"The Coward" [by Eve Merriam]

I've had a soft spot in my heart for Eve Merriam's poem "The Coward" ever since I watched, when I was ten or eleven, the 1949 film Home of the Brave on the old Million Dollar Movie on TV (where they played the same movie back to back to back, and the theme from Gone with the Wind played before and after). The movie, which was directed by Mark Robson, dealt with racism in the army, centering on a platoon entrusted with a dangerous mission on an island in the Pacific that the Japanese tenaciously held.

Home of the Brave was based on a play of the same title by Arthur Laurents (1945), only there it was a Jewish GI subjected to anti-Semitic abuse. The substitution of a black man (played stirringly by James Edwards) was a shrewd stroke for more reasons than one, but what interests me in particular is the idea that an African-American man may, and sometimes is, an allegorical representation of a Jewish-American man -- especially in plays, movies, and musicals of the 1920s and '30s.

Carl Foreman and Arthur Laurents wrote the screenplay for Home of the Brave; Dmitri Tiomkin composed the music, Stanley Kramer produced. The cast included Frank Lovejoy, Lloyd Bridges, Steve Brodie, Jeff Corey, and James Edwards.

Lovejoy, playing a tough-as-nails sergeant, quotes the last six lines of "The Coward," saying that his wife wrote them. It was very many years later that I discovered that the lines came from this poem in Eve Merriam's first book, Family Circle (1946), which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

-- DL

The Coward

You, weeping wide at war, weep with me now.
Cheating a little at peace, come near
And let us cheat together here.

Look at my guilt, mirror of my shame.
Deserter, I will not turn you in;
I am your trembling twin!

Afraid, our double knees lock in knocking fear;
Running from the guns we stumble upon each other.
Hide in my lap of terror: I am your mother.

-- Only we two, and yet our howling can
Encircle the world's end.
Frightened, you are my only friend.

And frightened, we are everyone.
Someone must make a stand.
Coward, take my coward's hand.

-- Eve Merriam (1916-1992)

Comments

along the lines of racial transformations in movies a truly stunning example is Giant, directed by the supposedly right-wing george stevens. this film which i recently saw again after many years is an inspired and wise allegory on sexual and racial prejudice. james dean actually represents a black man -- a conceit that's literalized when he gets so completely covered by oil that he looks like the tarbaby! and rock hudson's hardly-a-secret homosexuality is insightfully meditated upon, especially in the closing scene where liz taylor consoles rock after he loses a brawl. i have not seen the coward and would like to see it. giant is a film perhaps in the same tradition but "veiled." "all men would be cowards if they dared." -- John Wilmot

[Bob Lipman]

I just watched "Home of the Brave" online several days ago. I have seen it many times since first viewing it many years ago. The movie remains one of my favorites. The manner in which black-white racial relations is approached is truly admirable and ahead of its time. I loved the acting, and being a poet myself, those final poetic lines are so beautifully written and pertinent to the entire script. I'm ready to watch the movie again.

[Jim cade]

It is an acurate, feeling poem. It covers all weak moments we all have. I saw it inthe same movie and though, someone with a sensitive heart wrote that.
I just wish we all could live that way... or at least try