The coffin

Christian Century, August 14, 2002 by Donald W. Baker

The coffin

"all a poet can do today is warn"--Wilfred Owen

   There's no use writing this poem.
   It will be bad.
   It will stay unpublished and unknown,
   except that, as usual, I shall read it
   to my wife and a few friends.
   I think of them on their feet,
   clapping and whistling,
   swearing never to join the Marines again.
   For this is a poem written by me against war,
   and that is how wife and friends ought to react,
   accepting the artifact for the achievement,
   ego for truth.
   Actually, little remains to be said against war.
   It's foolish, trying to add
   argument, anecdote, or emotion
   to what better poets than I
   have already written.
   And those among you not Nazis at heart
   have no need to be told.
   But by way of parenthesis,
   in this dissertation on bad poetry,
   let me give it the ring of the lecture hall,
   let me make a statement of theme:
   Nothing is worse than a war.
   Pause, for wife and friends to applaud....
   Thank you.
   Yes, that's what this poem insists,
   that nothing is worse than a war,
   though I have been repeatedly and excitedly warned,
   by professors and other experts,
   that polemic stultifies art:
   metrical brilliance, architectonical genius--
   irrelevant, once your poem engages itself.
   Too bad.
   These are ripe times
   for poems that speak against war.
   I should have enjoyed annoying them all
   by composing a good one.
   You've probably noted the virtuosity
   posturing vainly in back of this discourse.
   Lines 10, 11, and 12, for instance,
   quintuple vowel alliteration, triple internal rhyme,
   and the whole poem,
   with small neglect of intelligence,
   a tour de force,
   practically purged of metaphor--
   except in that word "purged"
   and one or two others, "ripe," line 35 above.
   Ah, me!
   The craft so long to lerne,
   wasting itself on a poem so engage.
   Dear wife, dear friend, dear reader:
   this poem, already too long,
   raises, like war, a tough technical problem:
   how, successful or not, to stop it.
   A last line should click into place,
   someone has said, like the lid of a coffin.
   But there's no point in wasting technique
   on a poem dead from the start.
   So I'll let you end it, dear people.
   Abandon your minds, for once, to imagination.
   Imagine I've stopped.
   Imagine I'm stepping aside
   to let the professors rise and rebut.
   Many things, they will tell you, including this poem,
   are worse than a war.
   And who knows?
   We're all rational, liberal here.
   They may be right.
   But now, before hearing them,
   why don't you test your technical skill?
   Ready?
   Begin.
   Imagine the coffin.
   Imagine the lid.
   Imagine the click.

MY LONGTIME colleague, Don Baker, now retired to Cape Cod, is a fine poet and the best reader of poetry I have ever heard. As an army flier in World War II and an eloquent opponent of the war in Vietnam, he thought and wrote a lot about war. He knew that mall-town professors of English don't affect national policies, but he also knew he had to speak out on what he believed. He recognized that it is a hopeless cliche to note that war is a terrible thing, but he also recognized that, somehow, much of the world doesn't seem to have understood. So we have to keep saying it. I first heard this poem a long time ago, but I can still remember the silence in the room at the end. I wish the poem seemed out of date.

--William C. Placher, professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College in Indiana