The Second World War brought about a major power shift. The world’s power center moved from Europe to the United States of America. For almost ten centuries Europe had remained the centre of the world. But in 1945, with the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, as if by the effect of the tremor of the blasts, the reigns slipped from the hands of Europe and were quickly grabbed by the United States. The United Nations Organizations which was formed to develop an international understanding among nations through which peace and harmony could be maintained, could not serve its purpose well. Instead it became a puppet of the United States of America.
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1980s, the world became unipolar with the United States of America assuming the role of a super power dictating other countries in all matters of political, strategic, economic and development issues directly or through agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. England joined the United States as its junior partner and participated in several military operations in the name of “Allied Forces” in the Middle East. One after the other the leaders of countries like Palestine, Iraq, Libya and Tunisia were liquidated in the name of democracy and peace and wars were thrust upon them. Now it is more than clear that Iraq was attacked in the name of destroying the non-existent weapons of Mass Destruction. The American interest, particularly in Petroleum, was the main reason behind such military actions. The British forces too, were deployed in the name of upholding democracy in these troubled countries. Thousands of British officers and soldiers were deployed in these actions.
British forces were engaged in Afghanistan for nearly thirteen years. During this period many officers and soldiers of the British forces were wounded, many died and those who fortunately returned home in one piece had bruised souls and blood-stained memories. In addition to the forces engaged in the war, there were thousands back home who also suffered worrying about their kith and kin serving in the forces.
Andrew Motion, who was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009 AD, saw this suffering through the accounts of battle field told to him by the officers and soldiers who returned from the battlefield and whom he met. He could feel the pathos of not only the soldiers and officers who were deployed in Afghanistan but of those also who were left behind waiting and worrying about them. Andrew Motion was convinced that such wars were futile and a wastage of human energy and intellect.
The collection of poems titled Peace Talks by Andrew Motion is another addition to the sequence begun in Laurels and Donkeys. In Laurels and Donkeys also the poet had talked of similar feelings. He talks of the futility of warfare and the human pathos caused by the mindless violence it involves. The book is divided into two parts: “My Own Blue Eye” and “Laurels and Donkeys”. The book begins with an epigraph from Ethics which roughly translates as “Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” This is precisely what Andrew Motion attempts in his poetry. There are pictures of pathos in his poems but frequently he turns to Nature and its quiet benedictions which provide solace with their cool serenity. He presents in these poems the pathetic aftermath of warfare through reminiscences, brief descriptions and subtle understatements. The blurb of the book Peace Talks (2015) mentions this with perfect clarity, ” …Motion also depicts the ravages of modern warfare through reported speech, redacted documents and vivid evocations of place , his plain understatement bringing the magnitude of war home to our shores.”
The poems in this collection have a simplicity that is bare and forthright. Images come in a sequence and halt with sudden full stops in the middle of a stanza. The rhythm of the verse resounds like the sound of the boots of an army troop marching. A war changes many things . Andrew Motion says that it changes the meaning of many ordinary and commonplace words:
Bare facts and staggering multitudes: what hope , what possible hope left for language with finish? Light. Knock. Road. Engine. Rail. Truck. Cold. Night. Whatever these words meant, they no longer mean.( 79)
In a poem titled ” A Tile From Hiroshima” the poet conjures a whole series of heart-rending images like paintings in an art exhibition depicting the gory scenes after the dropping of the nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. The pathos is very nakedly portrayed in a lucid prosaic narration:
No longer
Men women and children walking towards you
But the skin slithering from their hands and faces
But burn – prints of metal buckles and suspenders
But eye sockets empty because eyes have melted. (87)
The second section of the book ” Peace Talks” has many poems about 20th and 21st century wars. Some of these poems are based on found text , or conversations, and thus lack the musicality and rhythm of the more conventional lyric poems which are there in the first part of the book. However, the poems in the second part of the book are more straight forward, plain and this very fact gives them the power they attain.
Andrew Motion tries to find refuge in the world of nature. He turns to nature and imparts a new meaning to it. The human trace in the natural world is at the centre of Motion’s thought. In the poem titled ” The Death of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine” , Motion writes:
In my final estimation
The mountain looked very
Beautiful […]
I can think of no better way to explain
Why they chose to stay.(20 )
George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were lost in the snowy hills. They could not be recovered. The poet says that perhaps they decided to stay in the lap of nature and decided not to return to the conflict-ridden world. In the poetry of Andrew Motion nature is a permanent presence as opposed to the human beings who are transient , whose questions of identity and the self are also transient. He writes , ” So far as I can tell / nothing changed when he went.”
The publishers of the book Peace Talks mention some of the prominent features of the poems published in the book. The specialty that is highlighted in the note on this book is the importance of memory in these poems. They are like poems of remembrance in which an elegiac note is clearly discernable:
These poems are moving and measured, delicate and clear-eyed, and bear witness to the futility of war and the suffering of those left behind. Elsewhere we find biographies in miniature, dreams and visions, family histories, which in their range of forms and voices consider questions of identity, and character. These are poems of remembrance in which Motion’s war poems, all in their own way elegies, find a natural partner. Peace Talks is a wise and compassionate work.
The process of writing these poems is much different from traditional ways in which the poet starts composing as soon as he is inspired by some ‘divine spark’ and pours out his feelings with a certain degree of spontaneity. The poet believes that writing about the trauma of war would not be authentic if one did not have the first hand experience of the battlefield. He wishes to visit the front but is not able to do so due to state policy. However, he is able to visit a camp in which soldiers who had actually fought in the battle are staying. He talks to them and uses their experiences as a journalist would do for his reports, to write poems. He is conscious of their contribution and admits that all the compositions he has been able to do are a product of the joint effort of the narrators and him. In an interview he makes a statement to this effect:
The main reason for choosing to base that poem on interviews was the same as shapes several other poems in the collection—poems that could all be described as being in some sense “found.” Which is to say: even the most well intentioned of us, writing about conflicts we’ve not been directly involved in, in which we haven’t worn a uniform, are likely to get into difficulties. The poems are bound to fall short of the experience they describe, and often parade the sensitivity of the author rather than concentrating on the subject. I thought one of the ways around this difficulty might be to include as much material voiced by the subject as I could, and treat it in such a way that I could make it both theirs and mine. A Collaboration. I’m not terribly bothered by the idea of “mineness” in these found poems. ( http://hopkinsreview.jhu.edu/archive/an-interview-with-andrew-motion/)
The poet succeeds in capturing the experiences because of his sympathy with the victims of war irrespective of their nationality. The poem titled “One Tourniquet” is a moving account of the suffering of an Afghan child who stood on a land mine and whose both feet were blown off. The boy was screaming. The medical staff attending on him said that they were issued only one tourniquet for a victim but here was a child who needed two since both of his legs had to be amputated. The pathos comes live in these lines:
He was conscious at first,
Screaming,
and I thought
what a mess.
All in a bit of field.
None of the other kids cried,
they’re all quite sort of tough.
Very tough kids in fact.
Definitely.
At the time
we were issued with only one tourniquet each.(110)
It traumatizes even the lady staff nursing the child to an extent that she is at a loss with her language and is not able to spell out her dismay with what she had undergone. The suffering child is not the only one who suffers but even those who see him suffer are traumatized. The pathos of having no means to treat a wounded child comes live in the poem. Andrew Motion himself mentioned this poem in an interview to Hopkins Review and described what he felt when he interviewed that lady nurse who treated that child:
There’s also a little poem you may remember which is narrated by a woman I talked to, a medical orderly, who’d attended to a young Afghan boy who’d had his legs blown off when he trod on a land mine. She was clearly traumatized by this, and kept coming back to it in her conversation—without, in a sense, having anything to say about it. I found it very moving as I listened to her, but when I looked through the script of our conversation I found it even more compelling. I thought that if I could write well about it, I would be able to make a poem out of almost nothing. A nothing that was everything. And that’s what I tried to do. I wanted to write a poem showing in a sympathetic way that she was bereft of language to cope with the things she’d been through. There’s a bit in the poem, as you may remember, when she says they eventually took this little boy to an American camp where they saved his life. All she had to say about that was, with her eyes full of tears, “So yeah. Brilliant.” The whole world of suffering was somehow in that. I thought if I could present it right, then people would be able to see. That was the challenge. It brought to a climax lots of the thoughts I previously had about combining my own arrangements, my own words, my own editing, with the languages of other people.( http://hopkinsreview.jhu.edu/archive/an-interview-with-andrew-motion/ accessed on 12-11-2018)
War is madness. One may link it with patriotism or national pride but the truth is that war has never led to any solution. In the post globalization era it is a big industry which feeds the superpower and supports its allies countries whose economy depends more or less on their arms industry. It is a means to capture natural resources and exercise dominance over other nations. Unfortunately the twenty first century has seen a rise of narrow nationalism all over the world. The rulers take pride in glorifying the national past as well as uniqueness of their identity. This is not good for humanity. Andrew Motion attempts to shock the sensibility of the readers by his poems and also some stylistic features of his poems. His poem ” Finis” is a case in example:
Not to go mad, or to go mad and understand madness
to gaze steadily on the world with the eyes of Lazarus
Lager. Barracks.Bunks. Kapos.Musselmans.Chimney.
The mind cannot skip the air and mingles with smoke. (79)
These lines strike the reader with sensations which shock him like strokes of hammer as he reads the single word sentences in the third line of the extract. Such lines composed of a series of single word sentences occur in every stanza of the poem. Lager, which is pale beer, barracks where the soldiers stay, Bunks ,small narrow shelves meant for soldiers to sleep, Kapos, who are prisoners of war given the duty to supervise the forced work given to the prisoners and chimney which emits smoke into the air form a series of images which create an atmosphere of gloom, grief, suffering and helplessness. This rises to the mind which the poet says ‘cannot skip the air and mingles with the smoke’. In a situation like this ‘to go mad or not to go mad’ seems to be a rhetorical question which cannot be answered. In the madness of war, one has hardly any choice. Whether one wishes to be a part of war or not, it is imposed over him. Lazarus is the name of a saint who was resurrected by Jesus four days after his death. This miracle is mentioned in Gospel, Book of John. In a war what sort of resurrection is possible? So, one gazes steadily at the world with dismay.
The poem “Critical Care” is about the treatment of the wounded soldiers. In this poem the poet attempts to reproduce the voices he hears in a critical care ward. The voices of those who are wounded, the doctors, nurses, other people who are attending on the wounded are, as if, reproduced by the poet verbatim:
Jesus- Stay still-Stay fucking still-
Stay with us – Put Morphine on it-
Don’t touch it – Don’t touch it-
We’ve got to get him now-
We’ve got to get him now- (104)
Andrew Motion talks of this style as his attempt to use the Keatsian concept of Negative Capability, wherein the author attempts to remain away from the object of appreciation. The narration in the form of direct speech reproduced as it is makes it possible. The poet presents what he witnesses as a photographic depiction of reality observed by him. In an interview to Hopkins Review Andrew Motion mentions this:
That’s always been my ideal, even before I started to evolve this strategy to approach it. It’s the quality that Keats loves: negative capability. I see what I’m trying to do in these poems as a version of negative capability.
Andrew Motion arrives at the stage of negating his personality in many of his poems but his understanding of war as a huge human waste is reflected in all his poems. He expressed a great relief when he hung his robe of Poet Laureate in 2009 and decided to go to the United States. Peace Talks is used as a title in which the phrase ‘Talks’ is not a noun but a verb. In his poems Peace talks and reinforces the futility of warfare.
Works cited
Motion,Andrew.Peace Talks.London:Faber&Faber Ltd.2015
https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571325474-peace-talks.html accessed on 12-11-2018
http://hopkinsreview.jhu.edu/archive/an-interview-with-andrew-motion/ accessed on 12-11-2018
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