Challenge 182

Poets Apart

Horace’s line “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (‘It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country’) is the theme of two oft-cited poems about WW I:

Owen Seaman’s “Pro Patria” extols a “just war” and calls for self-sacrifice. It echoes in its own way Guelph’s own Col. John McCrae’s much more famous poem “In Flander’s Fields.”
Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est” depicts realistically a soldier’s agony and dismisses Horace’s words as cynicism:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Kevin Ahearn’s “The Lost Lives of Nathan Hale” recalls the theme of Owen Seaman’s poem. Although written from an American point of view, it is not necessarily nationalistic: Nathan Hale picks his causes, and, at the end, Coyote puts “countries” in the plural:

Men and women, by the hundreds, thousands, millions, must be willing, without regret, to lose their lives for their countries... or there would be no countries, leaving us so little to play with.

The ending is perhaps deliberately ambiguous. Are nationalistic wars, then, a devil’s snare? Or a necessary evil?

Willie Smith’s “Unsung Hero” echoes to an extent Wilfred Owen’s theme by alluding to mass slaughter, but his character Bob Gray is betrayed by a duplicitous government.

Some Challenges for our readers, then:

The Battle of New Orleans is remembered in American history schoolbooks from the War of 1812. However, the Battle of Lundy’s Lane is largely overlooked. How can that battle be reconciled with “The Lost Lives of Nathan Hale”?

Corollary: What qualifies a fallen soldier as an avatar of Nathan Hale? Mustn’t one pick and choose one’s wars?
Plato has Socrates distinguish between the “noble lie” and the “bad lie” in literature (cf. “Travesties of Science Fiction,” in this issue). Are “The Lost Lives of Nathan Hale” and “Unsung Hero” good or bad in Plato’s terms? What truth do you find in either or both?

Responses welcome!