Well, there are quite a few poems
about a different kind of departure
from the ones in The Moving Target,
or if there are different kinds of departure or departure seen
in a different way.
And some of them are projected in different ways too as is
or as are these next two poems.
This again, this next poem is again
a poem in a second person is addressed to some figure.
And I think there are quite a number of things
I can say about it that will make it clearer listening
to that you'd see yourselves at once if you were reading it
off the page.
The occasion of it or the ostensible occasion of it
was the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Verdun,
which was the turning point probably of the First World
War.
The casualties on both sides were
numbered in millions, and the--
France really never recovered from the Battle of Verdun
though it's one of the only real proud things
in modern French military history.
And of course, all of the men who'd survived it
had very strong feelings about the 50th anniversary in the way
that old veterans do.
And so poem is addressed to one of these people, who was
a French peasant named Edouard.
But I mean Edouard, is deliberately
evoked also because of the Scottish ballad "Edward,
Edward," which had the whole if I may use the word again
ironic dimension to the way the poem happens,
the way it moves out of its title
and into the president's address too.
And the assumption, which is the thing
that you notice in these men who've
been through this appalling thing and come out of it
is that they regarded it very often
not as the most appalling thing that ever happened to them,
but is in some ways the most marvelous thing that
ever happened to them.
And this is one of the mysterious
and sometimes desperate things about looking
at the human animal, which includes one cell.
But anyway that's quite enough to say about this poem, which
is just called "Edouard."
Edouard, shall we leave tomorrow for Verdun again?
Shall we set out for the great days
and never be the same, never?
Time is what is left.
Shall we start this time in the spring
and they lead your cows out next week to sell at the fair,
and the brambles learn to scribble over the first field?
Edouard, shall we have gone when the leaves come out
but before the heat slows the grand marches?
Days like those, the heights and the dying at thy right
hand, sound a long horn and here the bright handles
will fog over.
Things will break and stay broken in the keeping of women.
The sheep get lost the bonds burn
uncontrolled in the darkness.
Edouard, what would you have given not to go?
Sitting last night in by the fire again,
but shall we be the same?
Tomorrow night shall we not have gone leaving
the faces of nightingales?
As you know we will live, and what never comes back
will be you and me.