Sunday Poetry - Wilfred Owen

With Armistice Day only a few days away, I've been reading my favourite war poets. This is a less familiar poem by Wilfred Owen with the poignant title The Next War. Unfortunately there's always a next war. "The war to end all wars" was a phrase that was nonsense almost as soon as it was coined.

War's a joke for me and you,
While we know such dreams are true.
- Siegfried Sassoon

Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to Death,-
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,-
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We've sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,-
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe.
He's spat at us with bullets and he's coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, -knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

Sunday Poetry - Remembrance Day

With Remembrance Day on Tuesday, I've had to replace Emily Dickinson with a poem by another of my favourite poets, Wilfred Owen. Anthem for Doomed Youth is so poignant & I especially love the second stanza with the image of the sadness of the women at home, living on with that sadness through all the years afterwards.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
      — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Another poem that evokes a similar feeling of looking back to another time was written fifty years later. MCMXIV by Philip Larkin. Looking back at an England that didn't survive the Great War, the innocence that was lost along with the open pubs & the cheery photos of young men joining up for a great adventure.

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again

Sunday Poetry - Remembrance Day

A quiet, reflective poem for Remembrance Day. Futility by Wilfred Owen. Lest We Forget.

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds,—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved—still warm—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

Sunday Poetry - Wilfred Owen

Remembrance Day is less than a month away & around this time of year I usually start planning some WWI reading. I thought it was time for Sunday Poetry to focus on WWI as well for the next few weeks. I've chosen one of Wilfred Owen's less well-known poems, Exposure, which describes the cold, wet, boring hell of war. Death is always a possibility but here at least, boredom & weariness is more of a problem.

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us ...
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent ...
Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient ...
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
But nothing happens.

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.
Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
Northward incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
What are we doing here?

The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow ...
We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray,
But nothing happens.

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.
Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,
With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause and renew,
We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,
But nothing happens.

II

Pale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces--
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.
Is it that we are dying?

Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires glozed
With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed--
We turn back to our dying.

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
Now ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.
For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid;
Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,
For love of God seems dying.

To-night, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,
Shrivelling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.
The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens.

Remembrance Day

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.


What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

The English Poets of the First World War - John Lehmann

In November, my thoughts turn to Remembrance Day & I often decide to read about WWI & WWII. This year, I’ve begun with the poets of WWI. I first read Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon & Rupert Brooke as a teenager & I’m still moved by their work & their lives. Since then, I’ve read many anthologies, biographies & critical books about the period & the writers.

John Lehmann’s book, English Poets of the First World War, was published in 1981. I rescued this copy from a library book sale & I’ve been reading it over the last couple of days as well as dipping into some of the other books you can see in the photo below. Lehmann concentrates on 15 major poets & looks at the work they wrote during the war, rather than the poetry & prose they wrote long afterwards, if, indeed, they survived. The poetry of the war fell into two distinct phases.

From the beginning of the war in 1914 until the Battle of the Somme in 1916, it was still possible for patriotic young men to write poetry glorifying war & revelling in the opportunity to be a part of this great adventure. Rupert Brooke’s 1914 Sonnets & Julian Grenfell’s Into Battle are the most famous examples. Brooke & Grenfell both died in 1915 so there’s no way of knowing how their work would have changed as the optimism of the first part of the war was replaced by the despair of trench warfare that seemed neverending. Another poet who was killed in 1915 at the age of 20 was Charles Hamilton Sorley (the photo above is from the suffolkregiment.org website). I’ve always loved this poem. The image of the dead being oblivious to our pity & grief is intensely moving & comforting as well. Their pain is past.

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Sassoon & Owen are the most famous of the war poets. Their meeting at the hospital at Craiglockhart has been written about many times, both as fact & fiction. That meeting led to Owen’s miraculous last year when he wrote the poems that made his name after his death just a week before the Armistice. Sassoon survived the war & continued writing poetry but his War Poems remained his most famous & best-loved work. He also wrote three volumes of fictionalised autobiography, collected by Faber as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. His poem, Does It Matter?, exemplifies the bitter, almost brutal poetry of the last years of the war. The feeling of hopelessness & pity of the speaker contrasts with the bitter undertone accusing those safe at home of not valuing the sacrifice made by the men at the Front.

Does it matter? – losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter? – losing your sight?...
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter? – those dreams from the pit?...
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they’ll know that you’ve fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.

Wilfred Owen could also write with bitterness of the horrors of war but I find the quiet, elegiac tone of Anthem for Doomed Youth so moving. The final image of the families left at home for long years without the men who will never come home, quietly grieving in that long period of mourning after the war is filled with melancholy.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Isaac Rosenberg was killed in April 1918 (The photo below is from iwm.org.uk). His poem, Break of Day in the Trenches, is a meditation in a moment of peace before the madness of battle. It reminds me of John Donne & the metaphysical poets in the humour in which he sticks a poppy behind his ear & addresses a rat that has strayed into his trench from No Man’s Land.

The darkness crumbles away -
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand –
A queer sardonic rat –
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German –
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver – what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.

John Lehmann’s book is an excellent introduction to the WWI poets but it might be hard to get hold of. Jon Silkin’s Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (1979) has an extensive Introduction & there should be lots of second hand copies around. There’s an updated Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (2006) edited by Matthew George Walter which is in print but I haven’t seen it. Penguin Classics always have good notes & introductions so I’m sure this would be a good choice. I’ll continue my Remembrance reading throughout the month.