The Book of Yolek

“More Light! More Light!” by Anthony Hecht (1967)

Like “The Book of Yolek,” this poem describes a Nazi atrocity in World War II. It begins with the death of a religious prisoner in 16th-century England. He was burned at the stake but continued to assert his innocence and died courageously. The setting changes to a wood in Germany, where a German soldier forces a Polish man and two Jews to dig a grave, which the Jews are forced to lie in. The Pole, however, refuses to fill the grave. The soldier orders the men to change places; the Pole lies in the grave and the Jews shovel the dirt on him. When only his head remains visible, he is ordered out of the grave and the Jews back in. This time the Pole obeys instructions and buries the Jews alive, after which the soldier shoots him in the stomach and he bleeds to death in three hours. Lacking the religious faith of the earlier victim, none of the three is able to die with dignity. Hecht has explained that the latter execution took place in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He got the details from a book by a former prisoner who survived the camp.

“Sestina d’Inverno” by Anthony Hecht (1977)

Unlike “The Book of Yolek,” this sestina is lighthearted and amusing, although Hecht described it as “rather bitter.” The speaker describes the inevitable snowy winter in the “grey, sunless city” of Rochester, New York. (Hecht taught poetry at the University of Rochester for nearly two decades, which is perhaps why he called the poem bitter—he was the one who actually had to live there.) In the title, “d’Inverno” means winter in Italian. The sestina’s six repeated end-words are “Rochester,” “snow,” “mind,” “making,” “island,” and “natives.” Weaving in some brief mythological, literary, and historical references, the speaker says that in Rochester, snow is the only certain thing. Faced with such a winter, the mind amuses itself with thoughts about faraway places, an island, for example, “whose natives / blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making / roasts” (Lines 14-16). As with “The Book of Yolek,” Hecht varies the customary order of the repetition of terminal words in the envoy, this time to 1-2-4.

“September Song” by Geoffrey Hill (1968)

Twentieth-century English poet Hill, like Hecht, turned his attention to the Holocaust. In this poem, the poet memorializes an unnamed 10-year-old child who died in a Nazi gas chamber. The title of the poem refers to the child’s date of birth and the day he or she was deported, both of which were in September. (The exact dates appear in the poem’s epigraph.) The speaker implies that each year in September, the memory of what that child must have suffered comes back. This is similar to what happens in “The Book of Yolek,” in which the month of August brings back the memory of Yolek’s terrible fate.