Remembrance Day
Here it's Veteran's Day. But it really is not the same thing. I remember in Scotland, buying the red poppy to pin on your jacket lapel for 10 pence. Everybody wore them. It was actually kind of creepy, because wearing a small, red, plastic flower on your lapel is such a small thing that it seems almost unintentional that everyone should be wearing them at the same time. But after the creepy wore off, it was heartwarmingly subtle. It is a solemn day, a day for bagpipes, not fireworks or weekend sales. A day to ask God to save the Queen. And everyone quotes "In Flanders Fields", the origin of all those poppies. It's simple and symbolic.
And it, of course, reminds me of the War Requiem. I worry that it's inappropriate to post anti-war poetry to remember fallen soldiers. But to me it is the ultimate regret: it is a tragedy you are gone, even more so because we wish so badly that you had never left in the first place. So I'll post a poem that has perhaps one of the most brilliantly set lines I've ever heard in music.
Futility by Wilfred Owen
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?
And it, of course, reminds me of the War Requiem. I worry that it's inappropriate to post anti-war poetry to remember fallen soldiers. But to me it is the ultimate regret: it is a tragedy you are gone, even more so because we wish so badly that you had never left in the first place. So I'll post a poem that has perhaps one of the most brilliantly set lines I've ever heard in music.
Futility by Wilfred Owen
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?