Last year Cecilia McDowall invited the poet, Seán Street, to write a text for her to set to music for Composeher. In his three poems Seán has seamlessly woven together his words with those of the remarkable nineteenth century pioneering nurse and founder of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton.
Writing this 2020, the world feels very strange and distant from the days, some months ago, when Cecilia and I first discussed collaborating on a work to celebrate Clara Barton. As the Covid-19 pandemic changes the world, and closes doors between countries, cities and neighbours, Clara’s healing and humanity seems more relevant than ever. In London, they’ve opened an emergency mass facility called the Nightingale Hospital. In Kansas, there was already a Clara Barton Hospital long before all this started; it’s as it should be. Like Florence Nightingale, her name is a watchword for care and compassion.
I’m thinking a lot about a text for Cecilia to set, and the one thing these days and weeks of isolation have given is time; I’ve been reading a lot of words about Clara, many of them of varying quality, it has to be said. Donald C. Pfanz’s book, Clara Barton’s Civil War gives a sometimes sceptical account that seeks to cut through some of the myth that inevitably grows up around heroes. And there is hagiography of course. But, at the root of it all, there is Clara herself, a woman whose determination to serve, and heal, overcame the barriers of prejudice. I’ve been finding a useful source book to be William Eleazar Barton’s 2-volume biography, The Life of Clara Barton. William, as far as I can see, was not a relative of Clara, and was born 40 years after her. But he seems to have had privileged access to her personal papers, and his copious quoting of these is a gift to any researcher.
As a poet, I was delighted to discover that Clara herself wrote some verse: now I feel even more kinship! It seems she was drawn to writing poetry from childhood and, later in life, in a lengthy poem called To the Women Who Went to the Field, she casts a wry eye over some of the sexist thinking and attitudes she encountered from the male-dominated authorities conducting the American Civil War:
‘The women who went to the field, you say,
The women who went to the field; and pray,
What did they go for? Just to be in the way! –
They’d not know the difference betwixt work and play,
What did they know about war anyway?’
Towards the end of the poem, she answers her own rhetorical, ironic question in words that, for all they are of their time, speak powerfully to ours and, in particular, to the locked-down, frightened world in which I write this. Here is the woman who brought the Red Cross to America, whose legacy serves on today’s front line wherever it is required:
‘And these were the women who went to the war:
The women of question; what did they go for?
Because in their hearts God had planted the seed
Of pity for woe, and help for its need…’
When the bullet bites, or the virus strikes, we will always need the sons and daughters of Clara Barton and, beginning now, this, in a strange way, feels the right time to be considering how to celebrate and honour her in words and music. It is salutary to realise how quickly and easily the familiar routines and values of everyday life breakdown in times of war, and the fabric of ‘civilisation’ wears thin. Clara knew this; ‘The Angel of the Battlefield’, they called her. Whether the enemy is human or non-human, visible or invisible, we shall always need angels.