BROTHERHOOD OF MEN

by RichardEberhart '26. The Banyan Press (Pawlet,Vermont). 1949. II pp. $2.00.

In this poem of slightly less than 300 lines, the poet as narrator reviews in epitomised form the dangers, sufferings, and degradations of one who was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Corregidor, and who in the horrible days of prison-camps, forced marches, and ship-board dungeon that followed, was enabled to survive comrades dying in every conceivable .form of distress only through a kind of pliant, adroit (though never treacherous) tenacity, a will to survive as a kind of dumb challenge to the power of evil around and the force of temptation within. And the narrator obviously did survive—though with now and then a moment of regret. For fellowship in misery evoked fellowship in compassion and self-sacrifice to an extent rarely encountered in ordinary times.

The blank-verse of the poem is a kind of marriage of the irregular pentameter lineoften, in speaking, reducible to four stressed syllables—of the Jacobean playwrights, and the alliterative four-stressed line of Old English poetry. The result is a rugged line with a kind of "density" in rhythm and diction. So far as content goes, the poet sticks fairly close to the original form of his materials; he has not subjected these to symbolic transformations. The poem makes its effect, therefore, rather by movement and style than by imagery and metaphor. (The influence of Auden is perhaps discernible here.) In its best passages, the poem conveys well the sense of intolerable pressures which made up the daily existence of the soldiers unfortunate enough to fall into Japanese hands. And these pressures operated on victor and vanquished alike; all were in a sense compelled by war, and by the accumulated human sin of which war is an expression.

This particular edition is a collectors' item. It has been set by hand; and of the total of 226 copies, the 200 numbered copies which are for sale have been signed by the author.

CORRECTION—The correct title of the book to which Prof. Charles W. Sargent '15 of Tuck School has contributed eight chapters is Handbook of Cost Accounting Methods, edited by J. K. Lasser and published by D. Van Nostrand Company. The title was erroneously printed last month.