Edna St. Vincent Millary Pamphlet Removed From Tacoma Public Library

Among some of the Edna St. Vincent Millay work set up for sale by the Tacoma Public Library is a pamphlet of a poem that was read aloud by Ronald Colman on NBC on D-Day.  In the second section, the Prayer, hate can’t win is precursered.  The war rhetoric proclaimed an attack against hate, it is not an original language idea:

“Let us forget such words, and all they mean,

as Hatred, Bitterness and Rancor, Greed,
Intolerance, Bigotry…”

There is a comparison of attacks to rain, earlier this week at a potluck I overheard rain called Nature’s Waterboarding.  I took exception to this language used for rain.

“the downpour of the heavy, evil, accurate, murderous rain;”

I think the loathsome female creatures described are Harpies.  I include the complete text of this poem, over seventy years old. 

POEM AND PRAYER FOR AN INVADING ARMY

            by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Written by Edna St. Vincent Millary for exclusive radio use by The National Broadcasting Company...and read by Ronald Colman on “D-Day” - June 6, 1944 – over the NBC Network

They must not go alone

into that burning building!-which today
is all of Europe!  
                              Say
that you go with them, spirit and heart and mind!
Although the body, grown
too old to fight a young man's war; or wounded
too deeply under the healed and whitened scars
of earlier battles, must remain behind.

You, too, may not be with them, save in spirit, you

so greatly needed here, here in the very van
and front of Duty,
to fashion tools and engines, and to engineer
their transport; build the ships and mine the coal
without which all their efforts would be worse than vain!

You men and women working in the workshops,

            working on the farms;
makers of tanks and of tractors, fitters of wings
to metal birds which have not left the nest
as yet, which yet must try their flight;
sowers of seed in season, planters of little plants
at intervals, on acres newly plowed
and disked and barrowed,

Out of the Tacoma Public Library

to feed a starving world;

You workers in the shipyards, building ships

which crowd each other down the ways;
you miners of coal in dark and dangerous corridors;
            who see the sun's
total eclipse
each morning, disappearing as you do under the earth's rim,
not to emerge into the daylight till the day's
over, and the light dim;

All you

without whose constant effort and whose skill -
without whose loyal and unfailing aid -
our men would stand
stranded upon a foreign and a hostile shore
without so much as a stout stick to beat away
Death or Pain:
bullets like angry hornets buzzing 'round the ears and the
            bewildered brain,
and from the sky again and yet again
the downpour of the heavy, evil, accurate, murderous rain;

You who have stood behind them to this hour,

move strong behind them now: let still
the weary bones encase the indefatigable Will.

But how can men draw near

so fierce a conflagration? - even here,
across a gray and cold and foggy sea
its heat is felt! - Why,
touch your cheek – is it not hot and tight and dry?

And look what light climbs up the eastern sky, and sinks

and climbs again!
Like the bright Aurora of the North
it floods and flushes, pulses, pales – then glows,
lighting the entire East majestically;
as if it were the sun that rose.
                                                                        I wish it were!
Have patience, friend; it yet may be.

Surely our fibre and our sinews, the backbone

and brain of us, are made of some less common stuff
than clay? - Surely the blood which warms the veins
of heroes at the front, our brothers and our songs,
runs also in our own!
And are we not then capable perhaps of something more courageous
            than we yet have shown?

Surely some talisman, some token of

our lofty pride in them, our heavy gratitude,
and so much, so much love,
will find its way to them!
Some messenger, the vicar and the angel
of what we feel,
will fly before them where they fly, before them and above,
like patron goddesses in wars of old,
cleaving with level lovely brows the hard air
before the eager prows,
lighting their way with incandescent wings and winged heel.

This is the hour, this the appointed time.

The sound of the clock falls awful on our ears,
and the sound of the bells, their metal clang and chime,
tolling, tolling,
for those about to die.
For we know well they will not all come home, to lie
in summer on the beaches.

And yet weep not, you mothers of young men, their wives,

their sweethearts, all who love them well -
fear not the tolling of the solemn bell:
it does not prophesy,
and it cannot foretell;
it only can record;
and it records today the passing of a most uncivil age,
which had its elegance, but lived too well,
and far, oh, far too long;
and which, on History's page,
will be found guilty of injustice and grave wrong.

            …..........

Oh Thou, Thou Prince of Peace, this is a prayer for War!

Yet not a war of man against his fellowman.
Say, rather Lord, we do beseech
Thy guidance and Thy help:
In exorcising from the mind of Man, where she has made her nest,
a hideous and most fertile beast -
and this to bring about with all dispatch, for look, where even now
            she would lie down again to whelp!

Lord God of Hosts!  Thou Lord O Hosts not only, not alone

of battling armies Lord and King;
but of the child-like heart as well, which longs
to put away – oh, not the childish, but the adult
circuitous and adroit, antique and violent thing
called War;
and sing
the beauties of this late-to-come but oh-so-lovely Spring!
For see
where our young men go forth in mighty numbers, to set free
from torture and from every jeopardy
things that are dear to Thee.

Keep in Thy loving care, we pray, those of our fighting men

whose happy fortune it may be to come back home again
after the War is over; and all those who must perforce remain,
the mourned, the valiant slain.
This we beseech Thee, Lord.  And now before
we rise from kneeling, one thing more:
Soften our hard and angry hearts; make us ashamed
of doing what we do, beneath Thy very eyes, knowing it does
                        displease Thee.
Make us more humble, Lord, for we are proud
without sufficient reason; let our necks be bowed
more often to Thy will;
for well we know what deeds find favor in Thy sight and still
we do not do them.

Oh Lord, all through the night, all through the day,

keep watch over our brave and dear, so far away.
Make us more worthy of
their valor; and Thy love.

“Let them come home!  Oh, let the battle, Lord, be brief,

and let our boys come home!”
So cries the heart, sick for relief
from its anxiety, and seeking to forestall
a greater grief.

So cries the heart aloud.  But the thoughtful mind

has something of its own to say:
“On that day -
when they come home – from very far away -
and further than you think -
(for each of them has stood upon the very brink
or sat and waited in the anteroom
of Death, expecting every moment to be called by name)

Now look you to this matter well;

that they
upon returning shall not find

seated at their own tables, - at the head,

perhaps , of the long, festive board prinked out in prodigal array,
the very monster which they sallied forth to conquer and to quell;
and left behind for dead.”
Let us forget such words, and all they mean,
as Hatred, Bitterness and Rancor, Greed,
Intolerance, Bigotry; let us renew
our faith and pledge to Man, his right to be
Himself, and free.

Say that the Victory is ours – then say -

and each man search his heart in true humility -
“Lord!  Father!  Who are we
that we should wield so great a weapon for the rights
and rehabilitation of Thy creature Man?
Lo, from all corners of the Earth we ask
all great and noble to come forth – converge
upon this errand and this task with generous and gigantic plan:

Hold high this Torch, who will.

Lift up this Sword, who can!”