Private Fire by Babcock Matthew James;

Author:Babcock, Matthew James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61149-023-7
Publisher: University of Delaware Press

THE STATE OF NATURE

“War never won me over,” Francis opens chapter 4, “The War,” in his autobiography. “The waving of flags and the blowing of bugles never dazzled or seduced me” (Trouble with Francis, 32). Francis’s staunch anti-war stance derived in part from his personal commitment to pacifism and his lifelong pilgrimage toward promoting concinnity between humanity and surrounding biospheric elements. Throughout his poetry and prose, Francis consistently pursues his belief that to flourish in one’s natural settings one must also oppose the politically motivated destruction of wars waged against the earth’s human populations and against the progress and rejuvenation of the earth’s ecosystemic processes. Francis’s twin devotions to the preservation of life and landscape cast him as an American writer who saw no division between the political and the ecological, a position with which a generation of ecocritics would come to agree.5 Jonathan Bate, in The Song of the Earth, acknowledges this viewpoint. “The dilemma of Green reading,” Bate argues, “is that it must, yet it cannot, separate ecopoetics from ecopolitics” (Bate, 266). As someone who lived through World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam, Francis sidestepped the decades of international conflict and armed himself for combat with pencil and typewriter. Opposed to violence, he hummed the battle hymn of the hummingbird, joined the ranks of the soldier beetle, pledged his allegiance to peace, and aimed his most explosive poems at the wastefulness of twentieth-century warfare.

Writers and critics have often highlighted Francis’s gift for deftness and subtlety, but in his most volatile anti-war poetry, he exchanges deft subtlety for deafening subversion. “Bruised by American foreign policy,” the speaker in “Hogwash” laments, “What shall I soothe me, what defend me with / But a handful of clean unmistakable words” (7–9). The experimental post-Vietnam “Poppycock” crows, “ballyhoo from Madison A / ballyhoo from Washington DC / red-white-and-blue poppycock / Hurrah!” (21–24). The single-sentence satire “I Am Not Flattered” critiques those who tolerate wars from a distance: “I am not flattered that a bell / About the neck of a peaceful cow / Should be more damning to my ear / Than all the bombing planes of hell / Merely because the bell is near, / Merely because the bell is now, / The bombs too far away to hear” (1–7). Perhaps autobiographical, “The Articles of War” recounts an anonymous twentieth-century soldier’s simplistic desire to “resign from the Army,” a question which swells his barracks with derisive laughter (9, 13). “Somebody aghast at history,” the speaker finishes, “may try / Resigning from the human race / . . . Haunted by the hawk’s eyes in the human face / Somebody—could it be I?” (16–20). “Light Casualties” satirizes the sanitized politically correct phrase it takes for its title: “Did the guns whisper when they spoke / That day? Did death tiptoe his business?” (7–8). The fragmented and experimental “Blood Stains” lifts a home remedy for “how to remove” blood from household fabrics and applies it to the global need

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