World War II was so broadly supported, so broadly perceived as just and necessary, that it is easy to forget those who said no to it: jailed COs like David Dellinger, Lowell Naeve, Robert Lowell, and Bayard Rustin, and those like William Stafford and William Everson (1912–1994) who did alternative service in civilian camps. How strange the experiences of these last must have been, not fighting, not resisting, doing useful but somehow irrelevant ordinary work in the woods! Everson’s elegy gives us a glimpse of that life in the community of Camp Angel, a community both contingent and intentional.
Everson was born in Sacramento to Christian Scientist parents, both printers. He was led to become a poet by reading Robinson Jeffers; “Jeffers showed me God,” he later wrote. He was sent to Camp Angel, on the coast of Oregon, in 1943, and in his free time—after the day’s hard labor—he printed Ten War Elegies on the camp’s makeshift press and ran a fine arts program. After the war he migrated to San Francisco and the circle of Kenneth Rexroth. In 1951 he became Catholic, worked at the Catholic Worker House in Oakland, and joined the Dominican Order, taking the name Brother Antoninus (and the nickname “the Beat Friar”). He left that order in 1969, marrying a week later and becoming poet-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
To sunder the rock—that is our day.
In the weak light,
Under high fractured cliffs
We turn with our hands the raw granite,
We break it with iron.
Under that edge it suffers reduction.
Harsh, dense and resistant,
The obdurate portions
Flaw and divide.
From the road in the dawns we behold the sea,
In its prone slumber,
Holding the west with heavy ease.
The rock closes it out,
Narrows our sky,
In the morning thaws lets fall its sparse rubble.
We wait, suspended in time;
Locked out of our lives
We abide, we endure,
Our temporal grievance diminished and slight
In the total awareness of what obtains,
Outside, in the bone-broken world.
Confronting encroachment the mind toughens and grows.
From this exigence
Both purpose and faith achieve coherence:
Such is our gain.
We perceive our place in the terrible pattern,
And temper with pity the fierce gall,
Hearing the sadness,
The loss and the utter desolation,
Howl at the heart of the world.