By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Esquimos Have No Word for War’ is a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), a poet who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves. It’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet in the United States at the time of her death, so a few words of analysis about some of her best-known poems seem appropriate.
You can read ‘The Esquimos Have No Word for War’, a poem in which a speaker describes their futile attempts to explain the concept of war to a remote people, here.
‘The Esquimos Have No Word for War’: summary
In the first stanza, the speaker of the poem (who may or may not be Mary Oliver herself) tells us that any attempt to explain the concept of ‘war’ to Eskimos is pointless, since one comes away feeling absurd and even crass for having tried to describe war to them.
The Eskimos’ houses (i.e., their igloos) are like white bowls turned downwards on a prairie which has known snowfall since ancient times. If one bumps into the Eskimos during the brief moments when they are about, they simply listen politely to any attempt to explain war to them, and then they walk off, returning to their business.
The second stanza describes the nature of this business, which involves using spears, sleds, and dogs (huskies) to hunt for food. The men hunt while the women wait for them to return, chewing on the skins of animals or singing songs, biding their time since they know the men may be away hunting for a while.
The third stanza moves forward in time a little. Later, when the men return with the food they have caught on their hunt, the Eskimos welcome the speaker to share their food around the fire. This is a ‘difficult’ land and life is hard, with the Eskimos often enduring times of hunger when food is scarce. While the speaker continues to describe to them the world of war, including cannon and armies and aeroplanes, the Eskimos eat the meat from the bones of the animals they have caught, and simply smile at one another.
‘The Esquimos Have No Word for War’: analysis
Mary Oliver’s poem is a war poem with a difference: instead of focusing on the business or realities of war itself, she displaces the topic and removes it to a remote context where wars are unknown. The Eskimos – the name sometimes given to indigenous people who live in Canada and Alaska, although in some circles the term ‘Inuit’ is preferred – have no word for ‘war’ in their language because, it is suggested, they do not need one.
Because of their plain and simple environment, far removed from modern civilisation (if we can here use that word without irony), the Eskimos spend much of their lives simply trying to survive. They must work together to ensure everyone has enough food and tend to live in small communities where they share things with each other, as they share their food with the poem’s speaker.
Oliver’s speaker suggests that war does not arise in the Eskimos’ societies, because of this communal and rather sparse existence. They have no need to go to war over other Eskimos’ territory or land because there is enough for everyone. They have no imperial ambitions, and do not seek to seize other people’s resources for their own gain. Despite the supposedly ‘primitive’ nature of the Eskimos’ world, it is in some ways more civilised than other societies, because of the absence of war.
One question which we might be led to ask when reading ‘The Esquimos Have No Word for War’ is: who exactly is the speaker of the poem? Is it some adventurer or explorer who knows the Inuit way of life intimately, and is welcomed among them for this reason? Or is it some imagined speaker, some general and indeterminate figure, who is merely presenting a hypothetical situation to us? After all, idle comments about how many words the Eskimos have for ‘snow’, used to make some nondescript point about remote cultures and tribes, are a truism among more ‘advanced’ societies (even if the magnitude of the number of different words for ‘snow’ which they have is often wildly exaggerated).
Viewed this way, ‘The Esquimos Have No Word for War’ makes a serious point about the nature of war but does so in an arch or even playful way, staging an imagined, ideal encounter between an archetypal ‘narrator’ figure and the peoples who live in the northernmost reaches of North America.
And the serious point can be summarised as follows: war is not, contrary to what we might think, an inevitable and natural part of human life. Instead, it is something which human beings choose to do. And paradoxically, the more ‘advanced’ a society appears to become, the more likely war becomes, because nations and empires which have gained power usually seek to expand their territories or at least fight to maintain what they have claimed.
Here it is worth bearing in mind that the two deadliest wars in the history of human history, in terms of the sheer scope and scale of the devastation and the lives lost, occurred between technologically and industrially developed nations in the twentieth century. The First and Second World Wars are a reminder that the further we get from the simple and unadorned way of life that the Eskimos lead, the more probable large-scale war becomes.
‘The Esquimos Have No Word for War’: form
Like most of Mary Oliver’s poem, this one is written in free verse, which means it contains no rhyme scheme and no regular metre or rhythm. The line lengths are also uneven. The poem is an example of a lyric poem, because it describes the thoughts and feelings of an individual speaker.