Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Today I finished a first reading of Hugh Lofting’s Victory for the Slain only hours after receiving it in the mail. This is one of the best things I have ever read, and I am going to begin re-reading it tonight, slowly and carefully, savoring each line and each cultural and historical allusion.
Mr. Lofting, famous for the Doctor Doolittle stories for children, was wounded in body and heart in the First World War, and in 1942 wrote this deeply-felt and deeply-thought poem as a rebuke to the keyboard commandos who are in every generation so eager to sacrifice the lives of young men and women (not their own children, of course; they are sent to serve bravely in law school). As a Viet-Nam veteran I “amen” almost every line.
Mr. Lofting’s Catholic upbringing and solid education are obvious; Victory for the Slain is a work built upon a life of faith, study, thought, prayer, and bloody experience. It is a message poem, all right, but a brilliant and disciplined one. One reads the tired old weak defense of a poor piece of work with, “But it’s from the heart” – well, this poem is from the heart, right enough, but it is also from the head and from the careful consideration of the thousands of years of civilization.
Walmer is a small press (but not literally a press; the book was printed in the USA) in Shetland (http://michaelwalmer.com/index.html). They have taken this neglected poem and printed it on beautiful, cream-colored paper in a beautiful, accessible typeface.
Victory for the Slain is a keeper.
3 comments:
Interesting.
The poem is brilliant, and I said so on my amazon.com review, which was rejected as unworthy because I also mentioned how ugly the cover is and have nasty the surface of the cover is to the touch. So I add that you can find this brilliant and moving poem on the InterGossip.
Right on. Thanks!
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