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War poetry
Brooke:
Peace
Peace’ : this poem, with its pleasure in soldiering and masculine militarism, could be as logically
entitled War as Peace. Yet Brooke’s message is that war in the world has brought inner peace
to the combatants, who now know their duty and purpose in life.
“Now, God be thanked…wakened us from sleeping” : This is a poem of thanks that Brooke lives
at a time (“His hour”— ‘God’s hour’) when the young (the time has “caught our youth” ) will be
able to fight for right. The young have been awakened to the task they have in hand.
“With…sharpened power ”: all qualities of the fit, youthful body, ready for war.
“as swimmers into cleanness leaping…” : A paradoxical image, comparing going to war as an act
that cleanses the participants, like a dip in a pool or river. The metaphor of
swimmers “leaping” also suggests playfulness— war is a pleasure as well as a rite of passage.
“Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary” : the youthfulness of the participants is
contrasted with the metaphorical description of the world as “old” : the old world is incapable
of continuing, Brooke suggests— it is ready for death.
“Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move” : Those who do not do their duty to go and
fight for their country have “sick hearts” . A key opposition in this poem is between youth and
age; another is between healthy bodies and ill or unfit bodies. Those who do not fight are
physically (“sick” ) and morally (“hearts” ) degenerate.
“And half -men…” : Brooke continues his disparaging rhetoric: those who do not fight are not
men. There is an interesting connection here with the poetry of Pope (‘Who’s for the Game?’)
and the public school ethic of muscular Christianity, which taught that those born to rule (at
home and abroad) must be fit of heart and soul.
“…and their dirty songs…and all the little emptiness of love!” : Brooke’s world is a world of men
and masculine pursuits. Sex and women are dangerous to this value system: they threaten the
purity of men. Brooke was, ultimately a youthful and naïve ex-public schoolboy who had seen
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little of the world. He was still troubled by his break up with an important girlfriend at the time
of writing this, which may explain the mean tone.
Sassoon
To the warmongers
Irony Without Humour
"To the Warmongers" is one of Sassoon's angry poems of accusation. The lines are
shorter than two other poems on a similar theme, "The General" and "The Rear-
Guard." This poem has a different, more direct tone than "The General" and although
the irony is there, the forced humour is missing. In this poem, Sassoon is conveying the
reality of war, as he does in "The Rear-Guard." The first stanza, which is the longest,
twelve lines, tells the warmongers how it is on the battle lines. "I'm back again from
hell / With loathsome thoughts to sell; / Secrets of death to tell; / And horrors from
the abyss. / Young faces bleared with blood, / Sucked down into the mud, / You shall
hear things like this, / Till the tormented slain / Crawl round and round again, / With
limbs that twist awry / Moan out their brutish pain / As the fighters pass them by."
Avoiding the Commonplace
All the descriptive phrases in these lines are short and strong, with equally strong,
concise verbs, for example, "bleared." The most natural word to use here would be
"smeared" but "bleared" not only aids alliteration, but also conveys two meanings. The
men are tired of suffering, and they are "bleary." Therefore, their faces are bleared,
rather than smeared. The technique of turning words around in small ways so that
they are no longer commonplace, helps the reader to approach Sassoon's experience
in a deeper way. In the following lines, the poem almost threatens the object of itsvilification: "For you our battles shine / With triumph half-divine; / And the glory of the
dead / Kindles in each proud eye. / But a curse is on my head, / That shall not be
unsaid, / And the wounds in my heart are red / For I have watched them die."
A Vindication
This second stanza directly accuses the generals, for their single-minded concern with
the statistics of battle, and with winning and losing at the expense of simple humanity.
Sassoon derides their righteousness and their ignorance. "For you our battles shine /With triumph half-divine." The last four lines are a vindication of all that has gone
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before. Sassoon's final justification is the last line, which is steeped both in pathos and
truth. "For I have watched them die." There are many reasons why human beings fight
wars. Conscription is the most obvious, while mercenaries fight for "blood money."
Some may fight from pride or a sense of patriotic duty. Siegfried Sassoon was
different. He spoke out against war from a sense of personal conviction, compassion
and anger. All of this is demonstrated with feeling in his war poetry.
The Hero
In this poem an officer delivers a consolatory letter to a grieving mother concerning
the death of her soldier son, Jack. She is proud of her son’s glorious sacrifice— but, on
leaving, the officer reflects wryly on Jack’s cowardice and incompetence in the line.
STRUCTURE: Written in iambic pentameter, ‘The Hero’ comprises three stanzas of six
lines length largely made up of rhyming couplets, save the first four lines of the second
stanza, which have an alternating rhyme scheme. Rhyming couplets, of course, are
particularly effective in relaying neat epigrams or moral statements. The simplicity of
the rhyme scheme perhaps apes the newspaper poetry of the time, which often went
in for sentimental attitudes about the heroism of the British ‘boys’ and their sacrifice.
The first stanza could in fact stand alone as a very effective pastiche of such poetry.The second stanza sees a shift of narrative viewpoint, admitting a more complicated
reality of appearance and lies. The third stanza contains the revelation of Jack’s true
nature and death, subverting the sentimentality of the first.
The Hero: the ‘Hero’ of the poem is, of course, ironically termed so: Jack is the kind of
malingering coward who earned the contempt of his comrades on the battlefield,
especially in a well-disciplined regiment like the Royal Welch, in which Sassoon (and
Graves) served.
“Jack fell as he would have wished / The mother said” : the stock figure of the grieving
mother opens this poem: a familiar, emotive image of loss in war. Here, the mother
uses an everyday euphemism for dying in war— “Jack fell”— that implies an
honourable soldier’s death, falling in action.
“‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something broke…” : Colonels, those responsible for a
regiment of soldiers, wrote letters of condolence to the bereaved on behalf of the
regiment. As Graves relates in ‘Goodbye to All That’, these letters were often a duty.
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“‘We mothers are so proud / Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face bowed.” : The mother
speaks as if for all British soldiers: perhaps the consolation that she finds in doing so is
in subsuming herself in the collective loss of all the mothers of the nation. At any rate,
these words do seem more sentimental than authentic: their clichéd expression
helping to repress, perhaps, the great grief of the woman.
“Quietly the Brother Officer went out” : ‘Brother Officer’ is an unusual term— an
example of military language being used in a way that is jarring at the beginning of the
stanza. The camaraderie of the army, the special fellowship of men in service is
introduced into the poem here.
“…poor old dear …gallant lies” : these words imply a distance that the first stanza’s
heartfelt scene did not hint at.
“While he coughed and mumbled…” : the officer’s awkwardness in passing on
condolences is understandable. The reason for the officer’s embarrassment only later
becomes obvious.
“brimmed with joy, / Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.” : the alliteration in
these lines, expressing the devastation of the mother, is clever. The effect of the
repeated ‘b’s is to convey her restrained tears and give a suggestion of tremulously
spoken words— of repressing the need to cry, of blubbering.
“He thought how ‘Jack’, cold - footed, useless swine, / Had panicked” : it is interesting to
note the recurrence of the name ‘Jack’ in Sassoon’s poems. Sassoon was known as
‘Mad Jack’ by his men because of his almost suicidal bravery in battle. To name the
coward and object of contempt in this poem ‘Jack’, then, is an interesting t urn.
Perhaps this ‘Jack’ is a kind of alter-ego for Sassoon, as, in a sense, was ‘Mad Jack’; a
guilty idea of another self against whom Sassoon opposed himself (as a poet-warrior,
with some success).
“How he’d tried / To get sent home” : Jack has attempted to get a ‘Blighty’ wound— an
injury that would get him sent home to ‘Blighty’, or Britain, in the slang of the time.
This act of desperation— shooting oneself in the foot through sandbags, holding a
hand above the parapet in a sniper zone, and so on— was not an uncommon recourse
to those desperate to escape the Western front.
“…and how, at last, he died, / Blown to small bits.” : the grisly contrast of the soldier’s
death to the heroism supposed in the poem’s title is clear. ‘Jack’ is “blown to bits” by a
shell or a mine: the plosive sound, ‘b’ echoing the sound of the explosive and its effect
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on the unfortunate soldier. The halting rhythm of the line, with pauses following each
stressed word (“how”, “last”, “died”), lends a sense of inevitability to Jack’s end.
“And no-one seemed to care / Except that lonely woman with the white hair.” : The final
couplet is explicit, objective and powerful. The illusion of the opening stanza isreplaced two related scenes of devastation: the fragmented body of the dead soldier,
Jack, and the tragic image of the “lonely woman with the white hair”.
The General
The General : Pointedly anonymous in the poem. The General is a figurehead for the
kind of planning that led to massive loss of life during the attritional warfare on the
Western Front – Arras being a particularly grim example of the human cost of the
war. The Second Battle of Arras was a diversionary battle that took place in April-May
1917 and was intended to draw strength away from a larger French offensive to the
south at Aisne. While very successful at first, gaining ground and employing innovative
new tactics, by the end of the offensive such advantage had been largely lost and over
150,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers were dead.
STRUCTURE: ‘The General’ is written with a distinctive and upbeat rhythm that reflects
the General’s manner and which ironically contrasts with the deaths that result from
his incompetence. This rhythm is anapaestic. An anapaest is a three syllable foot that
comprises of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. So, for
example, the word ‘anapaest’ is, in fact, anapaestic, as we see here: a-na-PAEST . An
anapaestic rhythm bounds and gallops forwards, with that third syllable in every foot
being accentuated. There are four feet in every line of ‘The General’, meaning that this
meter is known as ‘Anapaestic Tetrameter’. If we break down the rhythm in this way
(an act known as scansion) then we can follow this rhythm. The second line scans, for
example, like this: “When we MET / him last WEEK / on our WAY / to the LINE / ” . It is a
strong, striding, strident rhythm, suitable for a poem such as this.
“‘Good -morning; good-morning!’ the General said’” : the breeziness of the General and
his pleasant demeanor is used as a powerful contrast to the consequences of his
actions. Sassoon’s satirical representation of the General is clever: it suggests (perhaps
unfairly) that his upbeat nature somehow reflects a lack of seriousness with which he
takes his charge.
“on our way to the line.” : the soldiers are making their way to the front.
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“most of ’em dead” : the inverted comma signifies the lower-class accent of the
speaker and dropping of the ‘th’ sound. This class voice gives the poem a more
subversive tone. The consequences of the cheery General’s actions are devastating.
“And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine” : the representatives of the Generalstaff — those soldiers working administratively at the General’s command— were
often intensely disliked by the average soldier. Here, their incompetence disgusts the
soldiers.
“‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack” : the soldiers see the General as a
‘card’, or ‘character’. Their tone is generous, given the physical effort they are making
(“grunted” ). The names of the soldiers are common and denote that they are ‘typical’
Tommies. This is, obviously, an emotive move: the irony of the men’s appreciative
statement shortly becomes clear.
“slogged up to Arras” : The Battle of Arras, April-May 1917 (see above).
“But he did for them both by his plan of attack.” : the single, end-stopped line at the
end of the poem is dramatic, and is the pointed lesson of this poem: that the General
and his staff are responsible for the death of the men.
Wilfred Owen
Mental cases
Looking at the first stanza and the beggining of the second
,Mental cases, is a shocking poem describing Owens experience in the Craig
Lockheart Hospital and the shell shock victims he saw there. Owen describes
their physical state but focuses mainly on the mental effects of war and of the
haunting things these men have experienced.
Owen begins the poem addressing the reader with rhetorical questions; Who
are these? Why sit they here in the moonlight?. These questions are an
effective beginning to the poem because they capture the reader ’ s attention
encouraging them to engage with the poem and learn more. The questions are
later followed by: Ever from their hair and through their hand palms misery
swelters. This metaphor stands out for me because it shows the strong sense of
despair, that these men are sweating misery. Again this verse is ended with
rhetorical questions, but who these hellish and surely we have perished. This
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death imagery is really powerful because it backs up Owens opinions on the
effects of war that they are in so much pain that surely they must be dead. I
think this first verse is very effective at setting the mood to the poem and
capturing the reader ’ s attention, encouraging them to emphasise with these
people.
The second verse comes as a answr to the rhetorical questions in the first verse
starting with. These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished. This line
really show the mental effects of war that these mens minds have been
ravished by what they have seen.
Disabled
Wilfred Owen's poem "Disabled" is about a soldier who came home from WWI missing
limbs, and how this disability changed his life. This poem was written when Owen was
in Craiglockhart War Hospital being treated for shell shock. It is very likely that he saw
numerous soldiers like the one he describes in this poem while he was at the hospital.
It was common that soldiers would return home missing limbs or severely wounded,
there wasn't a whole lot that could be done for soldiers while they were on the
frontline; so many injuries became more serious due to lack of medical care.
Line fourteen is basically saying that there was a girl, who is an artist, who was smitten
with him. "For it was younger than his youth" is just another way of saying that he had
a baby face. He adds "last year" to the end of line fifteen as a way of telling the readerthat he does not look like that anymore. His face has changed a lot during the war. His
face has lost its boyhood charm, and it has been replaced by a face that is hard and
worn by the ravages of war.
He describes himself as being old even though the oldest that he is likely to be is
twenty-two.
He lost his color, most likely means that he lost a lot of blood. He was caught in enemy
fire, which is how he lost his limbs. He bled and bled until there was no more blood
left. His injuries caused him to grow up very quickly; the reality of warfare sunk in, and
it was no longer something that was considered to be honorable, glorious, nor fun.
Isaac Rosenberg
Break of Day in the Trenches
As its title suggests, Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” is a poem in
which time juxtaposes with setting to create a new poetic perception of life and death.
It is a short free-verse poem of twenty-six lines, capturing the bemusement of an
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ordinary infantryman confronting the harshness of existence in the trenches during
World War I. It is also a reverie on life and the persistence of life in the midst of war.
Almost every line contains some reference to violent death, sometimes death on a
grand scale. Yet even in the midst of mass warfare, Rosenberg notes, there is life of asort. For instance, the poetic speaker’s casual act of plucking a poppy—an act of
killing—is juxtaposed with his observations on a living creature, a rat, that approaches
close enough to touch the speaker’s hand.
With sardonic humor, the speaker compares the rat’s situation with that of ordinary
soldiers, observing that the “Droll” animal is able to survive in the fields of battle. He
observes that the trenches and the other demarcations of war that separate the
English soldiers from their “enemies” matter little to the rat, which will perhaps cross
no-man’s-land to continue its feast on German corpses.
It is this free act of crossing a few miles of open space that figures in the next section
of poem. The speaker marvels at the rat’s ability to survive, while “haughty athletes”
with “Strong eyes, fine limbs” are so easily slaughtered. If the dominant fauna of this
environment is the rats that feed on the corpses, the common flora is “Poppies whose
roots are in man’s veins,” flowers of blood from wounded soldiers.
This reduction of humans to mere objects is reinforced later in the poem when the
movement of the rat is contrasted with the prostration of soldiers, who are “Sprawled
in the bowels of the earth.” From the description, the soldiers could be either living or
dead; perhaps it does not matter much to the speaker. At least the speaker knows that
he himself is still alive, although the slight dust on the poppy he has put behind his ear
prefigures the dust of the grave that always stands waiting.
Dead Man´s Dump
A soldier going wiring— that is, setting up entanglements of barbed wire in No-Man’sLand— takes limbers (carriages) full of wire across the battlefield. These carriages,
pulled by mules, pass near the bodies of the dying and run over the bodies of the
unburied dead.
“The wheels lurched over sprawled dead / But pained them not,” : The wheels of the
limbers roll over the insensible bodies of the dead in No-Man’s Land. This horrible task,
described by Rosenberg unflinchingly (“their bones crunched”), is the horrifying
inspiration for the poem.
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“They lie there huddled, friend and foeman…” : There is an equality or “kinship”
(brotherhood) in death on the battlefield for all these “men born of women”.
“Shells go crying over them / From night till night and now.” : The shrieking sound of
the shells that go “crying” over the dead men ironically recall the terrible cries of thosewho will mourn the dead. The repetition of “night” draws out and slows the following
line: the unburied bodies continue to be exposed to the violence of battle.
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