When viewing war, soldiers are generally seen as faceless warriors sent to a foreign field for a greater cause. Besides the families directly affected by war, it is rare that people think about how these young people were “torn” from their worlds and thrown into the war. Flint’s poem, “Lament”, was able connect the effect of war on society through the lives of young men with the use of Biblical references and other metaphors.
Flint begins the poem with a discreet reference to the faith based lesson of Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his son for a greater cause, which in that situation was the Lord’s will. At the end of the first stanza he says, “The young men of the world/ Are condemned to death/ They have been called upon to die/ For the crime of their fathers.” This could be perceived in several ways. The “crime” could refer to Adam’s picking the forbidden fruit in genesis. More realistically, it could refer to the decisions of the young men’s forefathers whose actions may have led to the war and their son’s potential deaths. Adam’s crime eternally banished humans from the Garden of Eden. By eating from the Tree of Knowledge and Truth, Adam and Eve realized how crude their situation was by living unclothed and exposing their bodies. It could be said that eating from the fruit led to war due to jealousy, competition, and other challenges brought with this newly found knowledge. The passage shows how these young men go off to war for crimes they did not commit and how they may be forced to pay the ultimate price.
As these young men go on to war, Flint describes, “The young men of the world, the growing, the ripening fruit, have been torn from their branches, while the memory of the blossom is sweet in women’s hearts.” This passage uses the specific imagery of a fruit being picked from a plant prematurely. The men are these fruits and the tearing Flint describes is more violent due to specific word choice. The fruit being picked or falling from the main plant that provides sustenance and life would have sounded more natural. This tearing could be the same motion that tears a soldier’s arm off due to the violence that war encompasses. The women in these men’s lives that are referred to are most likely the mothers that remember their sons as children, just beginning to grow into men that would be workers and fathers that would build the future society. Most of the mothers had probably not raised their sons to be slaughtered, but instead to become men similar to their husbands. Flint finishes the stanza by saying “They have been cast for a cruel purpose/ Into the mashing- press and furnace.” This means that these young men are not even considered humans by their superiors as they are thrown into deadly environments similar to a “mashing press and furnace.” The fruits of man’s labor are mankind’s greatest achievements which includes the younger generation of men.
Flint discusses how these young men are no longer in control of their action, but rather their actions control them. He wrote, “The young men of the world/ No longer possess the road:/ The road possesses them./ They no longer inherit the earth:/ The earth inherits them.” The second metaphor is referring to the Bible once again from the beatitudes, in particular “The meek shall inherit the Earth.” Flint is calling these men “meek” because they are still gentle and not yet belligerent and changed by war; however, they shall not inherit the earth because they will no longer maintain that passiveness after the war, if they survive. The earth inherits them as their bodies are put into the ground when these men are buried. These young men that entered World War I were similar to animals being sent to a slaughterhouse. They had lost control of their lives by joining the war effort. Flint’s poem was able to illustrate the abstract aspects of war that don’t always involve direct violence.
Literature of War STC 