2015.11.11 痛苦的最锋利的獠牙

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‘Misery’s Sharpest Fang’: Protesting War in Poetry
A rediscovered Shelley poem highlights how little has changed in warfare over the last 200 years.

By Kathy Gilsinan

British troops in Mesopotamia, circa 1917 (Library of Congress / Wikimedia)
NOVEMBER 11, 2015
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In 1811, a college student decided to protest war by writing poetry. Britain was fighting Napoleonic France at the time, and the 18-year-old Oxford student mourned the carnage, waste, and poverty he saw as the result, while “cold advisers of yet colder kings” seemed insensitive to these consequences and, moreover, kept their power amid the destruction. He published an anti-war verse, as well as an essay on “the necessity of atheism.” His work got him expelled from Oxford.

The student was the English Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley, and all copies of his protest verse were thought to be lost—perhaps destroyed by a tutor—for nearly two centuries. But on Tuesday night, just before Britain observed Remembrance Day to honor soldiers killed in battle and the United States commemorated Veterans Day in recognition of its armed forces, the poem was posted on the Internet for the first time. It was Oxford’s own Bodleian Library, which acquired Shelley’s lost work after it resurfaced from a private collection in 2006, that published the poem; the resulting visits promptly crashed the library’s server.


Here’s part of Shelley’s 200-year-old message:

Destruction marks thee! o’er the bloodstain’d heath
Is faintly borne the stifled wail of death;
Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die
In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie.
The sternly wise, the mildly good, have sped
To the unfruitful mansions of the dead.
Whilst fell Ambition, o’er the wasted plain
Triumphant guides his car—the ensanguin’d rein
Glory directs; fierce brooding o’er the scene,
With hatred glance, with dire unbending mien
Fell Despotism sits by the red glare
Of discord’s torch, kindling the flames of war.

[...]

Ye cold advisers of yet colder kings,
To whose fell breast no passion virtue brings
Who scheme, regardless of the poor man’s pang,
Who coolly sharpen misery’s sharpest fang,
Yourselves secure. Your’s is the power to breathe
O’er all the world the infectious blast of death,
To snatch at fame, to reap red murder’s spoil,
Receive the injured with a courtier’s smile
Make a tired nation bless the oppressor’s name
And for injustice snatch the meed of fame.

A century after Shelley wrote this, a similar protest, in the same form, came from another British poet, while his country was again engaged in battle. This time it was Rudyard Kipling, and the context was Britain’s World War I campaign in Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq, which then as now served as a battlefield for foreign powers. The subject—the target, really—was the leaders who sent soldiers to die there, and Kipling, like Shelley, conveyed a bitter despair that those leaders would keep their comfortable jobs even so.

They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?

Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide—
Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?

Another century later, the United States marks its appreciation of veterans as its leaders slowly escalate yet another conflict, under a leader who promised to end two wars. And again, those who order war seem largely insulated from its consequences, in both a physical and a political sense.


In his Atlantic cover story earlier this year, in which he noted the gulf between “today’s stateside America and its always-at-war expeditionary troops,” James Fallows picked up the theme of “those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going.” The country is different, the wars are different, but Shelley and Kipling would have recognized the decisions and the people—those who “thrust for high employments as of old.” Fallows described this dynamic in the modern context:

It is striking how rare accountability has been for our modern wars. Hillary Clinton paid a price for her vote to authorize the Iraq War, since that is what gave the barely known Barack Obama an opening to run against her in 2008. George W. Bush, who, like most ex-presidents, has grown more popular the longer he’s been out of office, would perhaps be playing a more visible role in public and political life if not for the overhang of Iraq. But those two are the exceptions. Most other public figures, from Dick Cheney and Colin Powell on down, have put Iraq behind them. In part this is because of the Obama administration’s decision from the start to “look forward, not back” about why things had gone so badly wrong with America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But such willed amnesia would have been harder if more Americans had felt affected by the wars’ outcome. For our generals, our politicians, and most of our citizenry, there is almost no accountability or personal consequence for military failure. This is a dangerous development—and one whose dangers multiply the longer it persists.

The point, in 19th-century England as well as 21st-century America, is the enormous and tragic difference between picking a battle and actually having to fight one.

Kathy Gilsinan is a St. Louis-based contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her book, The Helpers: Profiles From the Front Lines of the Pandemic, comes out in March 2022.



痛苦的最锋利的獠牙"。在诗歌中抗议战争
一首被重新发现的雪莱的诗强调了在过去200年里战争的变化是多么的小。

凯西-吉尔西南报道

美索不达米亚的英国军队，约1917年（美国国会图书馆/维基媒体）
2015年11月11日

1811年，一名大学生决定通过写诗来抗议战争。当时英国正在与拿破仑时期的法国作战，这位18岁的牛津大学学生对他所看到的大屠杀、浪费和贫困表示哀悼，而 "更冷酷的国王的冷酷顾问 "似乎对这些后果不闻不问，而且还在破坏中保持他们的权力。他发表了一首反战诗，以及一篇关于 "无神论的必要性 "的文章。他的作品使他被牛津大学开除。

这个学生是英国浪漫主义诗人珀西-比希-雪莱，他的抗议诗篇的所有副本被认为已经丢失--也许是被导师销毁了近两个世纪之久。但在周二晚上，就在英国纪念日向阵亡士兵致敬和美国纪念退伍军人节以表彰其武装部队之前，这首诗首次被张贴在互联网上。牛津大学的博德雷恩图书馆在2006年从私人收藏中重新出现后获得了雪莱的失落作品，并发表了这首诗；由此产生的访问量迅速使图书馆的服务器崩溃。


以下是雪莱200年前的部分信息。

毁灭标志着你！在血迹斑斑的草地上
隐隐约约地传来死亡的哀号。
数以百万计的人被迫战斗，要么战斗要么死亡
在战争的红色祭坛上躺着残缺不全的一堆。
严明的智者，温和的善者，都已奔赴
到了死人的不结果实的宅院。
而野心倒下的人，在荒芜的平原上
胜利的引导他的车----------的缰绳
荣耀的指引；猛烈的凝视着这场景。
带着仇恨的目光，带着可怕的不屈的神情
堕落的专制主义坐在红色的强光下
不和谐的火炬，点燃了战争的火焰。

[...]

你们是更冷酷的国王的冷酷顾问。
堕落的胸膛没有美德带来的激情
谋划着，不顾穷人的痛苦。
他们冷酷地磨砺着苦难最锋利的獠牙。
你自己是安全的。你的力量是呼吸
在整个世界上吹响死亡的号角。
夺取名声，收获红色谋杀的战利品。
以臣子的微笑接待受伤的人
让一个疲惫的民族祝福压迫者的名字
并为不公正的行为抢夺名声。

在雪莱写下这段话的一个世纪后，另一位英国诗人以同样的形式提出了类似的抗议，当时他的国家又一次陷入了战火。这一次是鲁德亚德-吉卜林，背景是英国在美索不达米亚的第一次世界大战，也就是今天的伊拉克，当时和现在一样是外国势力的战场。主题--目标，真的--是那些派士兵到那里去送死的领导人，而吉卜林，像雪莱一样，表达了一种痛苦的绝望，即这些领导人即使这样也会保持他们舒适的工作。

他们将不会回到我们身边，那些被冷酷地杀害的强者们
在看到日复一日被拒绝的帮助时。
而是那些在他们的痛苦中为他们指点迷津的人。
难道他们太强壮，太有智慧，不能放走？

昼夜分明时，我们的死者不会回到我们身边。
夕阳下的铁栅栏也不会回来。
但那些在死时争论不休的游手好闲的人。
他们会不会像以前一样去做高尚的工作？

难道我们只能威胁和愤怒一个小时吗？
当风暴结束时，我们会发现
他们是多么轻巧而迅速地回到了权力的身边
靠着他们这种人的宠爱和谋划？

又过了一个世纪，当美国领导人在一个承诺结束两场战争的领导人的领导下，慢慢升级另一场冲突时，美国对退伍军人表示感谢。同样，那些下令发动战争的人似乎在很大程度上与战争的后果无关，无论是在物质上还是政治上。


詹姆斯-法洛斯（James Fallows）在今年早些时候的《大西洋》杂志封面故事中指出了 "今天的美国本土和其始终处于战争状态的远征军之间的鸿沟"，他提到了 "那些渴望参战的人，只要有人参战 "这一主题。国家不同了，战争也不同了，但雪莱和吉卜林会认识到这些决定和人--那些 "像以前一样努力争取高薪工作的人"。法洛斯在现代背景下描述了这种动态。

令人震惊的是，我们的现代战争中的问责制是多么的罕见。希拉里-克林顿为她授权伊拉克战争的投票付出了代价，因为这让几乎不为人知的巴拉克-奥巴马有机会在2008年与她竞选。乔治-W-布什和大多数前总统一样，离任时间越长越受欢迎，如果不是因为伊拉克问题的悬而未决，他也许会在公共和政治生活中发挥更明显的作用。但这两位是例外。其他大多数公众人物，从迪克-切尼和科林-鲍威尔开始，都已将伊拉克问题抛诸脑后。部分原因是奥巴马政府从一开始就决定 "向前看，而不是向后看"，了解美国在伊拉克和阿富汗的战争中为什么会出现如此严重的问题。但是，如果更多的美国人感到受到战争结果的影响，这种意志上的失忆会更难。对我们的将军、政客和大多数公民来说，对军事失败几乎没有任何责任或个人后果。这是一个危险的发展--它持续的时间越长，其危险性就越大。

在19世纪的英国和21世纪的美国，问题的关键在于选择一场战斗和真正不得不打一场战斗之间巨大而悲惨的差异。

凯西-吉尔西南是《大西洋》杂志驻圣路易斯的特约作家。她的书《帮助者》。来自大流行病前线的简介》将于2022年3月出版。