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TSARINA ALEKSANDRA C. TABANGCURABSPT- 2B

Tsarina Aleksandra C. TabangcuraBSPT- 2B

The Last to Leave by Leon Gellert

The guns were silent, and the silent hillsHad bowed their grasses to a gentle breeze

I gazed upon the vales and on the rills,And whispered, "What of these?' and "What of these?

These long forgotten dead with sunken graves,Some cross less, with unwritten memories

Their only mourners are the moaning waves,Their only minstrels are the singing treesAnd thus I mused and sorrowed wistfully

I watched the place where they had scaled the height,The height whereon they bled so bitterly

Throughout each day and through each blistered nightI sat there long, and listened - all things listened too

I heard the epics of a thousand trees,A thousand waves I heard; and then I knew

The waves were very old, the trees were wise:The dead would be remembered evermore-The valiant dead that gazed upon the skies,And slept in great battalions by the shore.

Poem Analysis - 'The Last to Leave'Title: The Last to LeaveComposer: Leon Gellert

In the poem The Last to Leave, Leon Gellert constructs a depressing and sorrowful picture of the Gallipoli campaign by foregrounding the perspective of the forgotten soldiers who perished, and using a specific set of adjectives to set the scene.

Throughout the poem, Gellert makes very deliberate use of adjectives to describe the battlefield, for example, the ‘sunken graves’ and the ‘blistered night’. These adjectives, while used to describe the setting, also help set the tone and mood of the poem as one of bitterness and mourning. Rather than using romanticized, or ‘pretty’, adjectives, Gellert gives the reader a sense of harsh realism, making it easy to visualize the bare cliffs and barren land, which he describes.Gellert also uses personification throughout the poem, giving objects within the setting distinctly human qualities. A good example is the line, ‘their only mourners are the moaning waves.’ This gives the reader a sense of loneliness, stating that the only ones left to mourn the fallen are the waves and the narrator (hence the title, 'The Last to Leave'). This is effective because the poem is set around the evacuation of Gallipoli, at the time when all the soldiers fled the hills, leaving only the dead behind, and this was the tone he would have aimed to create.

The overall effect of these techniques is to position the reader to feel respect for those who fought for their country, mournful for those who died to achieve this goal, and awed and sad by the countless lost lives. The perspective of the soldiers who died is foregrounded, whilst the voices of those who survived as well as the opposition (Turkey) are silenced. This has the effect of making it seem a huge battle that no one survived, save for the narrator, even though (historically) we know this to be false.

This is an effective and eerily beautiful poem, which achieves its goal of increasing respect and a sense of loss in the readers. Even though little is said on the subject, it gives the reader an impression of valiant Australian soldiers who gave their lives to serve and protect. So, whilst the poem itself is altogether negative, positive light is thrown onto the Australian soldiers of Gallipoli.