captain sword

One of the first explicit antiwar poems – by which I mean it was subtitled an antiwar poem – is Leigh Hunt’s Captain Sword and Captain Pen.

Here’s a bit from the battle:

Down go bodies, snap burst eyes;
Trod on the ground are tender cries:
Brains are dash’d against plashing ears;
Hah! no time has battle for tears;
Cursing helps better – crusing, that goes
Slipping through friends’ blood, athirst for foes’.
What have soldiers with tears to do?
We, who this mad-house must now go through,
This twenty-fold Bedlam, let loose with knives –
To murder, and stab, and grow liquid with lives –
Gasping, staring, treading red mud,
Till the drunkenness’ self makes us stead of blood
[ O! shrink not thou, reader! Thy part’s in it, too;
Has not thye praise made the thing they go through,
Shocking to read of, but noble to do?]”

It is a long poem. In the remarks on war in prose that prefaced it, Hunt puts this sensible judgment, against which there is no appeal, in his first paragraph:

“The object of this poem is to show the horrors of war, the false ideas of power produced in the minds of its leaders, and, by inference, the unfitness of those leaders for the government of the world.”

Hunt's preface goes on to speak of hte "ladies handkerchief' that is put over the horrors of war, decently veiling it from civilian eyes. He is against it. So is LI. This is what the Congress voted to fund.



Take a deep breath, people, and remember though: this is part of the Democratic party's overall strategy. As Michael Tomasky, a hero to so many of us for his insight into framing the issues, put it in his article about seemingly giving President Bush what he wanted in the funding bill: Cave-in, or smart politics?

That's the only question that counts. We won. We secretly kept Bush from calling us weak. And is he ever pissed! We are amazing, really. A big pat on the back. Now, on to electing Hillary in 2008.