Truth in Numbers

            James Doyle’s “Civil War Photograph” is beautiful in its simplicity. At its base it consists of a single metaphor, indicated in its first line: “Flesh and blood turn mathematic.” The poem seeks to equate the death and destruction that is the aftermath of a battle with mathematical equations and geometry. The poem continues, “The limbs illustrate opaque angles/ The sky rotates three hundred sixty/ degrees.” The images that make up the photograph are turned into rational, logical ideas. Then the poem, on the premise of describing those images that prove the idea of “interlocking masses”, details the death on the battlefield. It speaks of hands still clinging to muskets, uniforms hung upon limbs, bodies fallen into the foliage. It is in these middle four stanzas that the true tension of the poem is revealed to us. The poem purports to make rational and understandable a battle of the Civil War, one of the bloodiest altercations in the history of mankind. As we read the descriptions of the dead we know intrinsically that such violence cannot be made sense of. In the last stanzas, the poem seems to acknowledge this untenable relationship. It refers to the lens as a “blackboard solving equations/ each one for its elusive X.” Doyle sees the photograph as a form of art, just like poetry, trying to make sense of the world around us. The photograph, too, is trying to figure out what X equals, what all this death and destruction means. The poem ends in a series of “maybe[s]”. The variable is unknown; neither the poem nor the photograph has peeled back the veil for us. Again, the beauty of the poem is its simplicity. Without frills and conceits to obscure the simple truth and untruth of the words, we are able to hear exactly what Doyle has to say.