photograph by Dorothea Lange (1935?)
Perhaps the quintessential American poem about the Spanish Civil War—because it captures both the idealism of the cause and the sense of loss and exile that followed the Spanish Republic’s loss—is Edwin Rolfe’s (1909–1954) “First Love” (1943):
Again I am summoned to the eternal field
green with the blood still fresh at the roots of flowers,
green through the dust-rimmed memory of faces
that moved among the trees there for the last time
before the final shock, the glazed eye, the hasty mound.
But why are my thoughts in another country?
Why do I always return to the sunken road through corroded hills,
with the Moorish castle’s shadow casting ruins over my shoulder,
and the black-smocked girl approaching, her hands laden with grapes?
I am eager to enter it, eager to end it.
Perhaps this will be the last one.
And men afterward will study our arms in museums
and nod their heads, and frown, and name the inadequate dates
and stumble with infant tongues over the strange place-names.
But my heart is forever captive of that other war
that taught me first the meaning of peace and of comradeship
and always I think of my friend who amid the apparition of bombs
saw on the lyric lake the single perfect swan.
