Identifying Poems to Their Authors + Historical Context

"When in a suicidal anguish

People expected German guests

And that austere Byzantine spirit

Flew from the Russian Church, once blessed...

I heard a voice. It called to soothe me.

Consolingly, it said, "Come here.

Leave your remote and sinful country.

Leave Russia now for good, my dear."

When in a Suicidal Anguish by Anna Akhmatova (1917)

A Russian poet whose poetry was the voice of World War II. When she was young, her father was disappointed in her for aspiring to be a poet and told her not to bring shame to their family name"I'm not one of those who left the land

To its enemies to grab and rend.

I'm not flattered by their clapping hands,

I offer my songs, but not to them."

"I'm not one of those who left the land

To its enemies to grab and rend.

I'm not flattered by their clapping hands,

I offer my songs, but not to them."

Untitled Poem by Anna Akhmatova (1922)

A Russian poet whose poetry was the voice of World War II. When she was young, her father was disappointed in her for aspiring to be a poet and told her not to bring shame to their family name

"First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist"

First they came... by Martin Niemöller (1946)

A German Lutheran pastor and theologian who previously supported the Nazi regime but later became a vocal critic, which lead to him being a prisoner in concentration camps. The poem was published on January 6th, 1946 and was written in Frankfurt, Germany.

"It could have happened.

It had to happen.

It happened earlier. Later.

Nearer. Farther off.

It happened, but not to you."

Could Have by Wisława Szymborska (1996)

A Polish poet who won a nobel prize in literature.

The poem's historical context is surrounded by fate and survival.

"No monument stands over Babi Yar.

A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.

I am afraid."

Babi Yar by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1961)

A Russian poet who wrote "Babi Yar" in 1961. His poem could be related to the Babi Yar massacre. The Babi Yar massacre was when the Germans entered Ukraine and started murdering people violently.

"The ram came last of all. And Abraham

did not know that it came to answer the

boy's question - first of his strength

when his day was on the wane."

Heritage by Haim Gouri (1960)

A veteran Israeli poet. He serviced in Hungary to assist holocaust survivors. This poem was written in Palestine in 1960. The historical context surrounding this poem is reflected upon the legacy of the Jews the suffered immensely.

"Once more he sees his companions' faces

Livid in the first faint light,

Gray with cement dust,

Nebulous in the mist,"

The Survivor by Primo Levi (1984)

A Jewish-Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz and died by suicide.

"There was a muddy ditch at the side of the road

where the road took a sudden turn. If I could jump —."

Five Muselmänner abreast, the trekking dead,

skeletons on the march to some other camp.

Death March, 1945 by Chana Bloch (2013)

An American poet and translator. Even if this poem was published in 2013, it reflects the events from the Holocaust in 1945. Specifically, the death marches. Seems to recount a survivor's story, possibly retelling or a real life testimony passed on.

It was actually from the author's interview with a WW2 soldier.

"What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons."

Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen (1917)

A British soldier and poet during WW1. This poem was written in 1917 while recovering from shell shock in a military hospital.

"I died with the first blow and was buried

among the rocks of the field.

The raven taught my parents

what to do with me."

Autobiography by Dan Pagis (1970)

Was a Holocaust survivor and Israeli poet. Born in Romania he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp as a kid.

"To my mother

I do not know

In what strange far off earth

They buried you;

Nor what harsh northern winds

Blow through the stubble,

The dry, hard stubble

Above your grave."

Holocaust 1944 by Anne Ranasinghe (1971)

Born as Anne Katz in Essen, Germany, she was a renowned Jewish-German English-language poet from Sri Lanka. She escaped Nazi Germany to England where she met and married her husband, a Sir Lankan prfessor and later bacame a Sir Lankan citizen in 1956. Her mother didn't survive the Holocaust. This ties into the poem, which reflects on personal and historical loss.

"After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won't

straighten themselves up, after all."

The End and the Beginning by Wislawa Szymborska (1993)

A Polish poet who, during World War II, attended underground classes to finish secondary school. Written two years after the Soviet Union dissolved

"The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.

Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing

against a white stone. . . ."

The Butterfly by Pavel Friedmann (1942)

A Jewish-Czechoslovakian poet who was murdered in Auschwitz during the holocaust. He received posthumous fame (fame after his death) for poems that he wrote during and before the war. This one was written before he was murdered.

"What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins

Of St. John's Cathedral this sunny

Day in spring?

What are you thinking here, where the wind

Blowing from the Vistula scatters

The red dust of the rubble?"

In Warsaw by Czesław Miłosz (1945)

The poem was written just after WWII ended. Miosz self-translated this, so we get to read what he wants to say and his careful word choice. He is most famous for writing poems about exile, memory, and faith.

"On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover,

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be."

A Song on the End of the World by Czesław Miłosz (1944)

Polish poet, essayist, and Nobel laureate. This poem was written in Warsaw in 1944, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, amid World War II and shortly before the Warsaw Uprising.