BLIGHTY

Previous
HE woke: the clank and racket of the train
Kept time with angry throbbings in his brain,
At last he lifted his bewildered eyes
And blinked, and rolled them sidelong; hills and skies.
Heavily wooded, hot with August haze,
And, slipping backward, golden for his gaze,
Acres of harvest.
Feebly now he drags
Exhausted ego back from glooms and quags
And blasting tumult, terror, hurtling glare,
To calm and brightness, havens of sweet air.
He sighed, confused; then drew a cautious breath;
This level journeying was no ride through death.
“If I were dead,” he mused, “there’d be no thinking—
Only some plunging underworld of sinking,
And hueless, shifting welter where I’d drown.”
Then he remembered that his name was Brown.
But was he back in Blighty? Slow he turned,
Till in his heart thanksgiving leaped and burned.
There shone the blue serene, the prosperous land,
Trees, cows and hedges; skipping these he scanned,
Large, friendly names that change not with the year,
Lung Tonic, Mustard, Liver Pills and Beer.

Hugh Pendexter, in Adventure Magazine, says “going west,” as used by the men overseas to mean death, is of peculiarly American origin. The Karok Indians of California believed the spirit of the good Karok went to the “happy western land.” The Cherokee myths picture the west as the “ghost country,” the twilight land where go the dead. The Shawnee tell of the boy who “traveled west” to find his sister in the spirit land. The Chippewa believes the spirit “followed a wide, beaten path toward the west.” The spirit world of the Fox Indians is at the setting of the sun. And so on, in the theology of many Indian nations we find the West as the storied abode of the great majority—who have passed over.

The phrase traces back to the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles:

Toward the Western shore
Soul after soul is known to take her flight.

Its later significance is tenderly sung by Eleanor Jewett in The Chicago Tribune:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Clyx.com


Top of Page
Top of Page