John Green Reads Poetry

Hank: I’m pretty good, I’ve had a bit of an annoying day, I’ll be honest. We can talk about that later, but first, can you have a short poem for us?

John: Sure, this is a poem to remind you that as annoying as your day might have been, it’s better than World War I was. […]

(Reads poem)

Hank: Oof. 

John: A. E. Housman’s poem on death and war, and also I think the centrality of the body. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, Hank. It was really in the first World War that poets in Europe started to grapple with the question of the seriousness of destroying or endangering or acting violently upon a human body, because, you know, for most of European history for the last thousand years, the destruction of the body was secondary to the destruction or endangering of the soul, like, you know, the soul was gonna survive in a way that the body wasn’t, and it was really in World War I when poets began to grapple with, you know, that in a world where maybe there aren’t human souls or maybe the human soul doesn’t survive the human body, that… began to grapple with kind of the seriousness of bodily destruction, and Housman did that very interestingly throughout his career, but I think also in that poem.

Hank: Well, my refrigerator isn’t working.

John: Yeah.

Hank: Which is super annoying.

John: That is tough. You know what it reminds me of a little bit is that 20 million actual human beings died in World War I, but I’m sorry about your fridge.

Hank: I’ve been shuffling materials around and knocking on neighbors’ doors so that I can put my frozen vegetables in their freezers and boy, what a… You’ve ruined all of my complaint, John, I can no longer complain about the thing I wanted to complain about.

Here dead lie we
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.