Poetry can tell of the horrors, evil of war

CIVIS’ spouse, having studied Hebrew for a university degree about 40 years ago, still keeps up with it by translating various books of the Tanakh, and recently shared the description, in Peake’s Commentary, of Genesis Chapter 22’s story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac: ‘‘From a literary point of view this is one of the finest pieces of Hebrew prose in the OT’’.

In view of the present murderous Russian attack on Ukraine, ordered by President Vladimir Putin, the quotation brought to mind Wilfred Owen’s moving riff on that story in the context of the slaughter of

World War 1 (always, in Civis’ mind, sung to Britten’s setting in his War Requiem).

In the poem Abram has prepared Isaac for sacrifice:

‘‘When lo! an angel called him out of heaven, / Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, / Neither do anything to him. Behold, / A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; / Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. / But the old man would not so, but slew his son, / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.’’

The parallel with slaughtering Ukrainians in what President Putin describes as part of ‘‘Holy Rus’’, in the interests of pride, is clear. As is that between the delusion of religious human sacrifice and willingness to sacrifice one’s own people in a war of aggression, as Moscow Patriarch Kirill (who has worked with President Putin to build totalitarianism in church and state) promotes what he describes (with President Putin’s concurrence) as a Holy War to bring Ukrainian Orthodoxy under control of the Russian Patriarchate.

Horror forged Wilfred Owen into a poetic genius — perhaps a Ukrainian poet will describe the evils of this war.