it was horrific, but remembering it now, it just seems melodramatic. One thing I do note in my memory is that the poem made no mention of sacrifice or heroism, which is refreshing, although I didn't really notice it at the time.
The main thing I take from the poem is that people die and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. This is unanswerable, of course, but there must have been more to it than that. I'm not going to look it up and find out. This poem didn't turn me on then and I doubt that it'll turn me on now.
1 comment:
the reason why it didn't mention anything about sacrifice and heroics is because he's not behind war, he's actually writing about the senseless deaths in war. or the senselessness of war itself. he starts the poem by describing a photo of young men, in a way creating them. making them more realistic. he abruptly says at the end of that "six months after this picture they all were dead." and he procedes to do that at the end of each paragraph. he makes you more in touch with the characters, because in that way, you too might see the senselessness in war.
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