Poetry in War: As Hope and Memory, for Ukraine

Upon the outbreak of World War I, a flurry of poetry came forth. Shaken by the events unfolding, poets took up their pens as soldiers took up their guns. Sara Teasdale’s “Spring in War-Time” was written in 1917 and beautifully captures the deep sadness and questioning of disastrous ruin during times of renewal.

The poem begins:

I feel the spring far off, far off,

The faint, far scent of bud and leaf—

Oh, how can spring take heart to come

To a world in grief,

Deep grief?

The sun turns north, the days grow long,

Later the evening star grows bright—

How can the daylight linger on

For men to fight,

Still fight?

Why is it that poetry and art are the natural human responses to pain, sudden change, and conflict? Perhaps, it is in poetry we can try and grasp at unimaginable suffering, atrocities, and the futility of destruction. When there are no words to describe tragedy and frustration, poetry functions as a prism, refracting that which cannot be expressed directly.

History proves this in many ways, as outbreaks of war and destruction have long been met with creation. The rupture of everyday life and the displacement of the norm are already deeply painful, and only made worse by the loss of life, created homes, and places of pride.

Widad Nabi, poet and activist, fled to Germany from Syria in 2015 following the 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Forcibly uprooted from her home, she had to face the challenging realities of so many refugees. Reflection on her situation culminated in powerful poetry, serving both as a protest of cruelty against the Syrian people and a questioning of humanity distorted in war.

From her “Soldiers Are Sleepless Prey”:

Do the coarse fingers

of soldiers who are fighting wars

touch their children’s soft hands?

Did they ever know tenderness?

Were soldiers who are fighting wars

born soft-skinned babies

with a refined laughter?

Did their mothers bathe them

with hot water and laurel soap

and smilingly comb their hair?

Did they play with their fathers

the game of war and the soldier who defends his country?

                                                     Translated by Ali Znaidi, from Arabic

Nabi described her experiences as a refugee trying to navigate an unfamiliar country, saying she was “met with the unpoetic and the non-literary, the callous face of bureaucracy”. Perhaps it is the softening that poetry provides that serves as a sort of comfort, a way of coping against harshness.

Peaceful life is poetic and soft: the way flowers bloom forth in the spring, the laughter of a child picked up by their parent, the quiet recognition in a smile. War and destruction obstruct these beauties, and the systems set to help those in need often do not take the pause necessary to see hope, they create sharp lines and sharp realities. In this way, poets create space to see that which is gentle, even if irrevocably painful, and with such humanity comes hope.

Beyond coping and confrontation, poetry is a facilitator of collective memory. Even in times of peace, the poetic heritage of many cultures has long prospered and documented the private and public hopes, fears, and daily wonderings of those living at the time. Poetry written in times of conflict can serve as a repository for collective trauma, documenting that which history books do not include.

Arguably of urgent importance, documented collective memory does not just serve as a remembrance or a memorial, it also allows the preservation of truth. Specifically, truth of experience. In the “Age of Misinformation”, poetry functions as a powerful combatant tool; through poetry, the raw honesty of a lived experience is expressed, countering claims from state-controlled media or misinformation campaigns.

The war in Ukraine is currently spotlighted in front of the world. As news of the violence and displacement spread, and continues to spread, poetry will prove useful to this end. As Charlotte Shevchenko Knight puts it, “the preservation of collective memory is vital to Ukraine’s survival, and what we are witnessing in many ways its destruction”.

Ukraine has a rich past of poets, including those who have written under former waves of oppression and conflict. Ihor Kalynets, now 83 years old, wrote secretly while imprisoned in a Soviet gulag; in his poems, his memory is retained and the undermining of his oppressors imprinted.

The 2014 outbreak of war in Crimea also inspired the creation of poetry. Serhiy Zhadan, Ukrainian poet, singer, and novelist, represented both the situation experienced by Ukrainians and the important duty of memory in his 2015 poem “Needle”.

An excerpt from “Needle”:

Someone said they shot him at a roadblock,

in the morning, a weapon in his hands, somehow by accident –

No one knew what happened.

They buried him in a mass grave (they buried them all that way).

His possessions were returned to his parents.

Nobody updated his status.

With the impetus of violence spreading in Ukraine, will poets, young and old, write? In bomb shelters, under the atmosphere of constant threat? Or on the Polish border where they await asylum? Or before heading out to fight?

 I believe they will.

No doubt exists in my mind that soon the words of poets will emerge, as it already has begun to, shedding a deeply vulnerable light upon the acts of resistance, the shattering losses, and the moments of hope lived by Ukrainians.

The situation in Ukraine is undeniably an atrocity and one that should not be forgotten, even as it begins. Through poetry, the horrors and hopes in the war will be documented. But also, those currently facing war will find, if not solace, then momentary pause the times they write, and the ability to contribute to a collective recognition of what their people have faced.

The last lines of “Needle” (continuing from the earlier excerpt) are a rather fitting echo of the role poetry must take during war. It ends:

There will come a time when some bastard

will surely write heroic poems about this.

There will come a time when some other bastard

will say this isn’t worth writing about.

And with this, the experiences of those in war remains, ubiquitously and forever, worth writing about.

Image courtesy of felixum8888 via Flickr, ©2009, some rights reserved.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.