On - On Hearing the News that Hitler was Dead
By Benjamin Myers
Hi, I’m Benjamin Myers. I’m a poet from Chandler, Oklahoma, and I’m here to share with you a poem by one of my favorite Oklahoma poets, Jim Barnes.
Jim Barnes is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including Sundown Explains Nothing, Visiting Picasso, and Paris. He has held fellowships from The Rockefeller Foundation, The Camargo Foundation, and The Fulbright Foundation. Barnes was Oklahoma Poet Laureate for 2009/2010, and he holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Arkansas.
The poem I’m going to share with you today is seemingly about history, but it is really about childhood. All of us spend our childhood in a foreign country. This land to which we are so alien when we are small is the land of the adults. When we are small, encounters with the world of adults are disorienting, even unsettling. Adult discussions and adult actions can be mysterious to us, and we often leap to wild associations in an attempt to understand and process these glimpses of the grownup world.
Jim Barnes writes about the childhood encounter with the adult world brilliantly in his poem “On Hearing the News that Hitler was Dead.”
Here is the poem:
ON HEARING THE NEWS THAT HITLER WAS DEAD
When we heard the news that Hitler was dead,
under the porch something shook we couldn’t find.
The dogs were by our sides, and all the hogs
were penned. The radio was full of Europe’s end
and Berlin falling into Red Russia’s hands.
The grown-ups heard it and sent us in the house
with the dogs, their bristles tough as quills.
Something big bumped against the floor and made
the blackest sounds we’d ever heard. Then, still
scraping underneath, it roared aloud until
we turned as white as chalk and someone fired
a shotgun into the dark beneath the floor.
We heard hell break from down below and burst
through the front-yard picket fence: a panther
black as sin itself. They said it cleared a car
in one long leap and the ditch we couldn’t jump.
We sighed and turned our normal brown as if
Some threat of evil had missed us in the night.
The commentator’s words on Hitler’s death left
Us puzzled about the course of war. A gift
of light was what we children waited for.
In the falling night we heard the far-off yowl
of wild cats in the woods, or thought we did.
The news leapt into the dark, wondering how
the master race so-called could master now
with Der Führer dead and the Russians drunk
on German schnapps. But what if he were not
the ashes they said were his? someone asked.
Silence and sound grew thick. Outside, lamplight
Stumbled and fell into a starless night.
Officially, there is no panther population in Oklahoma. Many people, however, especially along the wooly seam with Arkansas, report having seen their sleek and ominous shape stalking through the thick brush. That uncertainty, that legendary status, adds to the mystery and the menace in the poem.
But before we learn about the panther, we know only that there is “something” under the porch. This unease is connected with the news that Hitler is dead, which is certainly good news but also unsettling because it introduces a great note of uncertainty regarding the fate of Europe. The war and its potential aftermath is something the adults speak of in anxious tones that the children take note of. By the beginning of the second stanza the kids are sent inside. Though it seems most obvious that they are sent in to keep them safe from whatever is under the porch, we are also reminded of the kind of talk—talk of war for instance—away from which we were perpetually sent as children.
Meanwhile, Barnes has established a stanza form held together with some fairly tense rhymes—find and end, quills and still—which brings a further sense of unease even as the ordered pattern of the poem emerges. The poem leans into the discomfort and confusion of the moment as the poem’s very form stretches between discernible pattern and disorientation. How like childhood that is! Like the real childhood, that is, not our retroactive sentimentalizing of it.
If the panther embodies menace and uncertainty, the poem’s adults also are somewhat inexplicable. Who fires the shotgun into the dark beneath the house, and is that really a good way to deal with the situation? At any rate, the panther runs off. Still, the children remain puzzled, waiting for “a gift / of light.” What they get instead is the distant sound of wild cats in the dark, something like the distant news of war in Europe.
The poem’s final stanza introduces a further note of uncertainty. Is the Fuhrer really dead? The awaited light doesn’t come, and we end the poem with a darkness of confusion and uncertainty: a true, unsentimental picture of what it is like, at least sometimes, to be small in the land of the adults.
For Poets on the Plains, I’m Benjamin Myers from Chandler, OK.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Benjamin Myers is the Crouch-Matthis Professor of Literature and the director of the Great Books Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University. A former poet laureate of Oklahoma, he is the author of four books of poetry. His work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Image, The Yale Review, 32 Poems, Rattle, and The South Carolina Review, and his sonnet sequence, Black Sunday, was praised by The Wallstreet Journal as one of the “five best books on the dust bowl.” He is a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic and lives in Chandler, OK. His most recent book of poems is The Family Book of Martyrs (2023), and his second book of nonfiction, Ambiguity and Belonging, was recently published by Belle Point Press.
Benjaminmyerspoetry.com
OKLAHOMA – FEATURED POET
Jim Barnes is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including Sundown Explains Nothing, Visiting Picasso, and Paris. He has been invited to give readings of his work in France, Germany, Czech Republic, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, and Korea, and throughout the U.S. He served as Oklahoma Poet Laureate from 2009-2010. In addition, he has held several prestigious fellowships abroad, including those with The Rockefeller Foundation, The Camargo Foundation, and The Fulbright Foundation. As translator, he has published two volumes of the work of the German poet Dagmar Nick, one of which (Summons and Sign) was awarded The Translation Prize from the Translation Center of Columbia University (NYC). Oklahoma Poet Laureate for 2009/2910, he holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Arkansas. He and his spouse, the artist Cora McKown and former professor at Texas Tech, regularly commute between their two homes in Atoka (OK) and Santa Fe (NM). Honi soit qui mal y pense!
(On Hearing the News that Hitler Was Dead)
