War Poetry Poemas Analizados

8/10/2019 War Poetry Poemas Analizados

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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



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



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.



“‘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



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.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWarras2.htm






“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



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



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.



“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.

Documents

War Poetry Poemas Analizados