The Language of Love

“Red lips are not so red

As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

Kindness of wooer and wooed

Seems shame to their love pure.”

From the poem “Greater Love” by Wilfred Owen

I wanted to look more at the point Monica brought up in her post. As she mentioned, in Chapter Eight, Anderson cites the singing of national anthems as a means by which the community can achieve a moment of simultaneity. I agree with her in that the performance of an anthem must be constantly reproduced and re-performed to achieve its value. Nonetheless, I wonder how relevant the performance is in the case of poetry, another cultural product cited by Anderson as means by which individuals can cultivate and express “profoundly self-sacrificing love” for the nation (141). Perhaps it is not ideal, but poetry, unlike a national anthem, can oftentimes have as much meaning when experienced alone.

Take, for example, another example of WWI poetry by Edward Thomas:

“If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.”

From “This is No Case of Petty Wrong or Right” by Edward Thomas

No matter if one hears these lines or reads them alone, they pack a powerful punch. They also illustrate Anderson’s argument that “political love can be deciphered from the ways in which languages describe its object: either in the vocabulary of kinship (motherland, Vaterland, patria) or that of home (heimat or tanah air [earth and water, the phrase for the Indonesians’ native archipelago]). Both idioms denote something to which one is naturally tied” (143). Thomas believes himself one with England: the nation is both the source of his body and his home.

Lydia Magyar