“The Conscientious Objector” is a poem written by a soldier trying to imagine and do justice to his philosophical antagonist. It accordingly dramatizes both the soldier’s anger at the resister and the civic necessity of having the resister be there in the first place: “Your conscience is / What we come back to in the armistice.”
Born in Baltimore and educated at the University of Virginia, Karl Shapiro (1913–2000) was an established poet before he was drafted as a soldier in March 1941. He managed to write numerous poems during his three years’ service in Australia and New Guinea, characterizing himself as “a poet in a Battle Zone, which he had seen almost nothing of, who was serenely writing good poetry.” He received a special Guggenheim in 1944 and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book V-Letter and Other Poems (1944). (“The Conscientious Objector” was published in his volume The Trial of a Poet, in 1947.) He went on to have a distinguished poetic career, but chiefly as a poet of “hendecasyllables and the conversational,” committed to formal rigor and to a full representation of ordinary life.
Many of the traditions of American war resistance are profoundly Christian in origin, and many antiwar writers are also Christians. That preponderance becomes less pronounced around this moment, as the community of war resistance begins to diversify; the presence of American-born Jewish writers like Replansky and Shapiro hints at that enlargement.
The gates clanged and they walked you into jail
More tense than felons but relieved to find
The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped
From every mother’s windowpane, obscene
The bloodlust sweating from the public heart,
The dog authority slavering at your throat.
A sense of quiet, of pulling down the blind
Possessed you. Punishment you felt was clean.
The decks, the catwalks, and the narrow light
Composed a ship. This was a mutinous crew
Troubling the captains for plain decencies,
A Mayflower brim with pilgrims headed out
To establish new theocracies to west,
A Noah’s ark coasting the topmost seas
Ten miles above the sodomites and fish.
These inmates loved the only living doves.
Like all men hunted from the world you made
A good community, voyaging the storm
To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat;
Trouble or calm, the men with Bibles prayed,
The gaunt politicals construed our hate.
The opposite of all armies, you were best
Opposing uniformity and yourselves;
Prison and personality were your fate.
You suffered not so physically but knew
Maltreatment, hunger, ennui of the mind.
Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach
Erupting in his face damn all your kind.
Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us
Are equally with those who shed the blood
The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is
What we come back to in the armistice.