What Saves Us and The Way of Tet by Bruce Weigl are two poems that find the small pockets of beauty in war amidst all of its’ ugliness and elaborates on that beauty with Weigl’s powerful and eye opening writing techniques. Weigl writes with painstaking care and every syllable, adjective, and break is surgically placed here and there to evoke specific emotions from the reader. Bruce Weigl approach to writing is captivating and pure. In the first poem What Saves Us Weigl writes about a young man who is preparing to deploy to Vietnam.
The first half of the poem is entirely about the main character’s desire to have sex with his presumed girlfriend. “The next morning I would leave for the war….. I thought to myself that I would not die never having been inside her body” ( Weigel 605) in these lines the audience senses how imperative having sex is to the main character. The reader can either interpret these lines one of two ways. The audience could find the main character’s lust for his girlfriend as charming or appealing. A reader may also interpret the main character’s sexually motivated ambitions as perverted.
The main character’s eagerness for sex and impatience for sex causes the reader to question if his feelings for his girlfriend are genuine or if their relationship is predominantly based on the main character’s desire to fornicate. The theme of the poem drastically shifts within the lines “I tried to tear my pants off when she stopped….. she reached to find something, a silver crucifix on a long silver chain”(Weigl 605). In these lines Weigl makes an odd abrupt shift in the motif of the story from sex to religion. Religion and sex are polar opposites of each other and this sudden swing is unexpected by the reader.
Weigl probably added this detail to the story for shock value, to off put readers. The first half of the poem is very much theme-oriented but when the reader gets to the line “She put it around my neck and held me” (605) the overall tone of the poem shifts. People reading the poem with any sense of humor can laugh at the comedy in the main character’s girlfriend stopping him from pulling down his pants so that she can present him with a crucifix. However when she places the crucifix around the soldier’s neck and holds the man like a mother to a child, all humor dissipates leaving powerful sentiments.
The religious importance and symbolism behind the gifted crucifix is painfully obvious and elementary to many readers. A significant event that is a little more discreet, is the female character’s decision to not have sex with the main character but instead gives him a holy cross and the loving touch of a woman. This event is significant to the story because it makes the reader aware to the level of intimacy and the genuine bond between the two characters. In contrast to the first half of the poem, the second half removes all references to anything that could be interpreted as lewd.
Weigl’s purpose behind this is to give the main character innocence and to alter the reader’s perspective of the main character from a amourous manly soldier to an overwrought teenager who is fighting a war he had no say in. This somber realization evokes empathy within the reader. The line “We are not always right about what we think will save us” (605) is the most awe-inspiring and thought provoking line in the poem. The reader will automatically place extra emphasis on this line of the poem because the poem’s title is in it.
Weigl crafted this line to be intentionally ambiguous and that is an aspect that only makes the poem more captivating. “We are not always right in what we think will save us” (605). Readers’ can interpret this statement in numerous different ways. The initial question that will be probably be etched into many readers’ minds is “Is God even real? “. To read a poem one must start at the title, and when a person reads the title to the poem What Saves Us we subconsciously call Jesus Christ to the back of our minds.
Jesus Christ our Lord and “Savior”, the man that upposedly died on a cross to “save” humanity. It can be implied that the main character also questions the legitimacy of religion but there is not concrete evidence within the text as to if he does or does not. In the closing lines of the poem the main character says that he “carried the crucifix in my pocket and rubbed it on my face and lips nights the rockets roared in” (605). Assuming that you also believe that the main character is at an odds with religion, it raises another the question of “Why does hold the crucifix so dear? “. Does the main character believe in God after all?
Did the atrocities of war cause the main character to hope that there is actually higher power? Does he hold the crucifix dear to heart because of his girlfriend? At the end of the day what saves us as individuals? What inspires humans to not only survive, but to continue reaching new heights and pushing the human race forward? Is it a god? Is it ourselves? Is it an alien government trillions of miles away controlling every aspect of our lives? What Saves Us. The title of this Bruce Weigel poem is the rhetorical question that you are left with at the conclusion.
Weigl’s second poem The Way of Tet also discusses topic of war and the internal struggles of a soldier protagonist but in this plot the tones and conflicts are entirely different. Objects described in the opening scene of the story such as “Saigon graveyards” “Buddhas” (606) and burning incense make it apparent to the reader that the story is taking place in an Asian country. There’s not enough information given in the text to determine which country specifically, but Vietnam is safe assumption.
Fives lines into the poem, Weigl wastes no time getting into one of the more vulgar themes of the story, sex. weary bar girls burned incense before the boy soldiers arrived to buy tea and touch them where they please” (606) these couple of lines briefly describes the central bonding agent between U. S soldiers and native populations, specifically women, in warring countries. Weigl’s description of U. S military personnel as “boy soldiers” implies to the reader that the majority of these soldiers are probably problem prone, hyperactive, American youth. The story moves onto the lines “touch them(the girls) where they pleased. Twenty years and the feel of a girl’s body so young there’s no hair is like a dream” (606).
Scanning these lines is comparable to telepathically mind reading a seasoned pervert’s thoughts. The Asian women in this story are sexually objectified and are treated unkindly by soldiers. ““living is a darker thing….. he remembers her twisting in what evening light broke into the small room in the shack in the labyrinth of shacks” (606). This scene describes the vulgar gross reality that these girls live with. These young women face are objectified by foreign men and many girls are with left no choice but to prostitute themselves as a means of living.
He undressed her for the last time, each piece of clothing a sacrifice to the war” (606) Weigl wants the reader to feel empathy for these young women and with this line he achieves that goal. Also within those lines the helplessness of the Asian women’s situation is conveyed to the reader. Weigl describes “each piece of clothing”(606) as being “a sacrifice she surrendered to the war the way the world had become”. The women in this story sacrificed their womanhood and bodies to not only support themselves but their families as well.
These young women unknowingly kept together their wartorn countries with their vaginas. The story progresses into the l“Tomorrow blood would run in every province. Tomorrow people would rise from the tunnels everywhere” (606) In these two lines Weigl steps away from the conflict of sex and examines the bigger conflict at hand which is war. “the boy who came ten thousand miles to touch her small self lies beside the girl” (606) At this moment of the story the reader experiences a paradigm shift that pardons the American soldier’s ungentleman like behavior.
Weigl suddenly flips the story and transforms it into a love poem. “She is a white bird in the bamboo, fluttering…. he imagines he could hold all of her in his hands and lift her to the black sky beyond the illumination round’s white light where she would fly from her life and the wounds from the lovers would heal” (606-607). In those lines Weigl delivers powerful intimate poetry complemented by ultra colorful and elegant imagery.
The emotion within the ending lines and the soldier’s sudden awakening to the beautiful girl in front of him and his aspirations to help metaphorically up lift her from these slums and let her fly and truly be happy. Weigl’s symbolism behind and gorgeous effective use of imagery can inspire enlightened readers to shed a tear at the poem’s beauty. Bruce Weigl ranks chief among extraordinary poetry writer’s of the 19th century. Weigl’s poetry is the epitome of elegance and one can truly appreciate all the thought provoking subliminal messages spotted throughout his work.
