At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux1
I walked where in their talking graves
An d shirts of earth five thousand lay,
Whe n history with ten feasts of fire
Ha d eaten the red air away.
5 I am Christ's boy, I cried, I bear
In iron hands the bread, the fishes.2
I hang with honey and with rose
This tidy wreck of all your wishes.
On your geometry of sleep
10 Th e chestnut and the fir-tree fly,
And lavender and marguerite
Forge with their flowers an English sky.
Turn now towards the belling town
Your jigsaws of impossible bone,
15 An d rising read your rank of snow
Accurate as death upon the stone.
About your easy heads my prayers
I said with syllables of clay.
What gift, I asked, shall I bring now
20 Before I weep and walk away?
1. Near the coast of northwest France, the scene in June 1944. of heavy fighting following the Normandy landings 2. Cf. Matthew 14.19?20.
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246 0 / VOICE S FRO M WORL D WA R I I Take, they replied, the oak and laurel.3 Take our fortune of tears and live Like a spendthrift lover. All we ask Is the one gift you cannot give. 1957 Armistice Day I stood with three comrades in Parliament Square1 November her freights of grey fire unloading, No sound from the city upon the pale air Above us the sea-bell eleven exploding. 5 Dow n by the bands and the burning memorial Beats all the brass in a royal array, But at our end we are not so sartorial: Ou t of (as usual) the rig of the day. ioStarry is wearing a split pusser's flannel2 Rubbed, as he is, by the regular tide; Oxo the ducks3 that he ditched in the Channel In June, 1940 (when he was inside). isKitty recalls his abandon-ship station, Running below at the Ol d Man's salute4 An d (with a deck-watch) going down for duration' Wearing his oppo's pneumonia-suit.6 2 0Comrades, for you the black captain of carracks7 Writes in Whitehall8 his appalling decisions, But as was often the case in the Barracks Several ratings are not at Divisions.9 Into my eyes the stiff sea-horses stare, Over my head sweeps the sun like a swan. As I stand alone in Parliament Square A cold bugle calls, and the city moves on. 195 7
3. Trees whose leaves are traditionally taken as emblems of courage and victory, respectively. 1. An annual 'Remembrance Sunday' service is held at the Cenotaph, a stone memorial to the dead of the two World Wars, in London's Parliament Square. It includes a two-minute silence after the last stroke of eleven o'clock. 2. A torn navy- issue shirt. 3. Sailor's white tunic and trousers. 4. A British naval tradition calls for the Captain (Old Man) of a sinking ship to go down saluting.
5. I.e., for the duration of the war; a phrase common during World War II. 6. Canvas suit?belonging to his friend ('opposite number')?worn while painting the ship. 7. Large merchant ships equipped for warfare. 8. London street in which stands the Admiralty (navy headquarters). 9. I.e., noncommissioned sailors are absent from church parade, the religious service on board ship.
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Nation and Language
Armies and navies, cannons and guns helped spread and consolidate British rule across vast areas of the earth's surface, but so too did the English language. Over many years, in many different parts of the world, the language of the British Empire displaced or commingled with indigenous languages. Then the twentieth century witnessed the decolonization and devolution of the British Empire, from early-century Ireland to midcentury India and Africa and the Caribbean to late-century Hong Kong. Imaginative writers from these and other regions have thus had to wrestle with questions of nation and language. Should they write stories, plays, and poems in the language and traditions of the colonizer, or should they repudiate English and employ their indigenous languages? Is English an enabling tool by which peoples of different nationalities can express their identities, or is it contaminated by a colonial history and mentality that it insidiously perpetuates? If English is chosen for imaginative writing, should it be a standardized English of the imperial center or an English inflected by contact with indigenous languages?a Creole, patois, pidgin, even a synthetic composite of a local vernacular and Standard English? Since American power has sustained the global reach of English long after the withdrawal of British colonial administrators and armies, debates over such questions have persisted in many parts of the world where English still thrives in the aftermath of a dead empire.
Having tried to subdue the Irish people for centuries, the British outlawed the use of the Irish language (or Gaelic) in Ireland, and Brian Friel explores the painful effects of the forcible displacement of Irish in his important historical play, Translations. Because of Ireland's long and bloody colonial history and the flowering there of cultural nationalism, early-twentieth-century Irish writers were already expressing a powerful ambivalence toward English as both a vital literary inheritance and the language of colonial subjugation. Recalling the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English 'wars of extermination' against the Irish, W. B. Yeats acknowledges a historical hatred of the English but then reminds himself that, as an English-language writer, 'I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak and write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate' (see his 'Introduction,' excerpted in this volume). In the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce's
