“Sun Pictorial”

[Note written for a couple of high school classes which were studying the poem]

The impulse behind “Sun Pictorial” was a television documentary about the American Civil War (The Civil War, by Ken Burns) which I watched on TV in the early 1990s, as I recall. One episode dealt in some detail with the fact that many photographers took photographs of events and people in the war, using the old glass plates required at the time. This was the first war to be so recorded. There were so many of these plates left over after the war that large numbers of them were simply thrown away and, as I say in the poem, sometimes retrieved to build greenhouses. The effects of sunlight in due course erased the negatives on the plates. This immediately struck me as a beautiful and moving image for human transience in general and the destructiveness of war in particular: people are simply erased. So I knew that I would write a poem about it sooner or later.

It was not long after that the so-called First Gulf War took place, which accounts for the contemporary war imagery in the poem. This was the war conducted by the first President Bush to repel the forces of Iraq, which had invaded Kuwait. The poem does not refer to the recent Gulf War conducted by President George W Bush, the son of the first President Bush.

The contrast between the simple still photographs of the Civil War and the sophisticated films of the Gulf War provided an obvious point of tension around which the poem is constructed. There is irony, however, in the line “How far from then we’ve come”, because though technology has indeed come a long way, and the destructive power of modern war has correspondingly increased, the essence of war has not changed: it is still a matter of men killing other men and wreaking havoc on societies. The lines

…Who can recall
By day precisely what they watched last night?
Or find the unknown soldier in a field of wheat?

are intended to refer to the way that the modern citizen, seeing images of war on television, is distanced from the reality of what is taking place and to some extent desensitized to its full horror.

Ultimately, though, the focus of the poem is the pathos of the human condition and our brief presence on the earth.

I didn’t actually get around to writing the poem until 1999, and it was published in 2002 in the Paris Review and then in 2003 in my book Lost in the Foreground.

« Previous