I'm in search of pre-industrial anti-war poetry

February 23, 2023 10:13 AM

This may be a western-centric history problem (and perhaps a US-centric one), but it's very difficult to search for veins of anti-war or pacifist poetry or writing from before the Civil War. I don't mean writing that tries to cast war as a sad condition existing as part of the greater human endeavor. I'm looking for "good god, y'all. what is it good for?" stuff.
posted by es_de_bah to Media & Arts (16 answers total)

I remembered this very short poem, and did a bit of digging on it. It's anonymous, but per this page, it appears to be dated to the 1850s. Other than that, I'm just finding it on nursery rhyme pages.

The fortunes of war I tell you plain
Are a wooden leg, or a golden chain.
posted by FencingGal at 11:50 AM on February 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's a song rather than a poem, but the Irish song "Mrs. McGrath" might suit - it's from 1807, and is about a woman whose son gets talked into enlisting into the British army during the Napoleonic Wars - they make it sound like he's going to go off and do some grand noble thing, but he comes home several years later missing both legs and it ends with a sort of "fuck war" sentiment . Bruce Springsteen did a cover on the Seeger Sessions record, and the lyrics are here.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:55 AM on February 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Wow, great question! Quakers might be a good place to start as they're some earlier hardline pacifists in the English-speaking tradition. People have argued a lot about Milton in this vein-- is Paradise Lost anti-war, etc?-- but there's at least one more explicitly pacifist text out there. John Scott (d. 1783, so pre-American Civil War, post-English Civil War, I'm assuming you mean the former) wrote the following:

The Drum
I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,
And lures from cities and from fields,
To sell their liberty for charms
Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms;
And when Ambition’s voice commands,
To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands.

I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To me it talks of ravag’d plains,
And burning towns, and ruin’d swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
And widow’s tears, and orphans moans;
And all that misery’s hand bestows,
To fill the catalogue of human woes.

I see elsewhere a book chapter that I don't have access to pointing out that the 1790s were a great vein of war and anti-war poetry in England, given the French Revolution. They cite Charlotte Smith as someone who became disillusioned with war's power to bring peace, and The Emigrants does seem to speak to that. Similarly, Robert Southey's History describes him recoiling from the horror of history marked by war.

I don't have time to review these myself but this list of Greek and Roman anti-war texts seemed like an interesting resource-- some of these are definitely closer to your second category than your first, but maybe some will be good fits!

And finally I'd recommend the War That Killed Achilles as a provocative book arguing that Homer was incredibly ambivalent on war in the context of the Iliad and giving some amount of overview of the poetic context of that time. But that's a bit of an outlier on what you're looking at.
posted by peppercorn at 12:04 PM on February 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

The sixteenth-century Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus published The Complaint of Peace in 1517. It's an oration in which the personification of Peace complains about the hypocrisy of supposedly Christian rulers who seek power, wealth, and glory in war.

The entry on pacifism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes a brief overview of sources, and its bibliography includes a couple titles that might have useful answers to your questions:

Cortright, David, 2008. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kurlansky, Mark, 2006. Nonviolence: 25 Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea, New York: Modern Library.
posted by brianogilvie at 12:35 PM on February 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Southey's After Blenheim mocks a famous British victory for it's pointlessness.
posted by mark k at 12:57 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Archilochus ( ~680 – ~645 BCE)
ἀσπίδι μὲν Σαΐων τις ἀγάλλεται͵ ἣν παρὰ θάμνωι͵ ἔντος ἀμώμητον͵ κάλλιπον οὐκ ἐθέλων· αὐτὸν δ΄ ἐξεσάωσα. τί μοι μέλει ἀσπὶς ἐκείνη; ἐρρέτω· ἐξαῦτις κτήσομαι οὐ κακίω.

That good shield I threw away
beside a bush is making
some Thracian proud.
To hell with both of them.
I’m here and I’ll get me a better one.
One of several translations

Thomas Hood {1799 - 1845) Long ironic punning poem set in the Peninsula War 1807-1814
Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war's alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms.
etc. etc.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:59 PM on February 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

I really dig Andreas Gryphius. He was a German poet/playwright who lived through the 30 Years War and had a lot of clear-eyed thoughts. He's not that well known in the English world and translations range in quality but can also be very poignant, like this excerpt from "Tears of the Fatherland":

Down walls and through the town runs always fresh-spilled blood
For eighteen summers now, our river's yearly flood
Near-choked with corpses, has pushed slowly, slowly on

That's pretty good stuff for the 17th century.
posted by ZaphodB at 1:33 PM on February 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Arthur MacBride is probably about the Napoleonic wars or an earlier conflict. Some recruiters lie to two young men about joining the army, and get their comeuppance in the end.

Paul Brady sings the definitive version.
posted by itsatextfile at 3:49 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Propertius I.21 is from the point of view of a man dying on the battlefield. "...tell/ my sister that Gallus, who made it safely through Caesar's lines/ still got killed, and by nobody special."
posted by praemunire at 4:52 PM on February 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Erasmus wrote against war.

(Aaand- I missed the above. Disregard)
posted by BWA at 4:53 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Li Po: "In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.
So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,
And the generals have accomplished nothing."
posted by praemunire at 5:03 PM on February 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Anti-War Poetry in Ancient China.
posted by gudrun at 7:37 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Does Lysistrata count?
posted by brookeb at 8:46 PM on February 23, 2023

Burns? Ye Jacobites and The Battle Of Sherramuir both rewrite earlier, partisan, songs to condemn war itself. For that matter High Germany, the tune Jacobites borrows, is from earlier in the 18th century and usually thought of as anti-war, though it may fall into your "sad condition" category.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 10:50 AM on February 24, 2023

Does Lysistrata count?

It absolutely does. As does Aristophanes's other comedy Peace, in which the protagonist is a farmer frustrated with endless war. He goes to Olympus in search of the goddess of Peace, only to find that War has buried her in a pit filled up with rocks. The farmer digs her out, along with her daughters Harvest and Holiday, and brings her back to Athens.

There's a Chorus in the final act which describes the joys of peace, where the Chorus Leader steps up to protest about bad officers and the injustice of conscription:

CHORUS
[...]When the grasshopper sings his dulcet tune,
I love to see the Lemnian vines beginning to ripen,
the earliest plant of all.
Likewise I love to watch the fig filling out,
and when it has reached maturity I eat it with appreciation,
exclaiming, “Oh! delightful season!”
Then too I bruise some thyme and infuse it in water.
Indeed I grow a great deal fatter passing the summer in this way . . .

CHORUS LEADER
. . . than in watching a damned lieutenant
with three plumes and military cloak of crimson, very livid indeed;
he calls it the real Sardian purple,
but if he ever has to fight in this cloak
he'll dye it another color, the real Cyzicene yellow,
he the first to run away, shaking his plumes like a brown cock galloping,
and I am left to do the real work.
Once back again in Athens, these brave fellows behave abominably;
they write down these, they scratch through others,
and this backwards and forwards two or three times at random.
The departure is set for to-morrow,
and some citizen has brought no provisions,
because he didn't know he had to go;
he stops in front of the statue of Pandion, reads his name, is dumbfounded
and starts away at a run, weeping bitter tears.
The townsfolk are less ill-used,
but that is how the husbandmen are treated by these men of war,
the hated of the gods and of men,
who know nothing but how to throw away their shield.
For this reason, if it please heaven,
I propose to call these rascals to account...

CHORUS
For they are lions in times of peace,
but sneaking foxes when it comes to fighting.

Translation from here; there's another one here (content warning for obscenity and misogyny. Women in this play are treated as objects, not really characters in their own right as in Lysistrata)
posted by Pallas Athena at 4:53 PM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh, and Euripides's The Trojan Women (Troades) is absolutely an antiwar play. From Hecuba's entrance onwards, pretty much every scene illustrates the horrors that war visits upon the women and children of a city razed by an invading army. Euripedes wrote it about the Trojan War, but it's really about the Peloponnesian War, which at that point had been going on for 14 years.

Here's a pdf of a decent translation; it's sideways, so you will have to click "Rotate clockwise." If that seems like too much work, here's another translation (which I like slightly less) in a web version.

Or you can watch the movie from 1971 with Katherine Hepburn as Hecuba and Vanessa Redgrave as Andromache. They used the Edith Hamilton translation, which is my favourite.
posted by Pallas Athena at 4:34 PM on February 25, 2023