Today’s Poem: War is Kind

Stephen Crane’s fading

Howard Pyle, The Battle of Nashville, 1906 (Minnesota State Capitol)

War is Kind

by Stephen Crane

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. 
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky 
And the affrighted steed ran on alone, 
Do not weep. 
War is kind. 

      Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, 
      Little souls who thirst for fight, 
      These men were born to drill and die. 
      The unexplained glory flies above them, 
      Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom — 
      A field where a thousand corpses lie. 

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind. 
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches, 
Raged at his breast, gulped and died, 
Do not weep. 
War is kind. 

      Swift, blazing flag of the regiment, 
      Eagle with crest of red and gold, 
      These men were born to drill and die. 
      Point for them the virtue of slaughter, 
      Make plain to them the excellence of killing 
      And a field where a thousand corpses lie. 

Mother whose heart hung humble as a button 
On the bright splendid shroud of your son, 
Do not weep. 
War is kind.

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I intended to note the fading of Stephen Crane (1871–1900), his general disappearance from reading lists and popular memory — but as I thought about it, I realized what I was noticing may be nothing more than the fading of his 1895 novel, The Red Badge of Courage. And that once-standard of American literature, a typical summer-reading assignment in middle school, may have been crossed off simply because of the cultural decline of the once-recognized category of the boy reader (a topic I took up last winter in an essay called “Christmas and the Boy Reader.”)

But then there may be other reasons. We’ve probably lost the pathos of Stephen Crane’s death at age 28, and we’ve certainly set aside any need to defend the new realism emerging at the end of the 19th century. His first novel, the 1893 Maggie: Girl of the Streets, gained an audience only after Crane’s later success, but his short stories — “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and especially “The Open Boat” — were once widely anthologized. And now not so much.

His poetry, as well. Crane was never thought a major poet, but the strange title poem of his 1899 collection, “War is Kind,” was often reprinted. It is, I think, an indigestible bit of verse: a granite fragment that will not be reduced to any easy reading

Stephen Crane in 1896 (Wikimedia Commons)

In stanzas addressed to three women — who have lost, in turn, a lover, a father, and a son — the irony of calling war “kind” becomes unbearable. Written in a structured free verse, the poem repeatedly threatens to fall into a far-too-easy, far-too-simple kind of outrage at the horror of war. But Crane pulls back. Living in the aftermath of the Civil War, he keeps the complex irony of “the bright splendid shroud.”

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