"it's this love that I most fear / and this child I would destroy / for I hold her pain most dear"

For Poetry Monday, a glance back to Spender again:


Ultima Ratio Regum, Stephen Spender

The guns spell money's ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.

When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him.
Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in.
His name never appeared in the papers.
The world maintained its traditional wall
Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well,
Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside.

O too lightly he threw down his cap
One day when the breeze threw petals from the trees.
The unflowering wall sprouted with guns,
Machine-gun anger quickly scythed the grasses;
Flags and leaves fell from hands and branches;
The tweed cap rotted in the nettles.

Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?


Written in 1939 -- the scene is from the Spanish Civil War, which Spender participated in on the Communist side as part of the International Brigade. The title translates as "the last resort of kings," traditionally understood as meaning war.

---L.

Subject quote from "My Medea," Vienna Teng.