War & Peace Quote by Joseph Auslander

A prayer that can’t quite keep its voice steady, Auslander's line lands with the deliberately crowded urgency of a public benediction. The semicolon after "Dear Lord" feels like a caught breath: reverence interrupted by anxiety. Then the rhetoric tightens around an almost legal phrasing - "we beg but one boon more" - as if the speaker knows the audience has already asked for plenty. That "one" is a sleight of hand, because it contains everything: private conscience ("peace in the hearts") and geopolitical order ("peace in the whole world"). Auslander compresses the domestic and the global into the same sentence to argue that they are not separable.

The specific intent is Thanksgiving-facing: to redirect gratitude away from abundance and toward responsibility. The holiday’s warmth is used as a moral leverage point, turning a national ritual of plenty into a collective petition for restraint, reconciliation, and safety. The subtext is less serene than it sounds. "All men living" reads as expansive, even earnest, but it also reveals the era’s default language and the poem’s civic, podium-ready design - a universalism shaped by its time.

Context matters: Auslander lived through two world wars and the interwar disillusionment that made "peace" a contested, almost exhausted word. Placing that plea on Thanksgiving suggests a nation trying to sanctify itself while feeling history press in. The line works because it admits, quietly, that comfort is provisional, and that the only blessing worth adding is the one we keep failing to secure.