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 The New
Antiquity
CLASSICAL PRESENCES IN
IRISH POETRY AFTER 1960
The Answering Voice

FLORENCE IMPENS
The New Antiquity

Series editor
Matthew S. Santirocco
New York, NY, USA
Over the past two decades, our understanding of the ancient world has
been dramatically transformed as classicists and other scholars of antiquity
have moved beyond traditional geographical, chronological, and method-
ological boundaries to focuson new topics and different questions. By
­providing a major venue for further cutting-edge scholarship, The New
Antiquity will reflect, shape, and participate in this transformation. The
series will focus on the literature, history, thought, and material culture of
not only ancient Europe, but also Egypt, the Middle East, and the Far
East. With an emphasis also on the reception of the ancient world into
later periods, The New Antiquity will reveal how present concerns can be
brilliantly illuminated by this new understanding of the past.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/series/14756
 Florence Impens

Classical Presences in
Irish Poetry after 1960
The Answering Voice
Florence Impens
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK

The New Antiquity

ISBN 978-3-319-68230-3    ISBN 978-3-319-68231-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68231-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954966

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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To the memory of my father,
Claude Impens
 Acknowledgements

With the obvious exception of quotations, every word in this book is

mine, but The Answering Voice could not have existed without the guid-
ance and support of many—both people and institutions.
Funding received in 2010 in the form of a short-term MARBL
Fellowship, and of a grant from the Trinity Foundation, made it possible
for me to consult archival material at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript,
Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory University.
At Trinity College, Dublin, where the book originated as a doctoral
dissertation many years ago, members of the School of English and the
Department of French provided regular words of encouragement and
advice which have shaped my scholarship and this monograph: most of all,
Gerald Dawe, my PhD supervisor, and most generous mentor.
At the University of Notre Dame, the Keough-Naughton Institute for
Irish Studies, where I was fortunate to spend an academic year as NEH-­
Keough Fellow, gave me the space, resources, and time necessary to
rework the dissertation into a fuller manuscript in the best possible condi-
tions. I am very grateful for the warm welcome I received there, notably
from Brian Ó Conchubhair and Tara MacLeod, both of whom made me
feel at home thousands of miles away from it. Vona Groarke and James
I. Porter also provided essential feedback on the book on the occasion of
the NEH Seminar, and I would like to thank them both for their insightful
comments.
At the University of Manchester, where the manuscript was finally com-
pleted, I feel very lucky to have found supportive colleagues in English,
American Studies and Creative Writing, and at the John Rylands Research

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Institute. The support of the postdoctoral community there has seen me

through the last revisions.
Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family, in particular my
mother Isabelle and Dermot Kelly, for their love and support.
Quotations from Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman
and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), ‘Virtual Syntax,
Actual Dreams’ in PN Review 29:4 (2003): 25–28, and from ‘The Latin
Lesson’ in New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005) are repro-
duced by permission of the author and Carcanet Press Limited. Excerpts
from unpublished drafts of Michael Longley’s ‘A Gloss on Lycidas’,
‘Lena’, and ‘The Maid’, as well as of an unpublished letter from Michael
Longley to Donald Wormell dated 10 November 1969 are reproduced by
kind permission of the author and Lucas Alexander Whitley Ltd © Michael
Longley 2017. Excerpts from Derek Mahon’s unpublished drafts of
Oedipus, The Bacchae, and ‘River Rhymes’ are reproduced by kind permis-
sion of the author and The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co.
Meath, Ireland.
Elements from this research project have previously appeared as ‘Writing
Ireland: Seamus Heaney, Classics and Twentieth-Century Irish Poetry’ in
Post Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry (edited by Jefferson
Holdridge and Brian Ó Conchubhair; Winston-Salem: Wake Forest
University Press, 2017) and as ‘“Here are the words you’ll have to find a
place for”: Virgilian Presences in the Work of Seamus Heaney’ in Irish
University Review 47:2 (Autumn 2017).
 Contents

1 A Brief Introduction: Rationale and Objectives   1

2 The Classics in Modern Irish Poetry  11

3 Seamus Heaney: ‘Lethe in Moyola’  45

4 Michael Longley: The ‘Lapsed Classicist’  85

5 Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland: Marginal Perspectives 127

6 A Classical ‘Revival’? 169

Further Reading 205

Index 211

ix
 CHAPTER 1

A Brief Introduction: Rationale

and Objectives

In 1976, W.B. Stanford, Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College,

Dublin, concluded Ireland and the Classical Tradition, his seminal study
of classical presences on the island from the fifth to the early twentieth
centuries, on the belief that the classics were losing their appeal among
artists in the contemporary world, and gradually disappearing from the
Irish cultural landscape. With an education increasingly centred on ‘mod-
ern’ subjects, ‘in the non-academic world’, he wrote, ‘few poets, novelists
or artists now use classical themes or images in their work, and recent
styles of art and architecture are unclassical’ (Stanford 1976, p. 246).
Looking at the literature published on the island in those years, his com-
ments certainly ring true. Writers such as Austin Clarke and Brian Coffey
were still publishing classical poems, respectively Tiresias: A Poem (1971)
and Death of Hektor (1979), but these poets were in their seventies, and in
all appearance were survivors of a generation who had used classical mate-
rial in their work, such as William Butler Yeats, Louis MacNeice, and
Patrick Kavanagh, and who were, one by one, slowly passing away. In the
work of younger poets, by contrast, Greece and Rome seemed to occupy
very little space.
Oliver Taplin’s comments in ‘Contemporary Poetry and Classics’ on
similar changes in the relationship of English poets with the material reso-
nate in a Northern Irish and Irish context:1

None of the major English poets born between, say, 1915 and 1935, seems
to have shown a strong awareness of any relationship to ‘the classical

© The Author(s) 2018 1

F. Impens, Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960,
The New Antiquity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68231-0_1
2 F. IMPENS

t­ radition’. ( … ) This anti-classical or non-classical ‘generation’ (in so far as

my periodisation is valid) may be the product of little more than individual
coincidence. But these poets were educated in what was to prove the final
era in which Classics held an automatic and often obligatory elite status in
schools in England. This death-grip produced a revulsion in many of those
subjected to it. It may also be relevant that this ‘generation’ was formed at
the time when F.R. Leavis was at his most influential in his attempt to clear
the pedestal of all idols, including the classical, so that he could place the
Great Tradition there in sole majesty.
(Taplin 2002, pp. 9–10)

While the previous generation—poets such as Wynstan Auden, Cecil Day-­

Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender—born in England and
Ireland at the beginning of the century, had received a classical education in
English public schools and at Oxford, and, often, assumed that their reader-
ship shared a similar cultural background that would enable them to under-
stand the classical allusions peppering their work, the following generation
reacted against the classics and their elitist role in education.2 For writers
such as Philip Larkin, poetry, if it was to remain relevant in the 1950s and
later, needed to get rid of the elitism conveyed by (classical) allusions, and
on the contrary, focus on resources available to the majority of readers:

My objection to the use in new poems of properties or personae from older

poems is not a moral one, but simply because they do not work, either
because I have not read the poems in which they appear, or because I have
read them and think of them as part of that poem and not a property to be
dragged into a new poem as a substitute for securing the effect that is
desired. I admit this argument could be pushed to absurd lengths, when a
poet could not refer to anything that his readers may not have seen (such as
snow, for instance), but in fact poets write for people with the same
­background and experiences as themselves, which might be taken as a com-
pelling argument in support of provincialism.
(Larkin 1982, no page number)

Larkin’s argument is not specifically directed at the use of classical mate-

rial. For the poet, intertextuality and literary allusions of all kinds were to
be avoided: not only did they presume that readers would recognise the
source, which was unlikely, but they also distracted them from the new
text. Larkin’s unequivocal dismissal of the ‘myth kitty’, and his anti-­
classical attitude certainly resonated with Stanford’s concerns about the
 A BRIEF INTRODUCTION: RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES 3

decreasing importance of the classics in modern education and in the arts

(Larkin 1983, p. 69).3
The classical ‘revival’ in poetry and other art forms that seized the
Anglophone world, including Ireland, in the late twentieth century, and
continues to be felt in the first decades of the new millennium, might look
all the more surprising in this context. In the last sixty years, a plethora of
poems, novels, plays, and films (sometimes loosely) based on Greek and
Roman material has seen the light of day, and more importantly, has found
a significant receptive audience. Stephen Harrison in his introduction to
Living Classics (2009) comments on the ‘interesting but comprehensible
paradox’ of the popularity of classical re-appropriations in contemporary
Anglophone writing, of which he traces the roots back to the mid-­
twentieth century, when the classics became the object of a ‘vigorous pro-
cess of outreach’ and democratisation (Harrison 2009, pp. 1–2). To
compensate for the decline in the number of people learning the subject
at school, proponents of the classics actively sought ways to make the
material available to an audience less and less likely to read the texts in
their original language, notably with new non-specialist publications.
‘Enterprising publishers [in the postwar world thus] moved into the pro-
duction of readable and inexpensive versions of classical texts for the gen-
eral public’ (Harrison 2009, p. 2), giving rise to well-known series such as
Penguin Classics and Oxford University Press World’s Classics. Most
importantly, those versions ‘had claims to be literary works in their own
right rather than mere aids to deciphering the originals’; in brief, they
were stand-alone versions destined to be enjoyed by the reader (Harrison
2009, p. 3). One did not need to know Latin nor Greek any longer, nor
have much money, to have access to a relatively cheap and readable version
of say, Homer or Virgil. Slowly, the classics were being severed from their
association with the upper social classes.
While the wide commercialisation of new domesticising versions of the
classics was instrumental in making the material more widely available and
popular, in the context of the British Isles, changes in the education sys-
tem, both in England and in Northern Ireland, too played a role in the
democratisation of the classics, which Stanford had not foreseen. Those
changes introduced a new generation of writers, born between 1935 and
1955, to Greek and Latin literatures in a less elitist context, and indirectly
enabled them to dissociate those texts from their social connotations, and
to rewrite them more freely later on in their creative careers. If those
changes were primarily taking place in the United Kingdom, they would
4 F. IMPENS

have a ripple effect on Irish poetry too, North and South, under the influ-
ence of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. Mentioning Douglas Dunn,
David Constantine, Carol Ann Duffy, and Seamus Heaney, Oliver Taplin
pointedly remarks that

One thing that most of this ‘generation’ of poets have in common is that
they did not go to famous Public Schools. On the other hand most did take
Latin, at least as far as O-Level: the difference is that the subject was not
imposed with such heavy constraint or expectation as it had been on previ-
ous generations. The period between the education reforms of 1944 and the
1960s was a kind of golden age for selective grammar schools and for inde-
pendent ‘Direct Grant’ schools, during which both catered for the bright
and motivated children who had been selected by the reviled ‘11 Plus’
examination. In rivalry with the more privileged Public Schools, and often
in superiority to them, Latin and ancient history, and to some extent Greek,
were taken seriously. Even though still generally taught by unenlightened
traditional methods, they seem to have introduced future poets to a resource
which enriched rather than alienated them.
(Taplin 2002, p. 10)

Classics had become a more ‘democratic’ subject, and as such, Greek and
Latin literatures became part of the cultural background of one more gen-
eration of writers, who would rewrite them without necessarily feeling
caught in the tension between modern society and the elitist connotations
which these writings had conveyed before.
In many cases, those writers would be at the forefront of the wave of clas-
sical rewritings which were to characterise much of literature in English in
the late twentieth century. Re-appropriating Greek and Latin texts, they
highlighted issues such as class, colonial structures, and gender representa-
tions. For Harrison, ‘many of the most striking engagements with classical
texts since 1960 in Anglophone poetry have come from writers who are in
some sense on the periphery of the “traditional” English metropolitan cul-
tural world’ (Harrison 2009, p. 4). The marginality of those writers is to be
understood broadly, and brings together people ‘such as Tony Harrison,
from the northern English working class, Margaret Atwood, Canadian fem-
inist, and Derek Walcott, from St Lucia in the Caribbean’, to whom the
scholar later adds (among many others) ‘Harrison’s fellow northerner Ted
Hughes’, ‘African writer Wole Soyinka’, ‘working-class Scots poet Liz
Lochhead’, as well as ‘Irish writers [dealing] with the distress and issues of
the political Northern Irish “Troubles”’ (Harrison 2009, pp. 3–5).
 A BRIEF INTRODUCTION: RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES 5

This generation of poets will be the starting point, and to some extent,
the main focus of The Answering Voice in an Irish context, as it is one
whose relationship with the classics has been unique, both unprecedented
and never repeated. The last generation to widely learn Classics (at least
Latin) at school, it was also the first one to benefit from the democratisa-
tion of education in the post-war world.4 For the first and last time, many
writers from different social backgrounds had direct knowledge of classical
texts and narratives, which they could and would rewrite in their work.
If this generational dimension links British, Northern Irish, and Irish
poets in their shared use of classical material, the present study also shows
that the imaginative return to the classics in Irish poetry, from both North
and South, is also in many ways distinctive. While the classics have helped
Irish poets address broad themes such as contemporary violence and gen-
der issues, also reflected in adaptations by their contemporaries across the
Irish Sea, such Irish rewritings are informed by local circumstances specific
to the poets’ home ground. For Eavan Boland, for instance, classical
rewritings have long been a means to interrogate and challenge the mar-
ginal and passive positions occupied by women in Western art and society
in broad terms, as well as very often within a narrower Irish cultural con-
text. Many of her classical poems in the 1990s, focusing on the figure of
Ceres, revise the trope of Mother Ireland, and show its limitations. The
multiplication of rewritings of Greek and Latin literatures in the late 1980s
and early 1990s in response to the ‘Troubles’ also readily comes to mind—
notably in works by Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. Pressured to
respond to the Northern Irish conflict, many Irish writers found in the
classics texts that enabled them to do so while avoiding partisanship, as
distant metaphors of the situation.
In addition to those local inflections on broader uses, the postcolonial
and religious nature of Ireland has uniquely informed the poets’ relation-
ship with, and use of, the material. For Irish poets with a Catholic back-
ground, the classics, and Latin literature in particular, have at times
become secular and mythic alternatives to religious narratives. Heaney, for
instance, would increasingly, after the mid-1980s, draw from Virgil’s
Aeneid, VI and its description of the underworld in elegies for his father,
as well as in poems looking back at his life in Derry. Most importantly, the
classics have helped Irish poets renegotiate literary identities outside the
Irish/British binary—as markers of European identity challenging post-­
colonial definitions of Irish writing, and exemplifying new modes of relat-
ing to European literatures not mediated by Britain.
6 F. IMPENS

In its European argument, The Answering Voice is indebted to

W.B. Stanford’s and Brian Arkins’ work. Stanford’s Ireland and the
Classical Tradition was motivated by the realisation that despite its con-
tinuous importance over many centuries, the influence of the classics in
Ireland had been neglected in favour of studies focusing on the country’s
Gaelic and Christian identity, and on the nature of its relationship with
Britain. Bringing Ireland’s classical heritage to the fore was on the con-
trary a way to redress the perception of Irish culture(s) in a wider European
context, and to move beyond the fruitless debate around Ireland’s cultural
identity, which in many ways had been crystallised in the ‘Troubles’ that
were raging when Stanford was researching his subject. As he noted in the
epilogue, ‘in this way the classics served as an antidote to chauvinism, big-
otry and racialism’ (Stanford 1976, p. 245). This argument also informed
Arkins’ Hellenising Ireland: Greek and Roman Themes in Modern Irish
Literature (2005) some forty years later. Focusing on Anglophone Ireland
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Arkins sees in the classical pres-
ence in Irish literature evidence to support the claim that Ireland’s classical
past places it within a European context. As he remarks in his introduc-
tion, his is a reading of classical re-appropriation as a sign of postcolonial-
ism as well as an ideological decision to displace the context in which Irish
literature is perceived towards Europe:

To investigate how Irish writers appropriate Greco-Roman material is to

largely sideline the perennial question of Ireland’s relationship with Britain.
At one level, to espouse Greco-Roman material locates Ireland firmly in the
mainstream of Western civilisation with countries like France and Germany
that have long looked to Greece and Rome, and might now be further seen
as one cultural manifestation of Ireland’s membership of the European
Union. (…) At another level, the fact that Irish writers use Greek and
Roman material ensures that they occupy the same cultural space as many
British authors. Educated in a largely British way, their appropriation of
Greco-Roman themes brings to mind Caliban’s dictum to Prospero and
Miranda in the Tempest: ‘You gave me language, and my profit on’t/Is, I
know how to curse’.
(Arkins 2005, p. 7)

He reiterates in his conclusion, ‘(…) when Hellenised by such an array of

truly magnificent writers, Ireland can take its place at the centre of a pan-­
European enterprise that places the varied ideas of the Greco-Roman
world at the centre of its thought’ (Arkins 2005, p. 219).
 A BRIEF INTRODUCTION: RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES 7

Stanford’s and Arkins’ work might be criticised, on the one hand, for
not reflecting enough postcolonial and gender studies, which have revealed
the imperialist and patriarchal ideologies underlying the modern recep-
tions of the classics, and Ireland’s position in the context of the contem-
porary popularity of Greece and Rome in the Anglophone world; and, on
the other, for placing so much emphasis on the debatable existence of
what Arkins calls a ‘pan-European enterprise’, which ultimately fails to
account for the multiplicity of European (national) identities. But both
essays, I believe, are nonetheless essential in creating a framework for sub-
sequent studies of the classical ‘revival’ in Irish literature: Stanford, by
pointing out the search in Ireland for a literary material that could belong
to diverse, and often conflicting, cultural groups, especially during the
‘Troubles’, and Arkins, by underlining the need to reposition Irish litera-
ture in a European context.
Keeping in mind a double framework, The Answering Voice therefore
sets out to trace classical presences in the work of Irish poets who started
to publish in the late 1960s, which it reads both within an Irish context,
and against the wider background of British and Anglophone poetry.
Starting with a generation of young Irish poets experimenting with the
classics to find their voice, it shows how Greek and Latin literatures gradu-
ally became central in their work, up to the beginning of the ‘classical
revival’ of the mid-1980s. Briefly discussing dramatic adaptations and the
role of commissions, it focuses mostly on poetic rewritings, and outlines
the contours of a ‘movement’ accompanying a poetic transition in Ireland
from a postcolonial to a transnational model, whereby the classics, first
used to negotiate the historical and literary dichotomies between Ireland
and Britain, later became poetic manifestations of the poets’ engagements
with European and other foreign literatures.
At its heart are four poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek
Mahon, and Eavan Boland, who represent the diversity of classical rewrit-
ings in Irish poetry in the last sixty years. Seamus Heaney and Michael
Longley are indeed the two poets one might most commonly associate
with classical intertextuality in the period under study—Heaney notably
with his Virgilian poems, Longley with his Homeric rewritings. The analy-
sis of their classical output reveals the existence of parallels in the timing of
their classical poems and in the latter’s relationship with their sources. It
also highlights common ground in their respective uses of classical mate-
rial to address issues such as the ‘Troubles’ and global conflict, personal
grief and relationships, as well as the position of the Irish literary space
8 F. IMPENS

within the world republic of letters. On the other hand, Derek Mahon and
Eavan Boland represent alternative voices in the conversation that has
developed around the classics in contemporary Irish poetry. Their work, if
not making use of Greek and Latin material to the same extent as their
fellow poets, highlights the existence of other representations of such
sources, and the intricacies of the classical ‘revival’. Mahon and Boland
have in the course of their careers to date re-appropriated the same poets
as Heaney and Longley, among whom Ovid, Virgil, and Homer, but often
with other intentions, opening up the range of classical uses. Producing
very different bodies of work, they have rewritten the classics from what
they believe has been their marginal position in the Irish poetic land-
scape—Mahon as a poet in self-imposed exile, Boland as a woman poet
faced with a male-dominated national tradition.
When Irish literature experienced a classical ‘revival’ in the 1980s and
1990s, the four poets would contribute, each in their own way, to the
multiplication of such rewritings. Their classical work would also coincide
with, and reflect, contemporary historical and social changes. In the
North, classical rewritings accompanied the first tentative steps of the
peace process, when Irish writers tapped into the long tradition of re-­
appropriation of the classics in Western cultures. Greek and Latin litera-
tures brought together in imaginative terms the two communities in the
province, and the people on both sides of the border. But contrary to what
recent studies, with their tendency to focus on Greek drama and the
‘Troubles’, seem to suggest, the classical ‘revival’ also went beyond the
border with Northern Ireland, and coincided with a growing European
sentiment on the whole island, and with globalisation. Both Northern
Ireland (as part of the United Kingdom) and the Republic had joined the
European Union in 1973, and by the mid-1990s, the Irish economy was
beginning to develop at greater speed, helped by previous European
investments, and the existence of the European free market. Immigrants
from other European countries would also move to the island, reinforcing
the connections between the Republic, Northern Ireland, and the
Continent. In the mid-1990s, the peak of the classical ‘revival’ coincided
with the growing importance of Ireland within the European Union, and
the strengthening of Ireland’s cultural and political relationship with other
European countries. Although not prompted as such by those social and
economic changes, indirectly, the ‘revival’ accompanied and, to a certain
extent, mirrored Ireland’s further integration in Europe and in a glo-
balised world.
 A BRIEF INTRODUCTION: RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES 9

The situation has since changed. At the end of the 2010s, at the
moment of writing, the classical impetus animating Irish poetry in English
seems to be fading away. The last generation to learn Classics, who had
been at the forefront of the classical ‘revival’, is now ageing; Seamus
Heaney, one of its foremost figures, passed away in 2013. Among younger
and emerging Irish poets, few seem to be attracted to the classics. Instead
of the rewritings of Greek and Latin texts of their elders, many seem to be
producing versions of foreign (and mostly European) literatures, both past
and modern. If those observations prove to be true and hold in the future,
the legacy of the classical ‘revival’ at the turn of the new millennium will
remain of consequence. As Chap. 6, the concluding chapter of The
Answering Voice, argues, those classical rewritings have facilitated a transi-
tion towards a global Irish literature. Playing a role in the exploration and
unsettling of dichotomies in the early 1990s, they became texts that could
be used to reach out to others: the other community in the North, as well
as other Anglophone and non-Anglophone cultures in the Ireland of the
late twentieth century.

Notes
1. Although Oliver Taplin mentions Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and
Michael Longley, his article focuses mostly on English poetry, and does not
take into account what may be Irish specificities. However, considering the
existence of similarities in the education systems of England and Ireland,
and the fact that education in Northern Ireland, where Heaney, Longley,
and Mahon grew up, was modelled on England’s, his remarks resonate in
an Irish, and especially in a Northern Irish, context.
2. See Taplin 2002, pp. 7–8. As Taplin emphasises, such a periodisation needs
to be considered with extreme care, and only as providing broad guidelines
towards the understanding of a more complex reality. MacNeice, for exam-
ple, thoroughly examined his classical education, as well as the nature of his
relationship with the classics, in his work, making his inclusion in the group
rather problematic.
3. The phrase was first used by Philip Larkin in D.J. Enright (ed.), Poets of the
Nineteen-Fifties (1955), and reprinted in Larkin’s Required Writing:
Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982.
4. In the Republic of Ireland, while secondary education did not become free
until 1967, the wide availability of Classics on school curricula throughout
the country meant that many Irish poets born south of the border in the
same years were also trained at least in Latin.
10 F. IMPENS

Works Cited
Arkins, Brian, Hellenising Ireland: Greek and Roman Themes in Modern Irish
Literature. Newbridge: The Goldsmith Press, 2005.
Harrison, Stephen (ed.), Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry
in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Larkin, Philip, ‘The Art of Poetry no. 30.’ Interview with Robert Phillips. Paris
Review 84 (Summer 1982). Accessed online at http://www.theparisreview.
org/interviews/3153/the-art-of-poetry-no-30-philip-larkin, on 13 June
2017. No page number.
Larkin, Philip, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982. London: Faber,
1983.
Stanford, W.B., Ireland and the Classical Tradition. Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1976.
Taplin, Oliver, ‘Contemporary Poetry and Classics.’ T.P. Wiseman (ed.), Classics
in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002: 1–19.
 CHAPTER 2

The Classics in Modern Irish Poetry

When Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Eavan Boland
started to rewrite classical literatures and mythologies in the late 1960s,
they indirectly engaged with a long literary tradition of classical rewritings
in Ireland. As W.B. Stanford pointed out in his seminal study, Ireland and
the Classical Tradition (1976), the classical history of the island dated as
far back as the fifth century, and the work of Christian missionaries in Irish
monasteries. With the colonisation of Ireland in the sixteenth century,
however, this native classical tradition had gradually faded away to be
replaced with one modelled on England’s.
Anglo-Irish writers, writing in English mostly for the Ascendancy and
an English audience,1 rewrote the classics in the same ways as their coun-
terparts on the bigger island, and ‘in the Augustan period in Ireland’,
Stanford notes, ‘classicism was as pervasive among Anglo-Irish writers as
anywhere in the English-speaking world’ (Stanford 1976, p. 91), as can be
seen for instance in the works of Oliver Goldsmith, Jonathan Swift, George
Berkeley, and Edmund Burke. While it later remained, in the nineteenth
century, a noticeable feature of the works, notably, of Mary Tighe, Aubrey
de Vere, Oliver Gogarty, and George Moore, the representation of the
classics in Anglo-Irish literature before the end of the century seemed to
present very few differences from classical receptions in England and else-
where. As W.B. Stanford writes, the work of ‘most of the more classical
writers’ (i.e. those re-appropriating the classics) did not ‘differ widely from
what was being written in other countries’ (Stanford 1976, p. 90).

© The Author(s) 2018 11

F. Impens, Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960,
The New Antiquity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68231-0_2
12 F. IMPENS

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the nature of

Anglo-Irish literature would change, when the writers of the Celtic
Revival redefined Irish literature in English as a national literature, and
fashioned a Gaelic heritage in an Anglophone context. Anglo-Irish litera-
ture would evolve from being synonymous with the literature of the
Ascendancy to a literature addressing, and certainly claiming to repre-
sent, the descendants of the ‘native Irish’ and the Catholic population, as
well as Irish Protestants. At that moment, when Irish writers began to
emphasise their cultural identity, the classics became prime material
which could reconnect them with their broken past, and be re-appropri-
ated in a specifically Irish context. Throughout the twentieth century,
Greek and Latin literatures therefore played a central role in the redefini-
tion of Irish literature, as writers began to re-appropriate material from
those two traditions from its exclusively English re-interpretation, and to
make it their own. Their personal representation of the classics would
reveal much of their definition of Irish literature, and of their sense of the
position it occupied within Europe. These writers would pave the way for
Heaney, Longley, Mahon, and Boland, and offer them a wide range of
possibilities from which they could draw inspiration when engaging with
the classics, exemplified in this chapter by William Butler Yeats, Patrick
Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice.

1   William Butler Yeats: The Greeks,

‘The Builders of My Soul’
The history of classical receptions in Irish poetry in the first half of the
twentieth century in many ways reads like the unfinished story of compet-
ing definitions of ‘Irishness’, from the days of the Celtic Revival and the
formation of a new national literature in English, to the development of
Irish modernism in the work of exiled writers.
The classics, which Yeats called the ‘builders of my soul’ (Yeats 1955,
p. 59), and in particular the literature of ancient Greece, were central in his
project for a new national Irish literature in English: they provided para-
digms and examples which could nurture his ambitions for his country, as
a literature initially based on local folklore and mythology, written for the
people, and which had transcended geographical and temporal boundaries
to become canonical in the Western world. Yeats had no interest in Rome,
which he saw as an impoverished culture by far inferior to its Greek
 THE CLASSICS IN MODERN IRISH POETRY 13

predecessors. In ‘Letter to Michael’s Schoolmaster’, where he instructed

the latter to teach Greek but no Latin, Yeats elaborated:

The Roman people were the classic decadence, their literature form without
matter. They destroyed Milton, the French seventeenth and our own eigh-
teenth century, and our schoolmasters even to-day read Greek with Latin
eyes. Greece, could we but approach it with eyes as young as its own, might
renew our youth. (…)
(Yeats 1989, pp. 320–321)

His Hellenism echoed a shift in the representation of the classics that had
recently occurred in England and in Germany, the latter being ‘the source
of the most powerful current of Hellenism in eighteenth-century Europe,
and also of the largest and most productive body of classical scholarship in
the nineteenth century’ (Stray 1998, p. 23). As Christopher Stray explains
in Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England,
1830–1960, while Latin literature and grammar had retained their role in
the school curriculum as subjects training the future social elite in logics and
moral, the renewed interest in ancient Greece to the detriment of Rome was

the product of reactive ideologizing against what was seen as a dangerous

Gallic brew of secularism and materialism. Greece was used [in Germany
and England] to energize the construction of stable or defensive national-
ism, against what was perceived as a Latin-oriented expansionist nationalism
[in Napoleonic France]
(Stray 1998, p. 23)

in Napoleonic France. Stray elaborates:

the destabilized social and political situation in England at the end of the
eighteenth century provided a stimulus for a more anxious, more desperate
turn to the wilderness, to a remote Hellenism. (…) The shift from Rome to
Greece, from imitator to creative source, not only shifted the locus of
authority, but redefined the relation between Greece and Rome within the
ideological doublet of creation and imitation. In the Augustan period Greece
had been seen through Roman eyes; now the relationship was reversed and
Rome retrospectively devalorised. The second half of the eighteenth century
thus witnessed a turn from Augustanism and the stable social groups it cel-
ebrated, to a romantic Hellenism which went beyond Rome to Greece.
(Stray 1998, p. 18)
14 F. IMPENS

Influenced by this ideological evolution in classical reception in

England, Yeats’ uses of Greece to promote a new national literature in
Ireland are not without apparent contradictions. In a project devoted to
emphasising the independence and originality of Ireland’s culture, the
poet first of all re-appropriated the vogue for all things Greek from some-
where else—namely England—while also, and still paradoxically, shunning
Rome as a civilisation based on imitation, the very thing he himself was
doing. Dismissing the Romans, he indirectly rejected the imperialist over-
tones associated with their Empire, while not questioning the extent of
the English influence on his own way of thinking as a result of long-term
colonisation.
However, if Yeats’ representations of Greece were influenced by
England, his reading of the classics was at its most original when it ques-
tioned their association in European societies at the turn of the twentieth
century (England included) with the social, political, and economic elite
of a country. Greek literature was in his view democratic. Rooted in oral-
ity, it had achieved national status because it was not written for a minority
at the head of the nation, but on the contrary, for the ordinary people
whom it represented and addressed. It had grown from folklore without
outgrowing it.
It was on this basis that Greece could serve as a paradigm for Ireland.
Contrary to Latin literature, influenced by foreign elements and intertex-
tual by nature, Greek literature provided him with an example of a success-
ful tradition, which had flourished from indigenous oral roots. In many
essays and poems, Yeats thus proceeds to highlight the existence of paral-
lels between the two countries, suggesting that, if Ireland followed the
Greek model, it could in turn aspire to develop a strong and lasting cul-
ture, which would influence others, rather than be influenced. Although
he gently derided Standish O’Grady for enthusiastically saying that ‘a day
will come (…) when Slieve-na-mon will be more famous than the Olympus’
and wrote in A General Introduction that O’Grady ‘could delight us with
an extravagance we were too critical to share’ (Yeats 1997, p. 381), he
would nonetheless be the one to solemnly declare that

some modern poets contend that jazz and music-hall songs are the folk art
of our time, that we should mould our art upon them; we Irish poets, mod-
ern men also, reject every folk art that does not go back to Olympus.
(Yeats 1997, p. 383)
 THE CLASSICS IN MODERN IRISH POETRY 15

For Yeats, it was time for Irish writers to return to native mythological
subjects, just as their famous Greek ancestors had written the canons of
the Western world using their own folklore. In his view, Ireland was not
only a descendent of ancient Greece like any other Western country; it was
also the place in Europe that all along had been closest to Greek culture.
The peasants of Ireland could potentially understand the true essence of
the latter more than any classical scholar educated with Victorian values
would ever be able to. Under the influence of Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville,
author of La Civilisation des Celtes et celle de l’Épopée Homérique (1899),
and of his lectures on the existence of parallels between Celtic and Homeric
traditions, Yeats wrote about the kinship between both nations and cul-
tures in ‘Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye’ (Folk Tradition):

those poor countrymen and countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their

emotions, are many years nearer to that Greek old world, that set beauty
beside the fountain of things, than are our men of learning. She [Mary
Hynes] ‘had seen too much of the world’; but these old men and women,
when they tell of her, blame another and not her, and though they can be
hard, they grow as gentle as the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen
passed by on the walls.
(Yeats 1997, p. 406)

The Irish writer, going back to the roots of his culture in the rural West,
was thus in the best possible position to compose texts that would form
the future canons of Irish and, indeed, of world literature, and Yeats in
‘The Galway Plains’ was convinced that ‘one could still if one had the
genius, and had been born Irish, write for these people plays and poems
like those of Greece’ (Yeats 1976, p. 129).
His model was Homer, the bard par excellence, who had written in the
Iliad a work of popular literature for its first audience of Greek speakers,
in so far as it was based on folklore, and gave a place to popular stories in
the national culture. In Brian Arkins’ words,

(…) for Yeats, Homer functions as a specially potent model. Seeking to cre-
ate a national literature establishing Irish identity, Yeats used Homer as a
bench-mark because he ‘sings of the Greek race rather than of any particular
member of it’, and because like Lady Gregory, he produces aristocratic art
that possesses the common touch.
(Arkins 2005, p. 126)
16 F. IMPENS

According to Yeats, Ireland had already had its Homeric bard in the per-
son of Anthony Raftery (1779–1835), one of the most famous Irish-­
language poets, who had sung the beauty of country women, just like
Homer long before him. Quickly rewriting Irish literary history in the
second section of ‘The Tower’ (1928), Yeats traces a continuity between
Homer and Raftery, and himself in the present day, in a bold unifying
gesture smoothing out the divide in the emerging nation between Irish-
and English-language literatures under the aegis of the classics:

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;
Yet, now I have considered it, I find
That nothing strange; the tragedy began
With Homer that was a blind man,
And Helen had all living hearts betrayed.
O may the moon and sunlight seem
One inextricable beam,
For if I triumph I must make men mad.
(Yeats 1997, p. 97)

Referring to Raftery, the blind poet who ‘made the song’ about the ‘peas-
ant girl’ (Yeats 1997, p. 96), Yeats recreates a transnational and multilin-
gual tradition starting with Homer, and concluding with himself in the
last line of the stanza.
Elsewhere, Yeats would sing of the beauty of the Trojan princess in
many poems, in which the mythological figure becomes a metaphor of
Irish women. Early poems, such as ‘The Rose of the World’ and ‘The
Sorrow of Love’ offer a very similar treatment of this character in Greek
literature, reminiscent of the themes developed in connection with Homer
and Raftery in ‘The Tower’. Helen is depicted in both as a haughty femme
fatale at the origin of cataclysmic destruction. Compare this excerpt from
‘The Rose of the World’ (The Rose):

Who dreams that beauty passes like a dream?

For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.2
(Yeats 1997, p. 17, my emphasis)
 THE CLASSICS IN MODERN IRISH POETRY 17

with ‘The Sorrow of Love’ (The Rose):

A girl arose that had red mournful lips

And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers.
(Yeats 1997, p. 20, my emphasis)

This image of Helen as a figure of antinomies, where Love leads to Death,

and Beauty to the madness of men and a terrible war, recurs in later and
more famous poems, such as ‘A Woman Homer Sung’ (The Green Helmet),
where Helen (…) has ‘fiery blood/When I was young’ (Yeats 1997,
p. 41), and ‘No Second Troy’ (The Green Helmet), where her ‘mind’,
which ‘nobleness made simple as fire’ (Yeats 1997, p. 42), gives her an
almost primitive and elemental force.3
But the two poems also reveal how Yeats’ use of the classics would
evolve later in his career, when he became more critical of the paths mod-
ern Ireland had taken. In ‘A Woman Homer Sung’ and ‘No Second Troy’,
Helen is the incarnation of nobility and pride, a woman whose qualities
separate her from the rest of human kind. Quite often in his later work,
she becomes an unreachable ideal yet to be embodied, as in ‘Why should
not Old Men be Mad?’, published in On the Boiler. The poem opens with
a succession of vignettes illustrating sudden and surprising life changes, in
which someone falls out of an enviable accomplished position. One of
those uses a classical reference: ‘A Helen of social welfare dream/Climb
on a wagonette to scream’ (Yeats 1997, p. 165). The couplet contrasts the
ideals of beauty and nobility associated with Helen elsewhere in Yeats, and
the reality of demonstrations and public protests. The anonymous woman
(sometimes identified as Eva Gore-Booth) has fallen from her social status
when engaging in direct political activities, and the degradation of the
Greek intertext is underlined by the rhyme between ‘dream’ and ‘scream’.
For Yeats, moral nobility was not compatible with direct social activism,
and the woman was mistaken in her fight.
When Yeats’ vision for modern Ireland failed to materialise in his eyes,
Helen and ancient Greece thus remained as ideals against which contem-
porary failures could be measured. The classics were no longer used to
stress his democratic programme for Irish literature, but increasingly in a
conservative perspective differentiating the popular, now closer to the
18 F. IMPENS

vulgum pecus than to folk tradition, from the intellectual elite. In ‘Beautiful
Lofty Things’ (New Poems), the poet

looks back towards the end of his life on men and women in modern Ireland
who for him represent both beauty and simplicity—the Fenian leader John
O’Leary, his father the painter John Butler Yeats, the historian Standish
O’Grady, his patron Lady Gregory, his beloved Maud Gonne- (…).
(Arkins 1990, p. 83)

Limited to the final lines, ‘Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant
head: /All the Olympians; a thing never known again’ (Yeats 1997,
p. 158), the Greek references are nonetheless central to the poem, whose
syntax builds up a progressive tension until the climactic conclusion. With
the colon at the end of the penultimate line, the long succession of
vignettes describing each character in a symbolical situation is equated
with the final one. Yeats deifies his friends, and some of the best-known
public figures of the time, with the unexpected use of a classical image
concluding on their exceptionality, and this sudden shift distances the Irish
political and artistic leaders from the petite bourgeoisie of Ireland. In
‘Beautiful Lofty Things’, Yeats criticises his country, which he thought
had failed to respond to the ambitious vision he had nurtured for it. Only
a marginal number of people had lived up to the standards which ancient
Greece represented for the emerging nation.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Greece had been for him primarily
a means to idealise the literature and culture of his country, through mak-
ing extensive parallels between the West of Ireland and the people of
Homer, and between writers from both traditions. Greek literature had
functioned in his work as an exemplum in defence of his national literary
project. Gradually, however, as Yeats’ politics became increasingly conser-
vative, classical images would lose their democratic dimension, to illus-
trate, on the contrary, the gap between modern Ireland and the poet’s
aspirations and ambitions.

2   Patrick Kavanagh: Homer, a Parochial Poet

Like William Butler Yeats in the early 1900s, Patrick Kavanagh would
decades later use the Greeks to argue for the legitimacy of the new Irish
Anglophone literature, challenging the Victorian representation of the
 THE CLASSICS IN MODERN IRISH POETRY 19

classics to re-appropriate them in an Irish context. He too would identify

in Homer’s epics models for the modern Irish writer, and like his prede-
cessor, believe in the importance of an authentic ‘Irishness’ in Irish
writing.
But where their works differ, of course, is in their respective representa-
tions of Irish literature, and in the direction which they each wished it to
take. Kavanagh energetically challenged the project Yeats had formed for
Irish writing in the early twentieth century, and was dismissive of his
elder’s ideal Ireland. Born in County Monaghan in 1904, Kavanagh stood
against the Celtic Revival’s idealisation of the peasant and the West to
write a poetry which refused to embellish the rural world. Redressing what
he considered a simplistic and deceiving pastoral vision in his acerbic por-
trait of Patrick Maguire in ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942), Kavanagh demys-
tified the countryside, which cultural nationalists had identified as the
essential core of the nation, and touched upon subjects that were taboo in
the Ireland of de Valera, such as sexual frustrations and dysfunctional com-
munities. The focus of many of his poems was the ‘ordinary’ society of
Ireland, as in its own very different way was Yeats’, but the Monaghan
poet gave a radically different image of the nation. His people were not
those of the literati of the new artistic capital (whom he satirises in poems
such as ‘The Paddiad’), nor were they those that writers living in Dublin
or in big country houses in the West, like Lady Gregory and Yeats, had
wanted to represent. His were inspired by the peasants around whom he
had grown up in Iniskeen.
Reacting to the work of the previous generation, Kavanagh made a
point in his poetic career to write the Ireland of such people, which he felt
was too often ignored or misrepresented by educated and urban writers
disconnected from the reality of the place. A poet, in his opinion, had to
write about his local surroundings, of which he had first-hand knowledge,
and be strong enough not to imitate other voices. Only if the poet was
true to himself and to his world could his work be universal. Kavanagh’s
essay ‘Parochialism and Provincialism’ is well known. For Kavanagh, poets
had to be ‘parochial’ and not ‘provincial’ because

the provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see
until he has heard what the metropolis—towards which his eyes are
turned—has to say on the subject. This runs through all his activities. The
20 F. IMPENS

Parochial mentality on the other hand never is in any doubt about the
social and artistic validity of his parish. All great civilisations are based on
parochialism—Greek, Israelite, English. Parochialism is universal; it deals
with the fundamentals (…).
(Kavanagh 2003, p. 237)

Being a parochial poet meant refusing to adopt the literary conventions

imposed by the ‘metropolis’ only because of their origin, and on the con-
trary, coming to terms with one’s personal background, against which
literary traditions could be re-interpreted.
As Yeats used the classics as argumenta ad verecundiam, as evidence of
the validity of his vision of Irish literature, so did Kavanagh similarly reread
the Greeks to reinforce his reflection on what made authentic (Irish) writ-
ing, and his vigour lies in the daring re-appropriation and interpretation of
literary canons from his idiosyncratic perspective. Like Yeats, Kavanagh
saw in Homer the Ur-poet to imitate, the one whose epics should inspire
Irish writers to create true and lasting works of art. Homer was the paro-
chial poet par excellence.
‘On Looking into E.V. Rieu’s Homer’ illustrates Kavanagh’s ‘parochial’
rereading of both Greek and English literatures. The poem obviously
derives from ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, John Keats’
famous sonnet, in which the latter recorded his experience, as a reader, of
the Iliad, and compared his literary discovery to that of the ‘watcher of the
skies/When a new planet swims into his ken’, or that of ‘stout Cortez’
seeing for the first time the Pacific Ocean ‘upon a peak in Darien’. Like
Keats, Kavanagh reads the epic in the popular translation of his time, and
re-interprets it in his temporal and geographical setting. But while for
Keats the long poem opened up new horizons, and was an exciting journey
into an unknown literary territory, Kavanagh’s reaction to the Iliad, almost
the exact opposite of the English poet’s, centres on the reader’s emotional
identification with the Homeric heroes, in spite of his own modest rural
environment. The Iliad does not transport him onto an imaginary journey
to ‘virgin lands’, but echoes life and emotions on the farm:

It was no human weakness when you flung

Your body prostrate on a cabbage drill—
Heart-broken with Priam for Hector ravaged;
(…).
(Kavanagh 2005, p. 185)
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 Vanha mies vavahtaa kuin kuolettavan kuulan sattuessa. Horjuen
astelee hän toiseen huoneeseen ja palaa hetken kuluttua pistooli
kädessään.

Hän katsahtaa arasti ympärilleen ja istuutuu uudestaan. Hänen

vapiseva kätensä kohoaa hitaasti, hän pidättää henkeään kuin
odottaen jotakin — ja kauhea, kiduttava jännitys kuvastuu hänen
vanhoilla, kuolemankalpeilla kasvoillaan…
TURVAPAIKKA

Niinkuin hyväntahtoisen jättiläisen suojaan sulloutunut kääpiöparvi

ympäröi pikkukaupunki harmaine rakennuksineen mahtavaa
goottilaiskirkkoa. Ja aivankuin voittamattoman suojelijan turvissa oli
se seissyt vuosisatoja yhtä pienenä ja harmaana, säästyen
yhtähyvin sodilta kuin uusilta, maailmaa mullistavilta aatteiltakin, itse
tulikin näytti sitä välttävän ja milloin joku yksityinen talo paloi, siihen
rakennettiin heti toinen samanlainen — mutta ei myöskään muualle.
Tuntui siltä kuin olisi se määrätty seisomaan samanlaisena
tuomiopäivään asti.

Mutta nyt näytti tuho uhkaavan kaupunkia kauheana ja

armottomana kuin kuolema; sillä taukoamatta, säännöllisten
väliaikojen jälkeen kuuluu kaukaa pohjoisesta peloittava ääni,
lähenee, kasvaa kammottavaksi ulvahdukseksi, sitten sokaiseva
leimahdus, maata järisyttävä räjähdys ja kaikki syöksähtää
suunnattomana mustana massana ilmaan, ikäänkuin puhkeavan
tulivuoren kraaterista. Ja siinä missä äsken oli vanha, sievä talo
kukkivien hedelmäpuiden keskellä, siinä savuaa suunnaton, palavien
raunioiden reunustama, musta kuoppa. Ikäänkuin arvokkainta
vastustajaa etsien putoilevat nuo hirveät hävittäjät yhä lähempänä
kirkkoa, jonka jättiläistornit vavahtivat joka kerta kuin
kuolemantuskassa. Mutta mihin se putosikin, siinä kaikki räjähti
raunioiksi.

Eikä kukaan enää näyttänyt luottavan jättiläisen suojaan. Asukkaat

pakenivat pelottavan sekasorron ja kauhun vallassa kaikkiin suuntiin
— aivankuin hyönteiset joiden pesää hävitetään. Rikkaat kiirehtivät
pois omilla autoillaan, vaunuillaan ja vuokra-ajureilla; köyhemmät
kuljettivat kuormarattailla ja käsikärryillä lapsiaan ja
välttämättömimpiä tarpeitaan. Mutta paljon näkyi sodassa olevien
työläisten vaimoja ja leskiä, jotka eivät olleet saaneet
käsirattaitakaan, vaan pakenivat paljaine pienokaisineen niinkuin
lintuemo väijyvää metsästäjää. Pienimpiä kantaen, toisia taluttaen
laahustivat he nääntyneesti huohottaen eteenpäin ja joka kerta kun
tuo hirvittävä räjähdys sattui lähelle, lysähtivät he maahan
sydäntäsärkevästi kirkaisten — ja taas ylös ja eteenpäin kauhusta
vapisevin jaloin.

Kaikki kaupungin asukkaat pyrkivät poispäin, mutta haavoitettuja

sotavankeja kuljetettiin kuumeisella kiireellä keskikaupunkia kohden.
Niitä vietiin sairasautoilla, yksityisautoilia ja hevosilla, vieläpä
kuorma-autoillakin. Kirkon edustalle ne kaikki pysähtyivät, ja sinne
raahattiin haavoittuneet hurjalla kiireellä kuin elottomat tavaramytyt,
välittämättä heidän valituksistaan ja tuskallisista pyynnöistään. Kaikki
koettivat vain selviytyä mahdollisimman pian pois kirkon lähistöltä.

Kirkon läheisyydessä sijaitsevasta sairaalasta kannettiin

parhaillaan haavoittuneita ulos pihalle; paareilla makasi jo
parikymmentä ja vierellä seisoivat sotilaat, odottaen lähtökäskyä. He
kyyristyivät kauhusta kalpeina ja vapisevina joka kerta kun
jättiläispommin pelottava ulvonta läheni ja haavoittuneet peittivät
kasvonsa käärityillä kädentyngillään; mutta kädettömät ja ne jotka
eivät enää jaksaneet liikkua, sulkivat vain väsyneesti silmänsä eikä
heidän kelmeissä kasvoissaan kuvastunut muuta kuin kärsimys,
toivottomuus ja kuolemanväsymys. Mutta muutamat eivät näyttäneet
tuntevan tuskaa eikä pelkoa, heidän silmänsä välähtivät joka kerta
kuin salatusta riemusta ja kostonhimosta.

Odottavien sotilaiden joukosta kuului eräitä katkeria ja pelokkaita

huomautuksia:

— Ovatko ne perkeleet päässeet taas lähemmäksi?

— Ei — mutta niillä kuuluu olevan uusi tykkimalli. Jospa minä

kerran saisin…

Hänen puheensa keskeytti taas tuo pelottava vongahdus; se tuntui

lähenevän suoraan sairaalaa kohden. Muutamat sotilaat heittäytyivät
maahan, toiset kyyristyivät kuin iskua odottaen. Sitten tuntui kaikki
lentävän sirpaleiksi leimahtavasta iskusta, se paiskasi seisovat
sotilaat maahan, iskeytyi heidän korviinsa terävänä rautanaulana. Ja
kun he pökertyneinä kömpivät jaloilleen, näkivät he vain 100 m
päässä erään rakennuksen kadonneen ja viereisen talon
murskaantuneena palavan.

Sotilaat tuijottivat kauhusta tyrmistyneinä toisiinsa, voimatta sanoa

sanaakaan. Mutta vihdoin kuului joitakin raivosta ja kauhusta käheitä
ääniä:

— Oi nuo… nuo perkeleet…

— Ensikerralla voi pudota tähän.

— Tässä täytyy vielä noiden tähden…

 — Älähän nyt… Kyllä minä mielelläni teen tämän palveluksen
heille.

— Ja minä…

— Kun nyt vaan saataisiin lähteä.

Samassa vyöryi sairaalan ohitse kokonainen jono kuorma-autoja,

joissa haavoitetut tärisivät kauheasti ja moottorien jyrinästä eroitti
epäselvästi voihketta ja valituksia.

Eräs sairaalan pihalla odottavista haavoittuneista kysyi vieressä

seisovalta sotilaalta:

— Mihin meidät nyt viedään?

Kaikki lähellä olevat sotilaat katsahtivat kysyjää pahaenteisesti

välähtävin silmin ja eräs vastasi harvakseen, hillityllä vahingonilolla
ja uhkalla:

— Teidät viedään turvapaikkaan.

— Turvapaikkaan? Saanko kysyä minne?

— Parhaaseen, turvallisimpaan paikkaan mitä meillä on —

kirkkoon.

Hänen sanojaan säesti pari toveria pilkallisella myhähdyksellä.

Haavoitettu oli pysynyt aivan tyynenä äskeisen pommiräjähdyksen

aikana, mutta nyt hän hätkähti, katsoi kuoppiinsa vajonneilla,
kärsineillä silmillään viimeistä puhujaa ja lausui raskaasti syyttäen:
 — Se olisi epäinhimillinen rikos! Kun sen tornissa kauan on ollut
ilmatykkipatteri — ja vielä tähystysasema jotka aina saa hävittää
tykkitulella.

— Sinä lörpöttelet…

— Vielä kiellätte! — keskeytti haavoittunut kiihtyen ja juuri eilen

sieltä lentokonetykeillä pudotettiin kaksi meidän tähystysretkellä
ollutta lentokonettamme. Onhan mahdotonta…

— Pian näette onko se mahdotonta…

— Te olette siis niin kurjia raukkoja, ettette saa

haavoittuneistakaan henkeä — vaan varastatte apua meidän
tykistöltä…

— Vaiti koira! Taikka minä näytän, kuka saa sinusta hengen…

— Et sinä ainakaan! Eiväthän sakaalit itse uskalla tappaa — ilkkui

haavoittunut murhaavalla ivalla. — Mutta kyllä jalka ja
paksupohjainen kenkä sentään olisivat toisinaan tarpeen — eräs
kuono kaipaisi nytkin potkua…

Muutamat haavoittuneet naurahtivat katkerasti ja sotilaat ärähtivät

raivosta — niinkuin parvi nälkäisiä koiria, joille heitetään yksi
lihapala. He olisivat mahdollisesti ryhtyneet joihinkin rankaisutoimiin,
mutta taaskin putosi pommi huumaavasti räjähtäen ja sotilaat
vaikenivat — jääden jähmettyneinä ja pelokkaina paikoilleen.

Kaikki haavoittuneet oli kannettu pihalle ja suurikokoinen

aliupseeri tuli ulos, aikoen sanoa jotain. Mutta hänen sanansa
katkesi kuin tukehtuen, sillä samassa kuului taas tuo kamala ääni
lähenevän — aivankuin mielettömän paholaisen mylvähdys.
Aliupseeri vilkasi kauhusta kalveten ympärilleen ja heittäytyi
maahan, ryömien naurettavan nopeasti erään haavoittuneen paarien
alle. Pommi putosikin kauas sairaalasta ja haavoittuneiden seasta
kuului pilkallista naurua ja muutamia ivallisia huomautuksia:

— Siinä nyt näette vihdoinkin oikean sankarin!

— Koettakaa tekin pyrkiä hänen rinnalleen.

— Onko ihme, jos täytyy kerjätä koko maailmalta apua…

Aliupseeri hypähti kuin käärmeen pistämänä paarien alta. Hänen

kasvonsa olivat tummanpunaiset raivosta ja häpeästä; hän vilkasi
hätäisesti taakseen aivankuin aikoen juosta tiehensä, sitten
sinkahutti villin katseen haavoittuneiden yli ja tarttui pistooliinsa.
Mutta samassa kuului vihlovan pilkallinen kehoitus:

— Niin! Ammu! Nyt ne eivät pääse pakoon, eivätkä liiku…

Hänet keskeytti käheä karjahdus. Aliupseeri oli hellittänyt

pistoolista, niinkuin se olisi polttanut hänen sormissaan; hän hypähti
tasajaloin maasta ja syöksyi pilkkaajaa kohden, huitoen
hurjistuneena nyrkeillään ilmaa, ärjähdellen ja ähkyen kuin
tukehtumaisillaan kiukusta:

— Suu kiinni! Kurjat koirat! Siat… Minä opetan pian… Sotilaat!

Viekää ne pian pois… Mars! Juoskaa! Kyllä te pian… odottakaa…

Hänen sanansa hukkuivat lähenevän jättiläispommin

vongahdukseen, mutta nyt hän ei edes kumartunut, vaikka se putosi
niin lähelle, että räjähdyksen voima heitti hänet rajusti taaksepäin,
temmaten lakin hänen päästään. Hän sieppasi lakkinsa ja jatkoi
masentumattomalla raivolla:
 — Kuulitteko, minä sanoin: Liikkeelle, mars! Juoksuun! Kyllä minä
opetan…

Sotilaiden silmät välähtivät vahingonilosta ja julmasta

tyytyväisyydestä, ja he noudattivat käskyä säälimättömällä innolla.
Jok'ainoa pommi lisäsi heidän raivoaan, he pitivät niiden tuottamaa
tuhoa ja kuolemaa noiden raajarikoiksi rääkättyjen miesparkojen
syynä, koska he kuuluivat samaan kansaan. Ja nämä olivat vielä
kiihdyttäneet voittajain vihaa katkerilla sanoillaan, tietäessään
joutuvansa avuttomina vihollisen julman ja rikollisen kostotyön
uhreiksi. Suonenvedontapaisesti koettivat he tarrautua katkottuine
jäsenineen paareihin, silmät tuijottivat jäykästi eteenpäin ja hiki
helmeili heidän kuolemankalpeilla, kuihtuneilla kasvoillaan; kuului
käheätä voihketta, joku rukoili katkonaisin sanoin, etteivät kantajat
hytkyttäisi — hänen jalkansa oli juuri tänään katkaistu ja kädessä oli
verenmyrkytys. Mutta kantajat eivät olleet kuulevinaan, vaan
jatkoivat samaa hölkkäjuoksua.

Silloin välähtivät raajarikon silmät ja hänen kasvoillaan kuvastui

epätoivoinen uhma ja raivo ja hänen äänensä oli kokonaan
muuttunut:

— Raukat! Ettekö nyt saa minua putoamaan — eihän minulla ole

kuin yksi käsi ja jalka. Yrittäkää uudelleen!

Hammasten narskahdus — ja nyt paarit hypähtivät niin ankarasti,

että haavoitettu oli putoamaisillaan; hänen huulensa sinertyivät,
silmät sulkeutuivat niinkuin olisi pyörtynyt. —

Mutta hänen luinen kelmeä kätensä näytti puristuneen paarin

reunaan kuin yhteen jäykistynyt kuolleen koura.
 Taas räjähti ja kantajat lähtivät juoksemaan kuin ruoskaniskujen
ajamina… Pitkin paaririviä kuului käheätä, tukehtunutta voihketta,
valitusta ja hammasten kiristystä.

Mutta kädetön ja jalaton raajarikko ei enää valita, hänen huulensa

ovat lujasti yhteen puristetut ja tuskanhiki vierii suurina pisaroina
hänen kuolemankalpeata otsaansa myöten.

Jättiläiskirkon kylmä kivilattia oli ladottu täyteen haavoittuneita —

vain kaikkein heikommat oli jätetty paareille. Kaikkialla näkyi
laihtuneita, kalpeita kasvoja, tuskasta vääntyneitä suita ja
suonenvedontapaisesti kouristelevia käsiä. Kaikkialta tuijottivat
kuumeesta hehkuvat silmät… kuului hammasten kiristystä,
nääntynyttä valitusta, vaikerrusta ja voihketta — se kiirii edestakaisin
kumajavissa holveissa salaperäisenä, loppumattomana
huokauksena, jossa väräjää tuhansien tuskat ja kärsimykset.

Kun lattialla ei enää ollut tilaa, tuli kirkkoon nuoren luutnantin ja

muutaman sotilaan seuraamana pieni tummaihoinen eversti, jonka
rintaa koristi kunniamerkit. Hän silmäsi arvostelevasti onnettomien
joukkoa ja sitten kajahti voihkeen ja puheensorinan yli komentava,
korskea ääni:

— Vangit! Teidät on nyt tuotu tänne turvaan. Mutta minä varotan:

pienimmänkin pakoyrityksen sattuessa käytetään aseita ilman
varoitusta…

Hänet keskeytti ankara räjähdys ja sitten kuului katkeria ja

voimattomasta vihasta vapisevia huutoja:

— Voi raukat! Te siis sulette meidät tänne kuin

teurastushuoneeseen!
 — Kurja murhaaja!

— Iskekää se kuoliaaksi!

— Kuristakaa se konna!

— Kuolema murhaajalle!

— Teurastaja!

Meteli kiihtyi huumaavaksi, sanattomaksi ulvonnaksi ja muutamat

haavoittuneet alkoivat lähetä everstiä! Silloin hän viittasi
vartijasotilaat viereensä kiväärit valmiina, kohotti kätensä ja huusi
julmalla, uhkaavalla äänellä:

— Vaiti! Jos yksikin liikahtaa, ammutan minä jok'ainoan!

Mitä — kuka uskaltaa solvata minua? Mistä löydätte varmemman

turvapaikan? Vaikka vihollisemme menettelevätkin barbaarien
tavoin, niin en minä vielä usko heidän ryhtyvän niin kauhistavaan
rikokseen, kuin herran huoneen häpäiseminen ja hävittäminen olisi…
Se osoittaisi…

Taas ojentuivat sadat sidotut kädet häntä kohden ja kirkossa

kajahti niin uhkaava ärjähdys, että everstin täytyi lopettaa…

Joukon huuto hukkui taas vuorostaan pommin räjähdyksen

pauhuun…

Räjähdystä seurasi lyhyt äänettömyys ja haavoittuneet näkivät,

miten nuori luutnantti lähestyi everstiä, kohotti kätensä lakin
reunaan; hänen kauniilla kalvenneilla kasvoillaan ja vapisevassa
äänessään kuvastui ankara mielenliikutus ja harmi:
 — Herra eversti! He ovat haavoitettuja… vaikeasti haavoitettuja,
jotka eivät voi liikahtaa… Minä en tahdo olla osallisena siihen, että…
Ennen annan miekkani.

Ja hän tempasi miekkansa huotrasta, ojentaen sen kahva edellä

everstille…

Tämä katsahti kiukusta kiiluvin silmin ympärilleen, sieppasi sapelin

luutnantilta ja karjasi raivosta käheällä äänellä:

— Aliupseeri, tarttukaa häneen, sitokaa, viekää päävahtiin! Heti!

Mars!

Sitten hän käännähti taas onnettomia kohden silmät julmasta

riemusta kiiltäen ja lausui teennäisen vakavasti:

— Minä siis toivon, ettei teillä ole mitään valittamista. Kirkot ovat
kansainvälisillä sopimuksilla suojatut kaikenlaisilta hyökkäyksiltä ja
pommitukselta…

Ja kun taas jyrähti kauempana, livahti eversti nopeasti ulos ovesta

ja välskäri seurasi häntä sotilaineen.

Vasta seuraavan jyrähdyksen jälkeen huomattiin, että kaikki

hoitosotilaat olivat poistuneet. Eräs haavoittunut asteli ontuen ovelle,
aikoen työntää sen auki — ei auennut. Hän uudisti kokeensa monta
kertaa, viittasi erään toverinkin avukseen; turhaa — ovi oli kiinni.

He käännähtivät kauhusta kalpeina kuolemaantuomittuja

tovereitaan kohden ja heidän värisevät huulensa liikkuivat
äänettömästi, niinkuin he olisivat menettäneet puhekykynsä — mutta
tuo mykkä epätoivo selitti enemmän kuin sadat sanat.
 Seuraava pommi putosi pelottavan lähelle kirkkoa. Seinät tuntuivat
horjahtavan ja etelänpuoleiset, monivärisillä lasimaalauksilla
koristetut ikkunat sinkahtivat kirjavana sirpalesateena yli kirkon;
huumaavan jyrähdyksen jatkona kuului ylhäältä tornista kymmenien
erisuuruisten kellojen kumea, väräjävä ääni, ikäänkuin hukkuvien
yhteinen hätähuuto — ja taas katsahtivat onnettomat toisiinsa
tylsästi, äänettömästi, niinkuin kauhu ja epätoivo olisi lamauttanut
heidän viimeisetkin voimansa.

Mutta pommeja putoilee saatanallisella säännöllisyydellä, ja

ikäänkuin nekin tahtoisivat lisätä noiden kidutettujen tuskaa ja
kauhua, lähenevät ne hitaasti kuin hiipivä vihollinen varmaa
saalistaan. Ja nuo sodan raatelemat miehet lävistettyine rintoineen,
puhkottuine vatsoineen odottavat niitä kuin pyövelin iskua. — Sillä
jokainoa räjähdys sattuu heihin kuoliniskua kiduttavampana. Heidän
sielunsa ja ruumiinsa värisevät kuin inkvisiittorin kidutuspenkissä;
jotkut alkavat sanattomasti huutaa, muutamat menettävät järkensä…
Alkaa kuulua hohottavaa, pitkäveteistä naurua, itkua ja laulua; eräs
jättiläiskokoinen nuori mies linkuttaa horjuen ja välillä kaatuillen
miehestä toiseen ja selittää käheällä äänellä, että on juuri noussut
kuolleista; hänen palloksi kääritty päänsä muistuttaa todella
pääkalloa syvine suu- ja silmäaukkoineen ja niiden pohjasta
tuijottavat liikkumattomat silmät niin kamalasti, että kuulijoita
puistattaa… Mutta mielipuoli jatkaa matkaansa, hokien
salaperäisesti, uhkaavasti:

— Mitä? Epäiletkö sinä? Ja siitä on vasta puoli tuntia, kun makasin

syvällä, syvällä. — Katsos — multaa! Ooh — se on jo varissut.

Hänen sanansa hukkuvat räjähdyksen pauhuun ja luhistuvan

rakennuksen jyminään; kuuluu viiltäviä kirkaisuja ja hätähuutoja.
Eräs kädetön heittäytyy polvilleen toisten eteen, rukoillen
sydäntäsärkevällä äänellä armoa, hänen luiset kellertävät kasvonsa
ovat kuvaamattoman hädän ja epätoivon vääristämät ja kun ei
kukaan vastaa, alkaa hän mielettömällä kiireellä riisua risaisia
vaatteitaan, tarjoten niitä henkensä hinnaksi. Se vaikuttaa
järisyttävästi toisiin — yhä useammat hukkuvat hulluuden
harmaaseen hämäryyteen. Kaikki jotka kykenevät liikkumaan,
alkavat ontuen, laahustaen, ryömien kierrellä ympäri holvista holviin
kuni pyydykseen ahdistetut villieläimet; toiset yrittävät nousta kerran
toisensa jälkeen, lysähtäen uudelleen ja uudelleen lattialle kunnes
eivät enään jaksa.

Silloin tuntui haavoittuneista kuin koko kirkko olisi tulilieskana

lentänyt raunioiksi heidän ympärillään, kaikki jylisi, ryskyi ja
murskaantui, särkyneet kipsikoristeet ja kivilohkareet sinkoilivat
sinne tänne hurjalla voimalla murskaten joukottain lattialla viruvia ja
tukehuttava soransekainen savupilvi peitti kaikki sisäänsä kuin
jättiläissuuri harmaa hämähäkinverkko.

Mutta kun se hiljalleen hälveni kattoa kohden ja he alkoivat tointua

puhtaan ilman vaikutuksesta, huomasivat he pommin tulleen
ikkunasta sisään ja räjähtäneen vastakkaisella seinällä repäisten
siihen ammottavan aukon.

— Ulos!

Tuossa yksinäisessä huudahduksessa kuvastui yhtaikaa

hämmästystä, epämääräistä riemua ja toivoa. Ja sitä säestivät sadat
liikutuksesta vapisevat äänet. Heti kohosi kaikkialta kuihtuneita,
kalmankalpeita kasvoja, sadat sammuneet silmät kirkastuivat ja tuo
moniääninen huuto kasvoi, kajahtaen holvista holviin ikäänkuin
yhdestä ainoasta, nääntyneestä jättiläisrinnasta puhjennut
helpotuksen huokaus. Sitten näytti koko lattia heräävän eloon. Miltei
kaikki liikahtivat ja suuri joukko alkoi lisääntynein voimin, kävellen,
ryömien ja madellen pyrkiä aukkoa kohden.

Kauhea räjähdys keskeytti heidän matkansa: sadat

voimattomuudesta vapisevat, horjuvat olennot paiskautuivat yhtaikaa
lattiaan — aivankuin näkymätön jättiläinen olisi yhdellä ainoalla
leimahtavalla sivalluksella pyyhkäissyt heidät maahan.

Suuri joukko jäi paikalleen, mutta useimmat nousivat uudelleen,

lähtivät uudelleen aukkoa kohden. Ja taas kuului liikutuksesta
vapisevia ääniä:

— Ulos! Ulos! Pois!

Etumaiset olivat jo perillä kun ulkopuolelta kajahti kylmä, ankara

ääni:

— Seis! Vai aiotte paeta? Takaisin — mars!

— Emme pakene! — selitti eräs voimakas ääni: — Asetumme

yhteen joukkoon tuohon puistoon — ja te saatte vartioida.

— Vaiti! Jokainen ken ei paikalla peräydy, ammutaan! Takaisin!

Kuului matalaa murinaa ja sen ylitse taas sama ääni:

— Sotilaat! Tehän kuulitte, ettemme pakene! Ettehän tahdo, että

meidät näin rikollisesti tapetaan.

— Vaiti! Takaisin! — karjui aliupseeri raivosta punaisena. — Pois

aukolta! Mars!

— Kurjat murhaajat!
 — Ajatelkaa, sotilaat!

— Mitä te aiotte…?

— Murhaajat! Pelkurit!

— Kurjat…

Melun yli kajahti aliupseerin komennushuuto, kiväärit kohosivat

onnettomia kohden.

Sitten kaikki sekaantui hurjaan epätoivon ja raivon huutoon — joka

hukkui yhtäkkiä rätisevään yhteislaukaukseen.

Laukaukset räiskyivät taukoamatta ja niiden seasta kuului

tuskallisia parahduksia, kirkaisuja ja sitten huusi haavoittuneiden
johtaja läpitunkevasi:

— Eteenpäin — veljet! Nopeasti! Aseet pois murhaajilta! Tulkaa

vel…

Hänen äänensä tukehtui korahtaen; hän kaatui, nousi uudelleen ja

yritti huutaa, mutta veri purskahti hänen suustaan kuin ruiskusta; hän
lysähti maahan, aukoen suutaan kuni kuivalle heitetty kala. Hänen
tuskallinen korinansa hukkui huutojen pauhinaan ja hänen ruumiinsa
tallattiin muodottomaksi.

Aukon kohdalla oli maa suurten kivilohkareiden peitossa ja

haavoittuneet pääsivät vain vaivaloisesti eteenpäin; sotilaat ampuivat
heitä joukottain — yksikään ei päässyt ohi, koska miesjoukko työntyi
aukosta tiheänä, mustana tulvana… He kaatuivat, laahautuivat
nelinryömin, nousivat. Mutta jokaisen kasvoilla kuvastui kuoleman
epätoivo ja päättäväisyys — ja lopulta heitä pääsi parikymmentä
sotilaiden kimppuun. He tarraantuivat kuin kuolevat petoeläimet
näiden jalkoihin, vetivät heidät maahan, iskivät, kuristivat. Ja vihdoin
kuulivat sisällä olevat laukausten taukoavan; heidän jännityksensä
kiihtyi yhä — sitten kuului taas muutamia…

Yhä tulvasi aukosta haavoittuneita, kömpivät kuolevien toveriensa

yli — heillä oli vain yksi ajatus: kostaa…

Oli pöyristyttävää nähdä nuo vapisevat, loppuun nääntyneet

raajarikot raivosta mielettömine, vääntyneine kasvoineen taistelussa
terveiden, voimakkaiden miesten kanssa. Muutamat näistä nousivat
kerran toisensa jälkeen, iskivät haavoittuneita joukottain maahan ja
yrittivät lähteä… Mutta kaikkialta ojentui lukemattomia luisevia
kouria, sormet koukistuneina kuin hyökkäävän petolinnun kynnet,
repien, iskien, kuristaen… Uudet ja vanhat haavat vuotivat
pelottavasti ja monet vaipuivat kuin vastustamattoman unen
valtaamina maahan, vavahtaen vain muutaman kerran — mutta
toiset tarrautuivat kuollessaankin suonenvedontapaisesti
vihollisiinsa… Heidän otteensa ja iskunsa olivat voimattomia, mutta
niitä jatkui loppumattomasti — ja vihdoin viimeinenkin sotilas oli
liikkumaton.

Mutta haavoittuneet eivät tietäneet, että aliupseeri oli heti pyytänyt

apua ja nyt kuului lähenevien moottorien jyrinää ja pienen matkan
päähän pysähtyi kaksi panssariautoa. Alkoi kuularuiskujen kamala
soitto ja pian oli kaikki valmista — yksikään ei enää ollut jaloillaan
kirkon ulkopuolella.

Mutta sisäpuolella näytti vielä kauheammalta. Leveästä aukosta oli

koko ajan satanut kuulia, jotka sinkoilivat kirkon kiviseinistä kaikkialle
läpitunkevasti ulvoen ja suristen — aivankuin kamalat,
tuntemattomat hyönteiset… Kaukaisemmissa loukoissakin olivat ne
lävistäneet makaavia miesparkoja…

Säännöllisesti olivat jättiläispommit nytkin putoilleet kirkon

lähistölle ja sentähden panssariautot alkoivatkin kiireesti kääntyä,
lähteäkseen pois.

Mutta viime hetkellä putosi niiden eteen pommi — ja kun savu

hälveni olivat panssariautot miehistöineen kadonneet…

Kirkossa olevat raahustivat aukolle ja eräs kohotti kätensä

huutaen huumaantuneesti mielettömällä riemulla:

— Oi veljeni — veljeni! Ampukaa, ampukaa! Nopeammin,

nopeammin! Amp…

Häntä säestivät sadat mielettömällä vimmalla — kunnes kuolema

katkaisi heidän huutonsa. Sillä aivankuin heidän pyyntöänsä
noudattaen putosi pommi keskelle kirkkoa, ulospyrkijäin tiheimpään
parveen — ja laajalta alalta katosivat kaikki mustanpunaiseen,
räiskähtävään tuleen ja savuun. Ja kauempana olevat tunsivat
hämärästi, että heidän päälleen putoili jotain kuumaa,
kosteanniljakasta ja iöyhkävää…

Se oli ainoa mitä heidän tovereistaan oli jälellä.

Se oli liikaa — onnettomat eivät enää kestäneet. Viimeisetkin

näyttivät menettävän järkensä; jotkut heittäytyivät lattialle peittäen
kasvonsa, toiset yrittivät nousta ja heikoimmat kohottivat silvotut
kasvonsa tai muodottomat kädentynkänsä taivasta kohden kuin
rukoillen; kuolevien voihke ja hätähuudot, uikuttava nauru ja ulvonta
täytti kirkon pöyristyttävänä parkaisuna — ikäänkuin itse hulluus ja
kauhu olisi kajahuttanut riemuhuutonsa. —

Nuori haavoittunut, joka pari tuntia sitten väitteli sairaalan pihalla

kantajansa kanssa, makaa paareillaan vavahdellen ja aukoo välillä
suutaan kuni pyydystetty kala.

Hän aukaisee silmänsä, mutta ei näe mitään, ei kuule mitään, hän

ei tunne muuta kuin tuskaa — se kuristaa kurkkua, repelee rintaa,
koko ruumista terävin pedonkynsin… Ja kaikki on niin käsittämätöntä
ja kauheata kuin painajais-unsssa.

Sitten huomaa hän olevansa tukehtumaisillaan johonkin kauheaan

ja salaperäiseen, joka ympäröi hänet paksuna ja tukehuttavana kuni
suunnattoman suuri musta käärinliina…

Yhtäkkiä hän vavahtaa, hänen hampaansa alkavat kalista: tuosta

mustanharmaasta hornasta häämöttää harmaat, vääristyneet kasvot,
hiukan taampana luinen, ahnaasti koukistunut koura… Ja sitten
alkaa humiseva hiljaisuus häipyä ja joka puolella kuuluu yhä
äänekkäämpänä käheätä tuskanvoihketta, epäinhimillistä ulinaa ja
uikutusta ja vihdoin eroittaa sen seasta joitakin katkonaisia, sekavia
sanoja:

— Missä olen…?

— Vettä — kurkkuuni…

— Olemme petetyt — helvetissä…

— Se lupasi taivaaseen…

— Sotavankeja ei saa sulkea helvettiin — sopimuksetta.

 — Sopimukset — olemme täällä…

— Oi oi, en voi… valitan…

— Mistä tiedät — helvetissä?

— Etkö näe savua — helvetin huurua…

— Älä valehtele! Varokaa…

— Armoa, armoa…

Taas hukkuvat sanat kiihtyvään meteliin kuni myrskyn pauhuun —

eikä mitään näy… Ja yhtäkkiä hänestä tuntuu, että tuo hirveä
harmaus on todella helvetin huurua… Ja vieläkin eroittaa hän joitakin
nääntyneitä ääniä:

— Auttakaa… päästäkää!

— Armoa… olen sotavanki.

— Miksi meidät helvettiin — haavoittuneet?

— En voi… ijankaikkisesti…

— Armoa… apua…

Ennen tuntematon kylmä kauhu kiitää hyytävänä hänen lävitseen.

Noissa tukehtuneissa äänissä kuvastuu niin hirvittävä hätä ja
epätoivo, ettei sellaista voi olla muualla kuin yhdessä paikassa —
hänet oli siis heitetty helvetin syvimpään onkaloon, missä kadotetut
kituvat ja vaikeroivat nauravien pirujen kynsissä.— Ooh — sitä
kestää aina… ijäisesti…
 Hän jännittää viimeiset voimansa ja hänen kurkustaan kuuluu
korisevana, rukoilevana:

— Pelastakaa… en voi… Auta — rakas kuolema! Etkö

sinäkään…? Rakas kuole…

Silloin tuntui aivankuin kauhea tulinen kita olisi maata järisyttävällä

karjaisulla auennut, puuskaisten polttavan liekkimeren onnettomien
yli, ja jokin jättiläissuuri syöksyi mustana, muodottomana, murskaten
kaikki alleen ja hotkaisi heidät ahnaasti kamalaan kitaansa.

Ympärillä on äänetön pimeys.