More Light! More Light! by Anthony Hecht

First published: 1967, in The Hard Hours

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

Anthony Hecht’s “‘More Light! More Light!’” is a poem of witness, a narration of murders centuries apart: first, the execution, by fire, of a medieval prisoner, and next, the killing of two Jews and a Pole in Germany during World War II. In formal, measured quatrains, Hecht speaks of nearly intolerable atrocities. The poem begins with a painfully detailed account of the death of the first man, who is burned at the stake: “His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap/ Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.” It is part of the poem’s irony, and its power, that this horrible death is by far the most humane event in “‘More Light! More Light!’” The medieval prisoner is stripped of his life, but not his humanity. He suffers physical torture yet retains the hope of his soul’s salvation, as do even his executioners. His is an age of faith; his death is public and ceremonial and not, to himself nor to those who witness it, meaningless.

The twentieth century, in Hecht’s poem, is the true age of darkness: a world of “casual death” with no hope of redemption for victims of its random brutality and systematic evil. The only witnesses to the murders of the Jews and the Pole are “Ghosts from the ovens”; the death of a single man at the stake has become a mass burning, a Holocaust both physical and spiritual.

Much happens in this short poem of eight stanzas, and there is an urgency and immediacy in the telling that draws the reader in despite the lack of background. Stanzas 1-3 describe the first death. Hecht does not name the man condemned to die at the stake, nor name his crime—perhaps heresy, the critic Daniel Hoffman suggested—but his description evokes sympathy. Awaiting death, the prisoner writes “moving verses” and calls upon God to witness his innocence. Though little can relieve the cruelty of the means of death, the victim is “Permitted at least his pitiful dignity,” and prayers are said for his soul.

With the fourth stanza, the reader enters a different world, a shift made clear by the change in tone. “We move now to outside a German wood,” the stanza begins, the poet’s voice almost a parody of the narration for a film travelogue. The stark description of events that follows, however, makes clear that any irony here is dark and savage rather than playful. A German soldier, identified only by his uniform and gun—glove, boot, Lüger—orders a Pole and two Jews to dig a grave, then orders the Pole to bury the Jews alive. When the Pole refuses, he is ordered to change places with the Jews. Too drained by war to resist, they begin to bury the Pole; at the last minute, the order is reversed, and the Jews are told to dig him out. This time, when the Pole is ordered to bury the other men alive, he does so, dehumanized by the mocking game of death. The ending of the game is brutal: The German shoots the Pole in the belly and he dies a lonely and anonymous death with “no prayers or incense,” no one to comfort or to mourn him.

The final image of the poem places the death of the three victims in the larger context of the millions murdered in the Holocaust, whose ghosts are evoked as “black soot” from the crematory ovens. For such an enormity, Hecht seems to say, there can be no false light of hope, no redemption, and the poem offers none, only the silent witness of the dead.

Forms and Devices

“‘More Light! More Light!’” tells its story in eight rhymed pentameter quatrains, or four-line stanzas, in a variation on the traditional ballad form. Like a ballad, the poem tells a story of the past—a story that may or may not be apocryphal, but that feels emotionally true. If the exact incidents described here did not happen, horrors like them certainly did. This blurring of history and myth is heightened by the anonymity of the characters in the poem; neither the victims nor their persecutors are named. The effect is to universalize Hecht’s parable of cruelty, denying the reader the luxury of imagining that evil is limited to one person or one time or place. All humanity is implicated in these actions.

Hecht’s diction is spare and formal. Like the ghosts from the death camps he evokes, the poet is present in the work as a disembodied spectator, relating the events as they happen. There is no first-person narrator and little attempt to mediate or interpret the action. The details are precise, almost reportorial, viewed as through a lens of time and distance.

In another poem from The Hard Hours, “Behold the Lilies of the Field,” Hecht speaks in the voice of a disturbed man who relates a dream in which he is forced to watch the torture and death of a fallen Roman emperor; bound and helpless, the watcher is forbidden to close his eyes or look away. In “‘More Light! More Light!’,” it is the reader who is made to bear witness. Rather than entering into the minds and emotions of the characters, the language works to remind readers of their place as readers, as watchers who, perhaps like the poet himself, can see and know the world’s evil but cannot end it. Casting a cold eye on pain that is probably beyond description, the poet elicits emotion from the reader precisely by not demanding it. The starkness of a sentence such as “He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death” offers no judgment. Hecht provides the facts and allows the reader to imagine a scene for which ordinary adjectives of sorrow or outrage would seem inadequate.

Synecdoche is a device the poet uses several times, and to great effect. Hecht never describes the Nazi officer in the final scene; his menace is conveyed solely through his gun and glove: “The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.” Appropriately faceless, dehumanized, the soldier represents the institutionalization of evil, opposed to the frail humanity of the Pole, represented by his “quivering chin” and his eyes which, in the poem’s final image, are lightless and lifeless. In a sense, too, the events of the poem are themselves synecdoche: miniature scenes of death that represent a larger canvas of destruction. To read of the death of millions may be more than the mind can comprehend, but by showing one lonely killing “outside a German wood,” Hecht takes the Holocaust out of the realm of statistics and makes it life-sized; like the anguished watcher of Hecht’s other poem, the reader cannot look away.

Bibliography

German, Norman. Anthony Hecht. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

Lea, Sydney, ed. The Burdens of Formality: Essays on the Poetry of Anthony Hecht. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

Hoffman, Daniel. The Harvard Guide to Contemporary AmericanWriting. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

McClatchy, J. D. White Paper: On Contemporary Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987.

Spiegelman, William. The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.