Home
> Uncategorized > John Erskine: Dedication
John Erskine: Dedication
====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
====
John Erskine
Dedication
When imperturbable the gentle moon
Glides above war and onslaught through the night,
When the sun burns magnificent at noon
On hate contriving horror by its light,
When man, for whom the stars were and the skies,
Turns beast to rend his fellow, fang and hoof
Shall we not think, with what ironic eyes
Nature must look on us and stand aloof?
But not alone the sun, the moon, the stars,
Shining unharmed above man’s folly move;
For us three beacons kindle one another
Which waver not with any wind of wars:
We love our children still, still them we love
Who gave us birth, and still we love each other.
Categories: Uncategorized
Comments (0)
Trackbacks (0)
Leave a comment
Trackback
Recent Posts
- William Makepeace Thackeray: War’s slave dealers
- William Makepeace Thackeray: What human crime, misery, slavery, go to form that sum-total of glory!
- F. V. Branford: Over the Dead
- Horace Walpole: Peace is the sole event of which I wish to hear
- Jonathan Swift: We must have peace, let it be a bad or a good one
- Thomas McGrath: Senators mine our lives for another war
- Maxime Du Camp: Gautier, war filled him with horror
- William James: The horrors of a war of conquest
- Horace Walpole: Stuffing hospitals with maimed soldiers, besides making thousands of widows!
- Horace Walpole: Deplorable success of destroying any of our species
- Horace Walpole: I prefer the old hen Peace
- George Meredith: Think war the finest subject for poets?
- Isaac Rosenberg: Poems on war
- Isaac Rosenberg: In War
- Dante: The decree of peace the centuries wept for
- Vauvenargues: Soldiers
- Vauvenargues: If we could discover the secret of banishing war forever
- Jules Renard: Almost succeed in making you accept the butcheries of war
- Henri Troyat: War, war, war! Oh, why?
- Philip Freneau: Death smiles alike at battles lost or won
- Stephen Vincent Benét: Toy soldiers
- Henri Troyat: I prefer to die, so that I no longer have to see the others die
- Francis Saltus Saltus: Selections on peace and war
- Jorge Guillén: Rest peacefully, free of our presences
- Francis Saltus Saltus: Deem you one ambitious whose subjects bleed and perish on a field?
- Francis Saltus Saltus: Thy theme was one of utter peace
- Francis Saltus Saltus: Peace to see our Love and Law arrived to witness cruel War
- Lawrence Schoonover: An entire nation praying for peace at one time
- Edwin Markham: Semiramis, the conqueror
- Francis Saltus Saltus: If we saw but a century of peace
- George Preedy: One gigantic symbol of war, a cloudy impersonal cohort of Mars
- Lawrence Schoonover: An age of strict justice and peace, when nations shall live under law, without war
- Thomas Campbell: That first spoke peace to man
- Lawrence Schoonover: Accursed powder
- Walter Scott: The diffusion of knowledge, not the effusion of blood
- Walter Scott: The worst sort of frenzy, military frenzy, hath possessed man, woman and child
- Joanna Baillie: Making his simple audience to shrink with tales of war and blood
- Anatole France: Moved by the spectacle of the miseries and crimes of war
- Jean-Paul Clébert: Concrete monsters. Had war devastated everything and there was no one left alive?
- Hans Habe: John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered
- Hans Hellmut Kirst: Selections on war and peace
- Ödön von Horváth: We must prepare them to be warriors. Just that.
- Hans Hellmut Kirst: Each thinks it’s in the right, each wants peace and only wishes to defend itself
- Sinclair Lewis: The democracy of death
- Willi Heinrich: If the women had their own way there would be the death penalty for making or bearing arms
- Willi Heinrich: A people proud of its war dead has learned nothing from war
- Hans Hellmut Kirst: “Just a dirty, rotten business from beginning to end”
- Willi Heinrich: “It’s quite enough that I know it”
- Hans Hellmut Kirst: Nothing – absolutely nothing – can justify war
- Hans Hellmut Kirst: It was as if the whole world had become simply one vast graveyard
- Hans Habe: Constituent battles of the Third World War. You can’t pick your battlefields once war is in progress.
- Hans Habe: Hiroshima-born realization of man’s destructibility by man
- Heinrich Böll: I saw the fateful gleam in his eyes too late
- Eric Ambler: The Law did not think killing for money was insane
- Villiers de L’Isle-Adam: Vox Populi
- Eric Ambler: It is not good for those who fight to know too much. Speeches, yes. The truth, no!
- Jun’ichirō Tanizaki: A day’s work, a night’s dream
- Alejo Carpentier: War’s long reach
- Francis Bebey: They all come into the world speaking the same language of peace and friendship
- Edgar Wallace: War
- Edgar Wallace: Or wars would be impossible
- John Buchan: That night I realized the crazy folly of war
- E. Philips Oppenheim: Black tragedy leaned over the land
- Leo Tolstoy: As if there were any rules for killing people
- Leo Tolstoy: How is it that millions of men commit collective crimes – make war, commit murder, and so on?
- Leo Tolstoy: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?”
- Leo Tolstoy: He who kills most people receives the highest rewards
- Leo Tolstoy: War began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature
- Leo Tolstoy: Then why those severed arms and legs and those dead men?
- W. H. Auden: The shield of Achilles
- Stephen Leacock: War-Time Christmas
- Leo Tolstoy: Men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing one another
- Leo Tolstoy: Dialogues on war
- F. Marion Crawford: The real issue is between civilization and barbarism, between peace and war
- Stephen Leacock: Merry Christmas
- F. Marion Crawford: When everyone understands war it will stop by universal consent
- Lucy Aikin: Freedom and Peace with radiant smile now carol o’er the dungeon vile
- Louise Imogen Guiney: The voice of Peace
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selections on war
- Henri Fauconnier: A chance encounter on the evening of a day of slaughter
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Did iron-hearted War itself ever do so hard and cruel a thing as this before?
- Elizabeth Inchbald: War, a choice of words
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Every warlike achievement involves an amount of physical and moral evil
- Horace Walpole: I wish there were an excuse for not growing military mad
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: How glorious it would have been if our forefathers could have kept the country unspotted with blood!
- C. S. Lewis: The folly and danger of noble and humanitarian war
- Horace Walpole: We peaceable folks are now to govern the world
- John Erskine: Dedication
- William Morris: The role of soldiers and how they will disappear
- C. P. Snow: Their day is done
- Hervey Allen: Dragon’s Breath
- Richard Jefferies: The raven, a fable
- Hervey Allen: Hands off our dead! To war orators.
- Angela Morgan: War! Shall you be our lover? War! Shall you be our mate?
- Lillian Rozell Messenger: Why this feast of shells each day, the fury, blood and wail of war?
- André Pieyre de Mandiargues: Mercy and Peace squares
- H. Lavinia Baily: Recall
- D. H. Lawrence: If they do not kill him in this war
- Emmanuel Roblès: The war has changed my soul
Blog Stats
- 2,054,643 hits