A troupe of travelling performers sets out to sing peace into the world's hands, and by the end the places they left have burned, flooded and frozen. Sasha Fenn's "White Rabbits for Faux Doves" is a fable about escapism, told by the people who chose it. What makes it unsettling is that the narrators never stop defending themselves.
The title holds the poem's central trick. Rabbits and doves are what a stage magician pulls from a hat, and the dove is also the traditional emblem of peace. The band's peace is therefore a conjuring act, a "faux" bird produced for applause. Yet the poem lets the performers argue their case, and the argument has force. "Fighting never could trade war for peace, / and singing never could trade fear for love," they say, so why not pick the option that at least feels kind? Later they ask, "what harm did we, though yes, we did elope?" The verb is a strange and revealing choice. Elopement is running away with a lover, and here the lover is art. Their strongest excuse is a cold piece of logic: "In leaving, all we'd changed was who had cried." Had they stayed, they might simply have died with everyone else.
The journey is built on repetition and decline. Each concert is worse than the last. The first audience is dead already, "every seat was taken up by a ghost." The second has nothing to "feast" on but "paper crackers stolen from the priest," a hollow, communion-like image that I read as a picture of thin comfort. By the third, snow has "choked out the notes of our last song" and the band's own "children froze amidst the throng." After each departure comes a different disaster: flames and sulfur, then flood waters, then cold. The poem never says the band caused these, only that they were absent when they came. The narrators' explanation, "we told ourselves that we had done no wrong," exposes the self-persuasion the verse has been performing all along.
Fenn's imagery is quietly strange. A song cannot "sing olive branches into their hands," since a branch is a physical object and a tune is not, so the verb gives away that the gift is imaginary. The flood leaves "a witch's brew of laughing cherubim," a phrase where innocence turns grotesque. Judging by the imagery, these are drowned figures, though the poem leaves the exact picture to the reader. Through the ashen fog the band has only "our metronome's thin tick," which suggests that the rhythm of their art keeps going mechanically while the world goes under. The last darkness "fit eyes like leather gloves," a simile that is snug, close and a little suffocating.
The form carries the story's decay. The opening stanzas ring with insistent monorhyme (band, plan, lands, hands), a bright, ballad-like sound that matches the "masks of joy." Then the shape starts to break. The brick/sick/thick/tick quatrain is split by white space into two couplets, and so is the swim/cherubim/them/grim one. In the "mount" stanza, four tiny lines of lullaby (deep, sleep, weep, keep) are lodged inside the quatrain, as though the verse itself has been put to sleep. The final stanza repeats the trick, wedging "Came we to sleep / and dream so deep" between the rhymes of *night*/*fight* and *gloves*/*doves*. The stanzas where the band reasons with itself shift to looser crossed rhymes (*peace*/*deceased*, *elope*/*hope*), as if the logic never quite closes. Inverted phrasing such as "So journeyed us" and "Came we" gives the whole poem the cadence of a fairy tale, which suits a story about people who prefer fairy tales.
The ending closes the loop cruelly. The band returns to find bones "bleached by the day," unburied because everyone alive "had opted not to stay." They have copied the escapism they once offered. When the demons come for them at last, they sing "of fantasies of better lands, / where flags were fictions," and then they lose "the hopeless fight" they had refused to join. Both the hope and the fake peace die in the same line.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses an easy moral. It names no particular war, only demons and the night, so its warning applies to any crisis where comfort is on offer. It also asks whether a song is a gift or a way of looking away, and it leaves the reader to decide how guilty these singers are.