November 21, 2023
Merton: An Early Poem
On June 18, 1939 the New York Times published an article reporting on the reward from Columbia University for the Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer Annual Poetry Prize to Thomas Merton. The title of the poem was Fable for a War and the entire poem, without commentary, was included in the article. It may have been Merton's first exposure of his poetry to a wide American audience. The poem is also included in the Collected Poems of Thomas Merton published in 1977 by New Directions. Neither the Times article nor the collection includes any commentary. The collection is especially minimalist in that the only information about the poem is the year of the poem's publication. A search at the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University for scholarly commentary on the poem produced mostly bibliographical references
Perhaps interest in this early Merton poem would have been piqued had another event occurred. Ten years later a selection of Merton's poems, The Tears of the Blind Lions, was published by New Directions. The thin volume of thirty-two pages was under consideration for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. That year the committee encountered a dilemma - an abundance of excellent poetry not only from Merton but Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams. The committee, however, awarded the prize to an emerging poet, a black woman, Gwendolyn Brooks, for her debut poetry publication, A Street in Bronzeville. The committee decided that it would not list other poets being considered to further enhance the quality of her work and prevent her novice art to be compared to the established poets of the era. However, Fable for a War deserves a better legacy if only because its subject matter is still relevant today.
Here is Merton’s winning poem as printed by the New York Times. The version printed in the New Directions collection differs slightly in spelling, wording and punctuation.
FABLE FOR A WAR The old Roman sow Bears a new litter now To fatten for a while On the same imperial swill. The cannibal wolf will dig And root out the Spanish bones beside the pig. Germany has reared A rare ugly bird To screeth [sic] a sour song In the German tongue: Tell me if there be A sparrow hawk for such as he? The parrots lift their beaks And fill the air with shrieks. Ambassador is sent From the Parrots’ parliament: “Oh, see how fine I fly And nibble crackers got in Germany.” Europe is a feast For every bloody beast: Jackals will grow fat On the bones after that. But in the end of all None but the crows can sing the funeral. Germany has reared A rare ugly bird, But crows ate Roman pig Before this bird was egg. And in the end of all Crows will come back and sing the funeral.
Commentary on Merton’s Poem Fable for a War
Immediately, from the title line, the genre of the poem promises a moral story and the animals, standard characters in fables, appear in the first stanza: a Roman sow, a cannibal wolf, jackals and a rare ugly bird, plus a potential hero, a sparrow hawk.
Sparrow hawks inhabit all continents except Antarctica. The "sparrow" part of its name does not refer to its temperament but to its size. The sparrow hawk is the smallest of the falcons and hovers in the air rather than soaring. It surprises its prey, usually small songbirds, by dropping down and capturing them alive. North American bird watchers know this species as the kestrel.
In the second stanza Merton allows no doubt about the main antagonists of the poem: Germany and its rare ugly bird - Hitler. Then the poem shifts impatiently and Merton speaks directly to the reader:
Tell me if there be A sparrow hawk for such as he?
Is Merton calling for the hero to kill Hitler like the sparrow hawk kills another bird?
While Chamberlain was trading the Sudetenland for European peace Hitler had other plans. The Munich Agreement in September, 1938 was preceded by Winston Churchill’s more sober analysis that “I think we shall have to choose in the next few weeks between war and shame, and I have very little doubt what the decision will be.” Churchill understood Hitler better than Chamberlain. So, it seems, did Merton. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Merton writes that “Hitler regarded the power of his madness as a divine power because he felt inspired.”
The third stanza derides the empty parroting of the British parliament and Merton spares no scorn for Neville Chamberlain – allegedly quoting him– who chose shame over war and got both. Stanzas four and five predict, like Churchill, the inevitable; Europe ravaged once again only twenty plus years since the end of the war to end all wars.
Merton would become a fierce critic of nuclear weapons but he was not a pacifist. As a future Catholic theologian perhaps he was already aware of the Roman Catholic theory of “the just war.” But the just assassination? Did Merton paraphrase Henry II’s veiled request about Thomas Becket, “Can someone rid me of this dictator?”
It is not difficult to recognize a contemporary parallel with Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in March, 2014 and subsequent invasion of Ukraine eight years later. The thought was to avoid a war but it was merely late in arriving. Is it time to resurrect Pete Seeger’s song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and ask the question, “When will they ever learn?”
Reflection
“You will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet.” Matthew 24:6
Response
How should we act at Jesus’ advice not to become alarmed as wars rage?