I think this piece by the American poet Richard Eberhart (1904-2005) is an example of how a fairly indifferent poem can suddenly come alive and be saved by one good stanza. The first three verses really don’t work for me: the philosophising seems trite and ineffectual, the rhymes laboured. But then we have the last four lines, drawing directly on Eberhart’s experience as a gunnery instructor for the United States Navy in 1942: the tone quite different, practical, compassionate, a distillation of pity for young men barely out of school plunged into the maelstrom of war. And still it goes on, as the young grandson of a friend of mine waits even now for his orders at the edge of the Gaza strip…

The Fury of Aerial Bombardment

You would think that the fury of aerial bombardment
Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant.

You would feel that after so many centuries
God would give man to repent; yet he can kill
As Cain could, but with multitudinous skill,
No farther advanced than in his ancient furies.

Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all.?
Is the eternal truth man’s fighting soul
Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?

Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill,
Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.

Richard Eberhart