The Great War was a poet’s war, but not so much an occasion to win Homeric glory as it was a testament to our ability to find what’s human in even the most inhumane conditions. Wilfred Owen, by most accounts, was the Tasso of the Trenches, and Nelly Lambert has sent along his plangent sonnet “1914” to commemorate the morning after:
1914
War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,
Is over all the width of Europe whirled,
Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled
Are all Art’s ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. Love’s wine’s thin.
The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,
And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,
An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,
A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need
Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.
Owen didn’t write the first draft of “1914” until December of that year, when it was clear that Tommie and Jack would not be home for Xmas. The tenor of the verses composed by a number of young men before the reality of Ypres set in was far more romantic.
Along those lines, Jeremy Axelrod has sent in a companion to “1914,” Part I of Rupert Brooke’s “The Dead,” which also contrasts nicely with Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.”
He says: Owen is often described as a voice of national disillusionment, a soldier-poet who brought home the bad news about trench warfare. His typical counterpoint is Rupert Brooke—the darling poet of his generation—who gushed about young patriots dying sweetly for England. Brooke was naive, Owen worldly.
Interestingly enough, Brooke was in fact the older, more experienced poet when the war began. He enlisted first, in 1914, while Owen enlisted in 1915 but didn’t see any real action for two years. But while Brooke was ahead of Owen, Owen was ahead of his time. As “1914” shows, Owen saw “blood for seed” on the battlefield, a “perishing great darkness” that resembles our image of the war today. Brooke, on the other hand, imagined his own death on “a corner of a foreign field / That is forever England,” and “hearts at peace, under an English heaven (“The Soldier,” also written in 1914). His poetry cradles a dying worldview.
Part I of Brooke’s “The Dead” (1914) is another telling example of their differences. It begins, “Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!” You might say he is sort of blowing his own horn, too. He sees his poem as a beautiful way to honor beautiful sacrifice. In 1917, Owen will ask, as though in grim reply: “What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?” (“Anthem for Doomed Youth”).
In 1915, Brooke died quietly of sepsis on the way to Gallipoli, probably due to an infected mosquito bite. Churchill wrote his obituary. It was not the romantic death Brooke imagined in “The Soldier,” and since he died on a boat, there was no foreign field to colonize with his bravery. But perhaps it’s fair to say that if he had made it to Gallipoli, his death would have been even less like he imagined.
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
UPDATE from Jeffrey Greggs: Thanks to the two of you for such wonderful poems, and thanks for your excellent commentary, Jeremy. I thought I might add an example from a third strain of World War I poetry that speaks neither to the romance of nor the disillusionment with war—I am talking, of course, about the jingo rhymes. Less high-flown than its sister modes, this register still matches them in poetic force, for it is intended to stiffen the spines of common men and therefore traffics in the emotions of shame and pride.
The Call
by Jesse PopeWho’s for the trench—
Are you, my laddie?
Who’ll follow French—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’s fretting to begin,
Who’s going out to win?
And who wants to save his skin—
Do you, my laddie?Who’s for the khaki suit—
Are you, my laddie?
Who longs to charge and shoot—
Do you, my laddie?
Who’s keen on getting fit,
Who means to show his grit,
And who’d rather wait a bit—
Would you, my laddie?Who’ll earn the Empire’s thanks—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’ll swell the victor’s ranks—
Will you, my laddie?
When that procession comes,
Banners and rolling drums—
Who’ll stand and bite his thumbs—
Will you, my laddie?
After reading “The Call,” Margot Lurie reminded me that there’s a lighter side to jingo, too, as can be seen in this other squib from low culture, an “alternative concluding chorus” to “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”:
That’s the wrong way to tickle Mary,
That’s the wrong way to kiss.
Don’t you know that over here, lad
They like it best like this.
Hooray pour Les Français
Farewell Angleterre.
We didn’t know how to tickle Mary,
But we learnt how over there.
Malebolge 