ハーバート・リード覚書 : その詩『戦いの終り』をめぐって
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概要
- 論文の詳細を見る
Among the war poems inspired by his experience as an infantry officer in World War I, The End of a War has been the most widely known and has won the highest fame. Based on an episode of the war, the poem consists of three parts: "Meditation of a Dying German Officer," "Dialogue between the Body and the Soul of the Murdered Girl," and "Meditation of the Waking English Officer." In this essay I try to look at the poem analytically in the light of the poet's outlook on the world as he states it in his other works. After some introductory remarks, I survey Read's philosophy, dwelling chiefly on the two principles which seem most essential to its framework. Briefly, the two principles are Reason and Romanticism, as the title of his first book suggests: the belief that, by the exertion of reason alone, we can establish laws valid for both our aethetic and social life, and the belief in a leap into the unknown beyond the law-abiding world, where imagination defies reason and leads us to a heightened mode of consciousness. In the analysis of The End of a War which I attempt in the third section, my conclusion is as follows. The first and third parts of the poem can each be ascribed to one of the two above-mentioned attitudes. What is embodied in the image of the dying officer is "the sense of glory," which is one aspect of his romanticism, while the waking officer of the third part represents fidelity to reason. The symmetrical structure of the poem is further reinforced by the fact that the two partners in the dialogue of the second part, "the Body" and "the Soul", can be regarded in a similar way, "the Soul" being traceable to the "sense of glory" and "the Body" to the poet's confidence in reason. What strikes us when the inner structure of the poem is thus elucidated is the lack of any dialectic movement in the poem. Between the two opposing principles there exists an equation, but not a trend toward the synthesis which he seems to have reached in his philosophy. As a result, the unity of the poem is lost, and solidity of the poetical world is felt only fragmentarily.
- 東京女子大学の論文
- 1971-03-31