Dictionary.com says there is no such word as 'uncommemorated', which I find funny.Quote:
Originally Posted by ShoutGrace
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Dictionary.com says there is no such word as 'uncommemorated', which I find funny.Quote:
Originally Posted by ShoutGrace
I think there used to be such a word but nobody bothered to write down anything about it. It's buried in an unmarked sentence somewhere.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shanna
:lol: :lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
So do you agree, Shanna? With my thought, that is.Quote:
Dictionary.com says there is no such word as 'uncommemorated', which I find funny.
There lies the difference between the two incidents described in the poem, and perhaps the purpose of the juxtaposition - that in the first, there are people around who ensure that the burning man was:
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul's tranquility.
Whereas in the second incident, there's no one. The Pole bled to death alone, unremembered, uncommemorated, nobody prayed for his soul and his body lay there for years afterwards, gathering soot. PL, in her first or second post about this poem, said somewhere that nothing's changed, in all these years. But I think the poet's point is that it has changed. Its grown worse.
ktd222, do I have this right? In this poem Hecht doesn’t care about the Nazi soldier? The fact that he has portrayed him as behaving with almost incomprehensible, unfathomable cruelty should not be taken as any indication that, in this particular poem (which Hecht has dedicated to Hannah Arendt), he is at all concerned with his behaviour? Is the soldier in any way responsible for his actions? Is he merely a victim of Nazi ideology, just like the people he buries alive or shoots?
Shout Grace,
You agree with ktd222’s comments (at least the ones you quoted). You also “don't see the Nazi soldier as part of what Hecht is trying to convey in the poem”. My own explanation for those last four lines appears to be different from yours (I think – I’m not really sure what you are saying). I think that there are no prayers or incense because there is no loving God. At the risk of offering more trite, maudlin and melodramatic bathos that only serves to demonstrate my desperate need for psychiatric treatment (an ad hominem comment that our reliable mods appear to have missed), I’ll quote Elie Wiesel’s Night:
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my Faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
Elie Wiesel Night
Obviously, Hecht isn’t simply saying that all the evil in the world is the result of one lone Nazi soldier - but surely you can’t believe that the poet ignores or even exonerates him? Of course it’s not about blaming an individual soldier – Hecht doesn’t individualise him, but to say that “the Nazi soldier” is not a “part of what Hecht is trying to convey in the poem” is rather extreme, wouldn’t you say?
I think we've all keyed on one of the poetic elements in use in this poem: passive voice. In this way, Hecht is able to focus our attention on the vivid horror in detail about what the Jews had to grow through, and at the same time, exclude the perpetrator from this act, as far as 'face time' and our attention is concerned. At first reading I also saw Nazis associated with these torturings being carring out on the Jews, but after further re-readings I found the Nazi(edit) purposefully absent from the poem. I obviously can't identify(emotionally) with a boot, or luger, or eye, but I can definitley identify with human beings.
I think that it would be. I more than likely misrelated my thoughts. I was saying that in my reading of the poem, the fact that the divine intervention did not occur, that no 'saving' interference burst through and onto the scene, and the author's reiteration of that fact, are what affected me most deeply.Quote:
Originally Posted by Unnamable
As it relates to the author's intent, right? Meaning that both Hecht (implicitly), and Wiesel (explicitly), declared the absence (or disproof?) of God in these two works?Quote:
Originally Posted by Unnameable
---EDIT--- Oh, are you saying that the 'prayers and incense' constitutes the act of divine interference that never took place?
I think that I do agree with that. I think that the author is 'calling out' both the acts and the lack of providence. At least more so than the soldier.Quote:
Yes, the thrust of this poem is not based on the concerns about the Nazi soldier.
Yes, the thrust of this poem is not based on the concerns about the Nazi soldier.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
Moving the poem to the present page.Quote:
More Light! More Light!
For Heinrich Blucher and Hannah Arendt
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
"I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime."
Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.
And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul's tranquility.
We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.
Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Luger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.
Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.
No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Luger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.
No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
-Anthony Hecht
This is the first time I come across this poem so without any prior impressions: I find this poem somewhat detached but not lacking commitment or emotional depth. It makes me feel as if I am looking at some photos or watching those events through some camera lens; seeing only where camera is directed (the glove, the lugger, the boot, the chin, blistered legs...). Of course, there is someone holding that camera and my view of the scenes are limited with their directions.
Even though as a 'viewer', we can only see the things Hecht is pointing at, I don't think that he is putting the words into the reader's mouth either. I keep thinking that if I was watching this scene, this is how I would have described them had I been asked to be 'objective' (I am not claiming poetic grandiose here, which I have none, but simply saying that, in my opinion, the poet achieves to describe what he sees, without resorting to colourful adjectives etc). In the light of this description, I feel it is up to me, as a reader, to decide how I feel about all this and take a stand if necessary.
I agree with ktd that the change between the two scenes is very striking and one of the most noteworthy things in the poem, in my opinion. However, Hecht's purposeful detachment, while not lacking emotion, gets the first prize, I believe.
I agree with this. Also the nice fitting glove suggests the efficiency of the Nazi.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
Cheap values like love or honoring your mother or father or congratulating someone for a rite of passage? If you consider those cheap, I wonder what your core values are. They are trite becuase they have been deflated of individuality, not because they are cheap.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shanna
ktd, I have to agree with Unnamable here. The Nazi soldier is part of the drama. But you know you had me thinking about the ritual aspect to the drama you brought up earlier. I'm beginning to agree. The drama has a feeling of a choreographed ritual. In a religious ritual, say like the conversion of bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ every Sunday morning, the power behind the ritual is the Godhead itself. In Hecht's little drama, the "god in the machine" if you will, the power behind the ritual, is not really the Nazi soldier, but the Luger. And so the image of the Luger is paramount to that of the soldier.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
I'm beginning to really like your understanding of what's transpiring as ritual.
Since it's become an issue, I thought I'd quote my earlier response to KTD's initial mention of the disembodied nazi (I think the comments got lost in an overly long post in which I tried to respond to too much at once :lol: ):
Whether you buy this argument or not I think it points to one reason for the minimalist description of the Nazi. Hecht doesn't want it to be an individual with a face who we can direct our hatred against. He's making it clear that the Nazi could be anyone who could wear a glove and boots. I think KTD is partly right in that this poem is not concerned with one individual Nazi soldier. It is, however, very much concened with Nazis (not chimps from Glasgow :D).Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
Virg--I think in your response to Shanna you've hit on what makes the "trite" phrases of this poem work. What I tried to argue earlier (at too long length?) was that it is not the individual phrase, but the context of the phrase that makes it "trite." In this poem these phrases are being individualized. They are brought to bear in the context of two situations where they represent the sorts of "core values" you describe. They are reinvested with the individuality and meaning that makes them significant rather than maudlin.Quote:
Cheap values like love or honoring your mother or father or congratulating someone for a rite of passage? If you consider those cheap, I wonder what your core values are. They are trite becuase they have been deflated of individuality, not because they are cheap.
To which question is ‘yes’ a reply? You can play with semantics all you want but there is no doubt in my mind that Hecht is bothered by Nazis and I take the poem’s title to be significant. No one appears to have mentioned/ considered the title yet.Quote:
Originally Posted by ktd222
If you know some History, you will know that Weimar was considered the birthplace of Humanism. Goethe’s dying words (and I don’t want to get into a debate about whether or not these actually were his dying words; Hecht has used them as if they were) are a plea for enlightened humanism but in this poem, there is no “light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill”. The poem insistently excludes the possibility of the moral light of either God or Humanism:
“Not light from the shrine at Weimar”
“Nor light from heaven”
“No light, no light in the blue Polish eye”
“And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.”
The light of humanism is not only denied but also replaced by physical and moral darkness. That this appalling event takes place near Weimar makes it all the more terrible in Hecht's eyes. The Nazis held rallies in the National Theatre at Weimar as early as the mid 1920s.
I’m saying that there is no loving God – neither in the poem nor in my view of things. The world we inhabit is, as the comment from Kent in King Lear goes, “cheerless, dark and deadly.”Quote:
Originally Posted by “Shout Grace”