“The tremendous
drama attending the tragedy of Warren’s going, the terrific explosion through
the whole metropolitan area of New York, the blowing to atoms of the officers
and crew, . . . whirled into the snow storm and melting with the snowflakes
into the sea; its repercussions here . . . were calculated to stir the emotions
to their depths, and I think they have.”
The
above excerpt comes from a letter Charlie Gibson, Jr. wrote to his nephew Henry
Allen after the death of Lt. Warren Winslow, another nephew, aboard the USS Turner, which exploded and sank off
the coast off New York in January 1944 (see “The USS Turner Disaster,”
August 7, 2015). Lt. Winslow, like most officers aboard, went down with the
ship.
While
there is little documentation to provide us with greater insight into just how
deeply this bereavement affected Charlie, he did write a poem that could be
read as an expression of grief. Entitled “Antinous,” it is an elegy “to the
heroes of the sea who have given their lives during the war.” Select stanzas of
the poem, which is quite long, appear below.
A
few details concerning the poem’s classical references and central theme are
necessary to make its meaning clearer. Although Charlie describes the poem as
an elegy to American sailors killed in the war, like his nephew, he does not
speak directly to them or Lt. Winslow. Rather, his poem is an elegy to
Antinous, the lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian (76–138 CE). Antinous was
universally admired for his youth and beauty. He met a similar and equally tragic
an end as Lt. Winslow when he drowned in the Nile.
Charlie
holds Antinous up as the “symbol of youth,” and this relates to the central
theme of the poem, therefore explaining why it is Antinous and not Lt. Winslow
whom Charlie addresses. As the “symbol of youth,” Antinous represents, for
Charlie, all the young sailors killed in the war, and in a more general sense
the poem expresses the sorrow over so many young lives cut short by war. Charlie
does not write of war-time death in romantic or glorifying terms as Lord
Tennyson did in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Rather, his lines speak only
of pain and grief and the profound absence felt in Charlie’s family and so many
others as a result of the Second World War.