Death Comes for the War Poets is a “verse tapestry” based on the work of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Own.
‘How does a human soul cope with the horror of war? Is there room for hope?”
At first glance, Death Comes for the War Poets sounds like the last thing one needs more of these days. Death and war. Amsterdam. London Bridge.
Is falling down to terrorism our new reality? It’s part of the reason Donald Trump is president. People have had enough. I stood a few yards from the vice president of the United States this week as he talked about the genocide of Christians as targets of the so-called Islamic State. The culture-wide feeling is that nowhere is safe. The fatigue with the violence is real and overwhelming.
And yet, at the Sheen Center in Manhattan, Death Comes for the War Poets is being performed as a “verse tapestry” exactly right for our times. Writer Joseph Pearce is determined to present people with hope. “You will experience a catharsis,” announced Dominican priest Peter John Cameron, O.P., the play’s producer and founder of the Blackfriars Repertory Theatre, with some confidence the night before opening night.
What is a verse tapestry? It’s taking the words of World War I poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Own and making of them the word equivalent of a ballet, says Father Cameron. Pearce worries that Christians have become too comfortable in the culture and have ceased to focus on making great art at the service of God as artists are called to.
Think right now about whatever talents you have. Do you see them as gifts? You don’t own them, Pearce emphasizes, you owe them. You owe them back to the gift giver. Seeing creation as a gift changes everything. Seeing beauty as a gift fills us with gratitude. It makes us better: wanting to reflect that beauty back to others, seeing that beauty in ourselves, too, realizing our lives are meant for greatness in things small and large. Waking up in the morning and on the front lines of battle.
Pearce, in knowing the gifts of these war poets who died in action, wants to make them more known, and in an accessible way that will make us better for it. In his own book making use of their words, he quotes from Sasoon’s “Litany of the Lost”:
In breaking of belief in human good;
In slavedom of mankind to the machine;
In havoc of hideous tyranny withstood,
And terror of atomic doom foreseen;
Deliver us from ourselves.
Chained to the wheel of progress uncontrolled;
World masterers with a foolish frightened face;
Loud speakers, leaderless and skeptic-souled;
Aeroplane angels, crashed from glory and grace;
Deliver us from ourselves.
In blood and bone contentiousness of nations,
And commerce’s competitive re-start,
Armed with our marvelous monkey innovation,
And unregenerate still in head and heart;
Deliver us from ourselves.
It’s hard not to think of the screens we sometimes seem enslaved to now, too. ISIS recruits that way. Of course. Because as we live our lives hitting refresh, looking for the next new thing, sharing every moment for digital infinity or Snapchat’s moments, we’re so obviously longing for something more. A connectedness has been lost that is regained when we look at the talents of those who came before and how their insights can help us now.
In Sassoon’s “A Prayer in Old Age,” he writes:
Bring no expectance of heaven unearned
No hunger for beatitude to be
Until the lesson of my life is learned
Through what Thou didst for me.
Bring no assurance of redeemed rest
No intimation of awarded grace
Only contrition, cleavingly confessed
To Thy forgiving face.
I ask one world of everlasting loss
In all I am, that other world to win.
My nothingness must kneel below Thy Cross.
There let new life begin.
“Having lived through two fratricidal world wars, fighting courageously in the first, and having become utterly disillusioned with the lifeless coldness of modern secular ‘progress,’ with which the world with devildom had gone dark,” Pearce writes, at the point of those last verses, Sasson had “finally found the peace beyond all understanding,” which “was the only authentic escape from the wasteland of worldliness.”
Whatever the circumstances, use the gifts!
Months back, one of the New York tabloids lashed out at the typical reaction – particularly from politicians – to terror attacks and other seemingly senseless violence. “Thoughts and prayers.” Statements express it. Tweets do. But what does it mean? How does it help? Pearce’s effort is a meditation on just this. Even in the middle of our actions in the world – which for some may include participation in war – we can’t survive without recognizing and rejoicing in the more. Believe it or not, we need people who do. They serve something other than ego because they see the source of everything great, every gift.
Pearce’s presentation, not a play but a playing with contemplative words at man’s harshest and darkest, is a celebration of humility. Whatever the circumstances, use the gifts! Show the beauty of life – and see clear through to hope — even amid clouds and suffocating darkness and death. Especially then.
READ MORE:
“Julius Caesar” in the Park Gets Trumped
World War I: American Isolation Turned to Intervention
Art & Identity Politics in Aida
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and an editor-at-large of National Review. Sign up for her weekly NRI newsletter here.