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Author's Note: It is with the patronage of The Royal Library that I have been encouraged to take up my pen once more. I cannot say that they shall profit much from naming me a Writer-in-Residence, particularly while my subject matter remains so drear, but nonetheless it is to them that you owe any praise, if any should be found due, for this little work.

- Arjah

A Mother Gazes on Rebellion

And shall I send my children now to war,
To batter down the dusty desert walls
Their mother raised when for a while she wore
An orcish uniform, and answered orcish calls?
What troll should spend his life in fighting for
A homeland robbed from poorer still than they:
The centaur, and the quillboar there before?
I took in youth and in regret a soldier's pay
To make a future for my children, and
My days, as now, for all that loving were
Pale strivings: nor meaning; neither end.
And shall I send my children now to war?

Preface

Outreach and education being part of the Royal Library's mandate, it seems some brief commentary on my new pieces would be appreciated, in addition to the pieces themselves.

(I have always found writing about one's own work the very height of vanity, but happily I am not lacking in that quality -- the Library did not hire me for my modesty!)

This will hopefully also give me the opportunity to answer some general questions about poetry that I have received in private conversations since the Library's salons began. As always I welcome the replies of other, particularly those that take a critical stance of their own. One cannot improve, after all, when one is one's sole critic!

Commentary: "A Mother Gazes on Rebellion"

Cycles and repetition are the dominant theme of "A Mother Gazes on Rebellion," which is nowhere more clear than in the rhyme scheme. In each quatrain, two lines are rhymed, while two are straight rhymes formed with homopohones -- war/wore, for/fore, and were/war, creating a repetitive structure for the entire poem.

Additionally, the final quatrain repeats both rhymes -- "end" and "war" -- and inverts the order of the first stanza, so that the rhyme scheme overall begins and ends with the word "war." This is the only word that appears twice in the rhyme scheme, suggesting that the poem (and its themes) begin and end at the same, unchanging place.

The effect of this is, obviously, unsubtle. The reader is reminded in a rather heavy-handed way of the author's belief that individual conflicts fade rapidly into meaninglessness against the backdrop of endless warfare.

Several specific and in some cases ongoing battles are cited in the poem: the founding of Orgrimmar ("the dusty desert walls/Their mother raised"), the Darkspear's original landing in Kalimdor and pacification of the native tribes there ("A homeland robbed from poorer still than they;/The centaur, and the quillboar there before"), and the current conflict implied by both the title and "to batter down the dusty desert walls."

All of these are framed by the repeated line "And shall I send my children now to war," which, by beginning the verse with a conjunction, implies that it is part of a longer conversation rather than a piece in isolation.

Metrically, the poem is largely in iambic pentameter. It struggles and breaks at "Pale strivings: nor meaning; neither end," just before the concluding repetition, which adds a feeling of uncertainty to the rhetorical "And shall I send my children now to war?"

It would be hard to characterize the verse as anything but over-engineered. There are too many devices in twelve short lines, all driving toward the same basic themes of doubt and cyclical repetition.

But then, the subject matter is not subtle either, and the piece was written at a time of extremely high political tension. In that, at least, it is somewhat a piece of its time.