Keep teaching the war poets - including the neglected ones
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/poetry/article4034351.ece
Jeremy Paxman has started a war of words over the poetry of the trenches. Is he right? Asks John Sutherland
Jeremy Paxman has, true to form, raised hackles by questioning if it’s a good
thing to force-feed our children First World War poems like so many
Strasbourg geese. The reasons these works stand so high on the curricular
menu is clear enough: they are simply written and pack a strong punch; the
First World War poems that are most commonly prescribed for study can be
read, analysed and summed up in a 45-minute class; and they raise
discussable “issues”.
There is, however, an undercurrent in those issues that clearly vexes the
always vexable Paxman. As any NUT conference will witness, the British
teaching profession is instinctively opposed to war unless it is 100 per
cent a “just war”. Few are. The First World War qualifies but, 100 years on,
the jury is still out on it.
My guess is that Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, one of the most
famous poems to come out of the First World War, gets classroom exposure
less as an elegant Edwardian lyric than as an effusion of obnoxious “It will
all be over by Christmas” jingoism. It opens:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Brooke, gallant to the core, volunteered on the outbreak of war, although
overage, and died in the first year of the conflict of an infected mosquito
bite, not an enemy bullet. He is indeed buried in a “foreign field”: the
Greek island of Skyros.
Brooke’s poem was exploited ruthlessly by the war propaganda machine.
Clergymen all over the country gave sermons on it. Schools had it recited to
them at morning assembly - encouraging the older pupils to volunteer en
masse to die honourably and leave their dust in foreign fields. (Until very
recently the British Army did not repatriate its “fallen”.) Winston
Churchill, no less, wrote Brooke’s obituary for this paper.
The poets of those awful four years whom we most admire struggled to come to
terms with the fact that their real enemy might not be the Kaiser (a close
relative of the British Royal Family) and his jackbooted Huns but a British
society that had somehow lost its way and blundered into a meaningless
slaughter of its best and brightest for no good reason.
The enemy was behind as well as in front. How to sum up the “war called Great”
in a single word? How about “futility”? Wilfred Owen’s poem of that name
will, I suspect, be as well known to English A-level students as the
National Anthem by the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 2018.
A decorated and gallant officer, Owen contemplates in the poem the corpse of a
soldier lying in the snow to whose family he must write the formal letter of
condolence and asks, forlornly: “Was it for this the clay grew tall?” No,
the poem insists. Was his death worthwhile? No, it was futile. A total
waste. And the war? Ditto. The War Office telegram announcing Owen’s death
arrived, it is said, as the church bells were ringing for peace. The God of
War likes his ironies.
However, if I were universal master of the school classroom I would prescribe
a poet I think is often left out of the educational syllabus. Virtually all
of the high-profile war poets were “officer class”. But one of the very
greatest had a quite different background. Isaac Rosenberg was Jewish and
from the working class. His family had recently immigrated from Russia,
fleeing the Czar’s pogroms.
Isaac was brought up in the East End of London, then something of a Jewish
ghetto. He left school at 14 to become an apprentice engraver. From
childhood he displayed unusual artistic and literary talent. In that
childhood he was chronically ill, with lung problems. He was physically
tiny. Despite these handicaps - and clearly unfit - he volunteered for the
military and went “up the line to death” (as soldiers said) in 1915. He was
killed in combat in April 1918, as the war was drawing to a close.
Rosenberg’s best known poem, Break of Day in the Trenches, is
what is called an aubade - a dawn poem. Hailing the newly broken day is
traditionally a joyous act, but not for a soldier in France in 1917. By
military regulation, soldiers “stand to” at dawn, because this is the moment
of the day most favoured for attacks:
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
(And God knows what antipathies).
The rats, of course, had a “lovely war” - feasting on the corpses of both
armies. Isaac Rosenberg, like three quarters of a million other British
soldiers, ended up as rat food. He didn’t have to give his life. But he
clearly loved the Britain which had taken him in and was prepared to die for
it. I revere him and I wish the country’s schoolchildren took him on board
with Wilfred Owen.
John Sutherland’s A Little History of Literature is published
by Yale University Press
The Call
by Jessie Pope (1868-1941)
Who’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?
Break of Day in the Trenches
by Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
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
(And God knows what antipathies).
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 boom, the hiss, the swiftness,
The irrevocable earth buffet -
A shell’s haphazard fury?
What rootless poppies dropping?
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.
A Dead Boche
by Robert Graves (1895-1985)
To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
“War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.
From Complete Poems Volume 1 by Robert Graves, edited by Beryl
Graves and Dunstan Ward, published by Carcanet
Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! -An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The Soldier
by Rupert Brooke (1890-1918)
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
‘Futility’
by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
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?
Taken from The War Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited and introduced by
Jon Stallworthy (Chatto & Windus, 1994)
Anthem For Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen
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.
From Wilfred Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments, edited by Jon
Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013)
Rain
by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae (May 1915)
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The General
by Siegfried Sassoon
‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
. . .
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
Copyright Siegfried Sassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George
Sassoon
Peace
by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
You can’t dismiss the war poets - but poetry is no substitute for history
Max Hastings on Siegfried Sassoon
I can understand exactly what Jeremy Paxman is saying - I just would have put
it differently. You can’t dismiss the war poets; they were a huge force in
our national cultural life and I’m passionately in favour of children
studying them in school as I did myself. What I’m not in favour of them
thinking is that this is a substitute for learning history.
My own favourite among the war poets is Siegfried Sassoon. I first learnt his
poem “‘GOOD-MORNING; good-morning!’ the General said” when I was, I suppose,
12 or 13 - and it has stuck in my mind ever since. Sassoon wrote with a
passion and an anger and a lyricism. It was a cry of rage against the nature
of what ordinary men were being subjected to by higher command and
governments and remains one of the most powerful cries of rage at war.
Nonetheless, it has nothing to tell us about the realities that government
and generals faced in 1914-18. Sassoon’s political view was that the war was
so dreadful that one should simply pack up and give it to the other side.
It would be insulting for me to compare anything that I’ve seen in the wars of
my own lifetime with the experience of the First World War. The men endured
things that mercifully nobody in our lifetime has remotely gone through and
the poets have an enormous amount to teach us about the nature of the
horror.
David Reynolds, in his excellent book The Long Shadow, about the legacy
of the war, made the point that the poets have been terribly misrepresented
by a modern generation. Most of the poetry written during the war was highly
patriotic. The poet who is most often cited as anti-war, Wilfred Owen, went
to his grave in November 1918 believing that the Allied cause was just.
Jeremy Paxman has started a war of words over the poetry of the trenches. Is he right? Asks John Sutherland
Jeremy Paxman has, true to form, raised hackles by questioning if it’s a good
thing to force-feed our children First World War poems like so many
Strasbourg geese. The reasons these works stand so high on the curricular
menu is clear enough: they are simply written and pack a strong punch; the
First World War poems that are most commonly prescribed for study can be
read, analysed and summed up in a 45-minute class; and they raise
discussable “issues”.
There is, however, an undercurrent in those issues that clearly vexes the
always vexable Paxman. As any NUT conference will witness, the British
teaching profession is instinctively opposed to war unless it is 100 per
cent a “just war”. Few are. The First World War qualifies but, 100 years on,
the jury is still out on it.
My guess is that Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, one of the most
famous poems to come out of the First World War, gets classroom exposure
less as an elegant Edwardian lyric than as an effusion of obnoxious “It will
all be over by Christmas” jingoism. It opens:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Brooke, gallant to the core, volunteered on the outbreak of war, although
overage, and died in the first year of the conflict of an infected mosquito
bite, not an enemy bullet. He is indeed buried in a “foreign field”: the
Greek island of Skyros.
Brooke’s poem was exploited ruthlessly by the war propaganda machine.
Clergymen all over the country gave sermons on it. Schools had it recited to
them at morning assembly - encouraging the older pupils to volunteer en
masse to die honourably and leave their dust in foreign fields. (Until very
recently the British Army did not repatriate its “fallen”.) Winston
Churchill, no less, wrote Brooke’s obituary for this paper.
The poets of those awful four years whom we most admire struggled to come to
terms with the fact that their real enemy might not be the Kaiser (a close
relative of the British Royal Family) and his jackbooted Huns but a British
society that had somehow lost its way and blundered into a meaningless
slaughter of its best and brightest for no good reason.
The enemy was behind as well as in front. How to sum up the “war called Great”
in a single word? How about “futility”? Wilfred Owen’s poem of that name
will, I suspect, be as well known to English A-level students as the
National Anthem by the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 2018.
A decorated and gallant officer, Owen contemplates in the poem the corpse of a
soldier lying in the snow to whose family he must write the formal letter of
condolence and asks, forlornly: “Was it for this the clay grew tall?” No,
the poem insists. Was his death worthwhile? No, it was futile. A total
waste. And the war? Ditto. The War Office telegram announcing Owen’s death
arrived, it is said, as the church bells were ringing for peace. The God of
War likes his ironies.
However, if I were universal master of the school classroom I would prescribe
a poet I think is often left out of the educational syllabus. Virtually all
of the high-profile war poets were “officer class”. But one of the very
greatest had a quite different background. Isaac Rosenberg was Jewish and
from the working class. His family had recently immigrated from Russia,
fleeing the Czar’s pogroms.
Isaac was brought up in the East End of London, then something of a Jewish
ghetto. He left school at 14 to become an apprentice engraver. From
childhood he displayed unusual artistic and literary talent. In that
childhood he was chronically ill, with lung problems. He was physically
tiny. Despite these handicaps - and clearly unfit - he volunteered for the
military and went “up the line to death” (as soldiers said) in 1915. He was
killed in combat in April 1918, as the war was drawing to a close.
Rosenberg’s best known poem, Break of Day in the Trenches, is
what is called an aubade - a dawn poem. Hailing the newly broken day is
traditionally a joyous act, but not for a soldier in France in 1917. By
military regulation, soldiers “stand to” at dawn, because this is the moment
of the day most favoured for attacks:
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
(And God knows what antipathies).
The rats, of course, had a “lovely war” - feasting on the corpses of both
armies. Isaac Rosenberg, like three quarters of a million other British
soldiers, ended up as rat food. He didn’t have to give his life. But he
clearly loved the Britain which had taken him in and was prepared to die for
it. I revere him and I wish the country’s schoolchildren took him on board
with Wilfred Owen.
John Sutherland’s A Little History of Literature is published
by Yale University Press
The Call
by Jessie Pope (1868-1941)
Who’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?
Break of Day in the Trenches
by Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
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
(And God knows what antipathies).
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 boom, the hiss, the swiftness,
The irrevocable earth buffet -
A shell’s haphazard fury?
What rootless poppies dropping?
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.
A Dead Boche
by Robert Graves (1895-1985)
To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
“War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.
From Complete Poems Volume 1 by Robert Graves, edited by Beryl
Graves and Dunstan Ward, published by Carcanet
Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! -An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The Soldier
by Rupert Brooke (1890-1918)
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
‘Futility’
by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
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?
Taken from The War Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited and introduced by
Jon Stallworthy (Chatto & Windus, 1994)
Anthem For Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen
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.
From Wilfred Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments, edited by Jon
Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013)
Rain
by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae (May 1915)
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The General
by Siegfried Sassoon
‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
. . .
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
Copyright Siegfried Sassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George
Sassoon
Peace
by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
You can’t dismiss the war poets - but poetry is no substitute for history
Max Hastings on Siegfried Sassoon
I can understand exactly what Jeremy Paxman is saying - I just would have put
it differently. You can’t dismiss the war poets; they were a huge force in
our national cultural life and I’m passionately in favour of children
studying them in school as I did myself. What I’m not in favour of them
thinking is that this is a substitute for learning history.
My own favourite among the war poets is Siegfried Sassoon. I first learnt his
poem “‘GOOD-MORNING; good-morning!’ the General said” when I was, I suppose,
12 or 13 - and it has stuck in my mind ever since. Sassoon wrote with a
passion and an anger and a lyricism. It was a cry of rage against the nature
of what ordinary men were being subjected to by higher command and
governments and remains one of the most powerful cries of rage at war.
Nonetheless, it has nothing to tell us about the realities that government
and generals faced in 1914-18. Sassoon’s political view was that the war was
so dreadful that one should simply pack up and give it to the other side.
It would be insulting for me to compare anything that I’ve seen in the wars of
my own lifetime with the experience of the First World War. The men endured
things that mercifully nobody in our lifetime has remotely gone through and
the poets have an enormous amount to teach us about the nature of the
horror.
David Reynolds, in his excellent book The Long Shadow, about the legacy
of the war, made the point that the poets have been terribly misrepresented
by a modern generation. Most of the poetry written during the war was highly
patriotic. The poet who is most often cited as anti-war, Wilfred Owen, went
to his grave in November 1918 believing that the Allied cause was just.