Your analysis is thought-provoking. I bring an anti-heroism bias to the table but, as you pointed out, the comment restricts itself to the assertion that the hero is the sky.

Out of curiosity, what do you make of the last line of Stafford’s poem? It sounds sarcastic, to me.

I’ve stumbled this page, good work!

Cheers,

Mitch
Mitchell Allen´s last [type] ..To Have and To Hold ‘Til Deft Filters Part

Remember your words, “…an absence is not nothing.” They apply very much to this poem. It is a war poem and treats the absence of war, battlefields, shots, bombs, mangled bodies that separate the grass, monuments to the dead, heros and nationailty.

‘ONLY the sky is heroic’ seems like a negative statement. Here the sky is simply a void. There is no heroism. We can’t hear the birds because they are flying so high; otherwise we certainly do hear them and would hear vultures descending on a field of dead bodies.

Heroism and Nationalism (see Hitler) are questionable concepts. Samuel Beckett is unable to put heroes into his plays as the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare still did.

You say grass cannot hold hands, denying the poet his imagery. “This is the field where grass joined hands” is one of the most moving lines in the poem.

If people forget the name of the place, they must once have known it: may be, if they succeded in remembering it, it would become the place of piece and unheroic blue skies which the poem seeks to deny.

If you’re interested in Hesiod, mentioned at the end of the entry, the “Theogony” is where to look (it’s a 1000 line poem), and there’s an essay on it by Seth Benardete entitled “The First Crisis in First Philosophy” which I highly recommend. None of that has anything to do with Stafford’s poem directly, to be sure.