Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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In his next volume of poetry, Thirty Poems (1944) – mainly written during his stay as English teacher in St. Bonaventure University, but also during the first years of his novitiate – the criticism of the urban life goes into a secondary plane and it is replaced by a direct attack of a world full of wars and death in compositions such as “Lent in a Year of War” (on the Civil American War), “In memory of the Spanish Poet Federico García Lorca”(on the Spanish Civil War), “For my Brother: Reported missing in action, 1943” or “The Night Train” (on the disasters of the Second World War).¹² Making use of clever comparisons, personifications, striking metaphors and exaggerations, they all denounce the barbarism which was isolating Europe and its cities, as well as the material destruction of its culture and art:

Cities that stood, by day, as gay as lancers

Are lost in the night, like old men dying

At a point where polished rails branch off forever

The steels lament, like crazy ladies.

We wake, and weep the deaths of cathedrals