Well, I'm going to come on again and read one or two straighter
and perhaps more intense poems.
I began writing some years ago that whole thing
of dramatic monologues.
I'd wanted to be able to project myself
into a number of attitudes very far from my own in particular
as absorbed by the idea of what one might call for want
of a better phrase fascist psychology,
and particularly Nazi psychology.
And I wrote several poems which were monologues spoken
by Nazis, in which the object was
to avoid if possible pulling any punches
or introducing any liberal comment to it.
In other words, I wanted to produce a poem
that if listened to by the Nazis would strike him
as far as possible as a faithful expression
of his own attitudes.
The object of this being to enable the reader
to make his own judgments.
This technique of course, was I suppose the main one behind all
of Browning's poetry, and it's been extensively used
since by people like Lowell, [? O'Hara ?]
and many other poets.
This poem is called "The Disciple," very long one
and it's about a man who worked in a concentration camp.
I wore a black band.
I thought they would crucify him in jail.
The word broke from his agony in the cells.
I worked transfigured by incarnate will.
When he walked out alive I knew that he was our savior.
I remember his burned face sharp in a nimbus
of blood light against the taut flags
when he spoke to our mass lifted hands at the rally.
And knelt chilled by the bare marble
before the fed flame for his dead martyrs.
I knew in my court heart we must all repeat his suffering.
I wept the oath.
I was dedicated to the stern commitments of a snapped order.
I swore to purify my blood of evil.
I accepted the fires of hell on Earth.
Each uniform I wore was as my flesh.
Its coarse fibers were burned by evil, stripped bare
of dust of evil, encrusted with excrement of evil.
I believe the evil and the stench of the bean soup
we drank.
The bags of charcoal I unheaped for the furnaces.
The pit of my soul.
When I raked the ovens or even touched a spade I felt sick.
I vomited when I saw the pyramid of their bodies
for the first time.
When a crying child stretched out her arms to me
I was moved to sweep her clear of the doors.
I was not a strong willed man.
I fought to do the hard thing well but the evil within me
fought back.
I lay awake hearing them scream.
I committed the sin of pity for evil
every time I touch their brittle limbs.
In my dreams I was watching my infant sister crawled
on by stick insects with human faces.
Gas was like incense, it drowned corruption.
In the wind on in cylinders to be raised and used,
it became a presence more real than his.
Above my bed his tense eyes looked down
while I slept and forgave or condemned.
His enormous words on the air proved that he still
existed and surely cared.
But I held a scarred image close to my heart,
which showed him massacred in the streets
by the blood of evil.
I walked in the foul heresy of admiring his weakness more
than his rise to power.
But I groped my way back.
The laceration of conscience began to ease,
and the toil of confronting the evil and others
began to confront the evil in me.
I was helped.
I confessed my doubts.
I endured the controlling speech and hands of those
more sure in their faith than I.
And by grace I recovered my sanity
and was purified and body and spirit.
Behind a locked door in a blaze of light on a plain slate
floor,
my schism was healed by the salt of fear.
I have no stain left to scour.
I cut into your wire a saved man.
I'm freed from sin by the mechanism of holy justice.
I heard of his death as if the meaning of life
had been for a moment suspended but felt no grief.
I have shed my heavy cross and abide my end
in peace of spirit.
A nasty man.