ELA B10: Equity & Ethics, Holocaust Poetry

Holocaust Poetry

• Elegy: a poem lamenting the death of an individual.
• Holocaust Elegy: a lament for the six million people killed in the Holocaust.
• Concrete Poem: The graphic shape or pattern of the poem conveys the meaning, effect, etc. of the poem.
• Enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause over a line-break. If a poet allows all the sentences of a poem to end in the same place as regular line-breaks, a kind of deadening can happen in the ear, and in the brain too, as all the thoughts can end up being the same length. Enjambment creates audible interest.
• Juxtaposition: placing unrelated ideas side by side, leaving it up to the reader to establish connections and impose a meaning.

“Blue” by William Heyen

1. Concrete poem: What is the shape of this poem?
2. How does enjambment enhance his message?
3. This poem, in a way, embodies the children who were killed in Auschwitz. Explain.
4. Notice all of the images that are signified as blue. How does this create juxtaposition?
5. How does “the blue sky” connect the poem to human existence?
6. “To witness”—what does it mean to witness something? Does a witness have a responsibility?
7. Who do you think is the “you” (your) of the poem?
8. To write a text is to oppose the silence. What does this mean?

“The Six Million” by Naomi Replanski

Naomi Replanski was a Russian Jew.

1. Examine the structures of the poem:
2. Number of stanzas?
3. Repetition?
4. Rhyme Scheme?
5. What questions does she raise in the poem?

Handout: (with responses) Equity and Ethics_The Elegy

“First They Came” by Martin Niemöller

(prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor)

 In Germany they came first for the

Communists, and I didn’t speak up

because I wasn’t a Communist. Then

they came for the Jews, and I didn’t

speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade

unionists, and I didn’t speak up

because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn’t speak up because I was a

Protestant. Then they came for me,

and by that time no one was left to

speak up.

1.  What is the message of this poem?
2. Read the information about the author. What does this show us about the importance of the poem?

Equity and Ethics First They Came

The Elegy for an Historical Epoch: Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” and Arnold’s “Dover Beach”

The elegy, as a poetic mode, has often provided a space for poets to lament the loss of an age and to bewail the demise of society. Indeed the elegiac mode has an innate sensibility for capturing the ethos of that liminal space characteristic of profound transitions in ideological shifts in society. In its concern with expressing deep emotion, the elegy embodies the force of the poet’s anxiety and despair. Both Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy employed the elegy as a site for mourning the loss of an age and as a space for raising questions about the future of England. They contextualize the conventions of the English elegy, adapting them to their own epistemological uncertainties and ideological concerns, while raising questions about the alterations of the poetic form, especially in their articulation of grief and consolation. Then, in this refashioned space, they lament, expressing the very anxiety and grief of their age. In particular, I am referring to Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) and Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush (1900). Let’s consider the ways in which these poets configure the ethos of that tenuous period of dramatic social and ideological change into elegy. The English elegy, with its fluid-like conventions, attracts Arnold and Hardy who need a site for lamenting , and who, consequently, mould the sensibility into a work of mourning.

Dover Beach

Arnold and Hardy were decades apart, yet their work overlaps in its concerns. Arnold wrote “Dover Beach” in the middle of the century, while Hardy wrote “The Darkling Thrush” at the end of the century. Nevertheless they both wrote in the Victorian Era, and they contended with some of the same anxieties and uncertainties regarding the changes they witnessed. Let’s consider, briefly, the ideological changes occurring in this period of history. The Victorian Era saw significant advancements in science and technology, which, according to Alan Grob created, “a growing feeling of cosmic perplexity and estrangement” (25). Indeed, shifts in scientific thought challenged traditional metaphysics: questions of agency and causality were being reconsidered. Grob explains:

[Science] had in the wake of its triumphant progress through recent history shaken and even brought down verities that an earlier age had assumed to be eternal, particularly those that, over the preceding eighteen Christian centuries, had come closest to making the world a home” (25).

Long-held Christian beliefs were being questioned, especially with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859). Grob admits that science offered its own verities, especially concerning views on nature, so that it posited “a nature that was also inescapably represented as matter in motion, a material and mechanistic order from which the feeling human soul or even the feeling human psyche found itself estranged and alienated” (25). Our poets, then, find themselves in a world that felt increasingly hostile.

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, fifth edition. Gen. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987. 2132-3. Print.

Hardy, Thomas. “The Darkling Thrush.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, fifth edition. Gen. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987. 2210-11. Print.

Grob, Alan. A Longing Like Despair: Arnold’s Poetry on Pessimism. Newark: University of Delaware, 2002. Print.