essay about a war poem

The Soldier Summary & Analysis by Rupert Brooke

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

"The Soldier" is a poem by Rupert Brooke written during the first year of the First World War (1914). It is a deeply patriotic and idealistic poem that expresses a soldier's love for his homeland—in this case England, which is portrayed as a kind of nurturing paradise. Indeed, such is the soldier's bond with England that he feels his country to be both the origin of his existence and the place to which his consciousness will return when he dies. The poem was a hit with the public at the time, capturing the early enthusiasm for the war (before the grim realities of longterm conflict made themselves known). Nowadays, the poem is seen as somewhat naïve, offering little of the actual experience of war. That said, it undoubtedly captures and distills a particular type of patriotism.

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The Full Text of “The Soldier”

1 If I should die, think only this of me:

2       That there’s some corner of a foreign field

3 That is for ever England. There shall be

4       In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

5 A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

6       Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;

7 A body of England’s, breathing English air,

8       Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

9 And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

10       A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

11             Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

12 Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

13       And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

14             In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

“The Soldier” Summary

“the soldier” themes.

War, Patriotism, and Nationhood

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Soldier”

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;

Lines 12-14

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;       And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,             In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

“The Soldier” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

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Personification

“the soldier” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Soldier”

Rhyme scheme, “the soldier” speaker, “the soldier” setting, literary and historical context of “the soldier”, more “the soldier” resources, external resources.

Learn More About War Poetry — A series of podcast documentaries from the University of Oxford about various aspects of World War I poetry.  

First World War Poetry — More poems and an insightful essay about WWI from the Poetry Foundation.

Bringing WWI to Life — In this clip, director Peter Jackson discusses his recent WWI film, They Shall Not Grow Old. Though technology, Jackson brings old war footage to vivid life, restoring a sense of the soldiers as actual people.  

A Reading of "The Soldier" — The poem read by David Barnes for Librivox.  

So Great a Lover: The Life of Rupert Brooke — A BBC documentary exploring the short life and work of Rupert Brooke.  

LitCharts on Other Poems by Rupert Brooke

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There is more to war poetry than mud, wire and slaughter

Poems about the first world war have defined the genre for decades. It is time to hear from new voices that reflect a wider view of conflicts

W hen we say “war poetry” today, the sort of writing that comes to mind is a conglomeration of Wilfred Owen , Siegfried Sassoon and the other great writers of the first world war. It means descriptions of mud, wire and slaughter on a horrific scale. It includes accusations that the top brass prolonged hostilities for no good reason and that people at home supported the cause in ignorance. It involves fierce protest as well as intense sympathy. It issues a warning.

Because poetry of this sort has been drip-fed into British schools for several generations (interestingly, the process did not start as soon as the war ended, but only began in earnest during the 1960s), it has settled in the public mind at an extraordinary depth. There are large benefits, of course. The best poetry of the first world war is exceptionally powerful – not just the lyrics of Owen and others, but the more complex and modernistic narrative of In Parenthesis by David Jones (which still has some claim to be considered a neglected masterpiece). Furthermore, by rubbing its readers’ noses in the brutal facts of conflict and suffering, it possibly creates a social value as well – by helping to educate people in the human cost of war, and in the process discouraging them from starting or supporting another one.

At the same time, maybe there are disadvantages. Perhaps by placing such an emphasis on war poetry in the school curriculum, we don’t actually put people off the idea of fighting, but inculcate the idea that it is somehow normal for the British to take up arms? Perhaps it solidifies the idea of us as a war-like nation? There is a literary consequence to the classroom focus too. By concentrating on the poetry of one conflict, which to an important extent is shaped by its particular circumstances, it directs attention away from the poetry of other wars.

Not just the poetry of other wars, in fact, but other kinds of war poetry. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend,” says the dead soldier encountered in Owen’s “Strange Meeting”: “I parried; but my hands were loath and cold”. This summarises the whole circumstance of first world war poetry: it often involved hand-to-hand fighting; it was intimate. The second world war, by contrast, was for many soldiers a more distanced affair. Keith Douglas when taking aim in his poem “How to Kill”, says: “Now in my dial of glass appears / the soldier who is going to die”. He still thinks of him as a fellow creature (the soldier “moves about in ways / his mother knows, habits of his”) but also feels a crucial separation – a gap that exists as a physical space, and proves the conflict has frozen or exterminated a part of the speaker’s own humanity.

The difference between these two poems is shorthand for the differences between two periods and two kinds of war poetry. It is also an opportunity to point out that while the Owen poem has been read by millions of schoolchildren in the last 50-odd years, the Douglas poem (which is just as good, if not better) has been read by a handful. By not conforming to the pattern of war poetry laid down between 1914 and 1918 (actually between about 1916 and 1918), it has been sidelined.

The point here is not to discredit poetry of the first world war. As a collective act of witness, made at an extraordinary level of technical skill and with equally extraordinary emotional power, it is in its terrible way magnificent. The point, rather, is to say that our definition of “war poetry” has become too narrow to be accurate or fair. By extending it we are not only able to make a large literary gain – by admiring a much wider range of expertise, thoughtfulness and compassion – but also to appreciate in even more varied and detailed ways the effects of war.

This applies to the first world war itself, if we look away from the frontline and move to the home-front poetry of men in uniform such as Edward Thomas , or women waiting for them such as Eleanor Farjeon . Or to the extraordinary reports by nurses and other volunteers such as Helen Mackay, May Wedderburn Cannan and Margaret Postgate Cole . Or to the visceral and proto-existentialist poems and songs and chants of “Anonymous” (“I don’t want a bayonet up my arsehole, / I don’t want my bollocks shot away”).

A glance across the landscape of war poetry written after 1918 gives an even more dramatic sense of variety. The frontline (in north Africa, then France) brilliantly evoked by Douglas – in his poetry as well as his memoir Alamein to Zem Zem – is just a part of the large picture in which also appears Alun Lewis writing about soldierly boredom and nervous waiting during the second world war, and Dylan Thomas writing about the blitz – and, around them, international voices speaking with and through and over them: Nelly Sachs , Paul Celan , Anna Akhmatova and Tadeusz Różewicz .

As we come towards the present day, our sense of dilation becomes even greater. Not just in the sense that poets have made far-flung wars visible at home ( Yusef Komunyakaa writing about Vietnam, for instance, or Brian Turner about Iraq), but also because the reporting of wars in the media has encouraged non-combatants to address the subject in greater numbers than ever before. This is a difficult business, since it is all too easy to get caught grandstanding, or parading sensitivities, or seeming to aggrandise oneself by associating with a grand subject. But when it is done well it produces poems that earn the right to sit besides those written by people in uniform: Tony Harrison ’s “A Cold Coming” , for example, or James Fenton ’s “Dead Soldiers”.

Before the first world war, war poetry since time immemorial ( The Iliad ) had been largely concerned to celebrate, commend, remember and, yes, grieve. Think of Lord Byron ’s Assyrian, coming down like a wolf on the fold, or Sir John Moore in Charles Wolfe’s poem about the battle of Corunna . Since 1918, like war itself, the poetry of conflict has become a thing of infinite variety, describing apparently infinite tragedy. Yet for all this – which deserves more acknowledgment than it gets – something has stayed the same. The something Owen meant when he spoke about “the pity”.

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An Essay on War

As I do nearly every night, I will sweep the floor when my mother dies. I will miss her and not call her and little will change, like the not calling. Every night I think of her and don't call because the thinking is soothing and the calling is not. I sweep the floor and think about what I've been asked to write, an essay on war.                                        _________ "Most of us have not been to war," I begin, "yet certain photographs make us remember what never happened to us. Either our imaginations are marked or no longer our own." Dust dwelling in corners deforms what I think of as an edge. There is the wall, and there, alongside it, trails the dust, stubborn, unrelenting. There— a boy asleep on the beach, a girl turned into flame. In my mind I am at war with images, my mother brazenly unsmiling in a photograph until the end of time. Her mouth's dark red, a terrible ellipsis. Now, awed by the body in time, she dons a smile rinsed out like an absence. I hate poetry. I hate art. One broad sweep, and still the house will not be cleaned. My floors. My nighttime habits. I write without experience: "Dying is a fact few of us can bear."                                        _________ My mother is dying and we pretend nothing will happen. There is the onslaught. Tiny particles of my children proliferate . . . our breakfast crumbs, my grief, the nothing that scatters across the room, that won't be swept away. I try to not burn the toast. I try to not bend to abstraction, this page torn out of nothing. What did you pluck out of the tree? What did you put in your mouth? My mother, who is dying, tells me to lock the doors and windows. Winter is coming. Every house is a target. I live in a house with a writing desk. As a child, H's mother, barely escaping the war, left everthing behind—a well-stocked kitchen, the first books she read in English. She held onto her small self, her only baggage, covetously, terrified in the backseat of a stranger's car barreling toward a border. Now in America my mother is dying. She is scared of deer, snakes, caterpillars, rats, and some men. And windows and doors. I no longer know where she puts the broom, if she sweeps the house or answers the phone.                                        _________ Who made this mess? I write, "The mother of all wars is inside ourselves: I cannot decide whether to speak or stay silent, or I speak only ineffectual words, the crackling sounds that trees make on a windy night?" The season changes; again nothing is coming out of my mouth. I read a poem about a family photograph, the son long gone, the mother years into a second language, second life. Her hair is a black wave in a black ocean. I write, "Why do we not think of this as an image of war?" The daughters look nothing alike. I am leaving the door open, the windows unlatched. I sweep the floor as my children sleep, I sweep out the leaves they've carried into the house, every corner the dust, the dust, the dust. My mother was born in a war, outlasted wars I studied and wars I never heard of. Never saw. My whole life.

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• March 11, 2023

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“An Essay on War & The Death of Socrates” originally appeared in The Georgia Review, Volume LXXV, No. 2 (Summer 2021), © 2021 by The University of Georgia / © 2021 by Jennifer Chang. Reprinted by permission of Jennifer Chang and The Georgia Review.

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Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark , which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2012 and 2022 , The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry , and the Yale Review . She co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, serves as poetry editor of New England Review , and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. Her third book of poems, An Authentic Life , is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2024.

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What is War Poetry? An introduction by Paul O’Prey

• Post author: Mike Scott
• Post published: February 2, 2021
• Post category: News

Poets have written about the experience of war since the Greeks, but the young soldier poets of the First World War established war poetry as a literary genre. Their combined voice has become one of the defining texts of Twentieth Century Europe.

In 1914 hundreds of young men in uniform took to writing poetry as a way of striving to express extreme emotion at the very edge of experience. The work of a handful of these, such as Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon, has endured to become what Andrew Motion has called ‘a sacred national text’.

Although ‘war poet’ tends traditionally to refer to active combatants, war poetry has been written by many ‘civilians’ caught up in conflict in other ways: Cesar Vallejo and WH Auden in the Spanish Civil War, Margaret Postgate Cole and Rose Macaulay in the First World War, James Fenton in Cambodia.

In the global, ‘total war’ of 1939-45, that saw the holocaust, the blitz and Hiroshima, virtually no poet was untouched by the experience of war. The same was true for the civil conflicts and revolutions in Spain and Eastern Europe. That does not mean, however, that every poet responded to war by writing directly about it. For some, the proper response of a poet was one of consciously (conscientiously) keeping silent.

War poetry is not necessarily ‘anti-war’. It is, however, about the very large questions of life: identity, innocence, guilt, loyalty, courage, compassion, humanity, duty, desire, death. Its response to these questions, and its relation of immediate personal experience to moments of national and international crisis, gives war poetry an extra-literary importance. Owen wrote that even Shakespeare seems ‘vapid’ after Sassoon: ‘not of course because Sassoon is a greater artist, but because of the subjects’.

War poetry is currently studied in every school in Britain. It has become part of the mythology of nationhood, and an expression of both historical consciousness and political conscience. The way we read – and perhaps revere – war poetry, says something about what we are, and what we want to be, as a nation.

Please click on the name of a poet listed on the right to read a biography written for this website by an expert on that poet. Many of the biographies also contain links to other information on the web about a poet. More biographies are being added to the website regularly. Biographies are listed by by war or conflict. To read a summary about the war poetry of a particular war or conflict, click on one of the conflict headings on the right of this page. These summaries are also written by experts and for this website. Other biographies or information on war poets not listed on this page may be available — use the ‘Search here’ box on the top right hand corner of this page left to specify what you want and press ‘Go’. To search outside this web site, use Google. If you would like to suggest a biography be written for this website about a particular poet, or to write an expert biography yourself to be added to these pages, please contact  [email protected] .

Suggested Reading:

The Oxford Book of War Poetry, edited by Jon Stallworthy (Oxford University Press, 1988)

Poetry and War: An Introductory Reader, by Simon Featherstone (Routledge, 1994)

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Oxford university podcasts: ‘british’ world war one poetry: an introduction, geoffrey taylor describes his experience of the wpa’s 2018 battlefields poetry tour, ‘the world’s worst wound’., tower of london commissions a ‘soundscape’ based on one of mary borden’s poems.

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The Literary Magazine of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

War Poetry, Political Poetry, and The Invisible Powers

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“The problem for a poet in writing about modern war is that, while he can only deal with events of which he has first hand knowledge—invention, however imaginative, is bound to be fake—his poems must somehow transcend mere journalistic reportage. In a work of art, the single event must be seen as an element in a universally significant pattern: the area of the pattern actually illuminated by the artist’s vision is always, more or less limited, but one is aware of its extending beyond what we see far into time and space.”

–W.H.Auden, preface to the first edition of Lincoln Kirstein’s Rhymes of a Pfc.

“The proper subjects for poetry are love, virtue, and war.”

–Dante Alighieri, De Eloquentia Vulgari , 1304

“Now you are in a new world, the world of invisible powers, the world of literature, of poem and story.”

 –Mona Van Duyn, “Matters of Poetry”, (1993)

One day in Hanoi, where our Nôm Foundation was working at the National Library to digitize its several thousand ancient texts, I took a day off to visit the ancient Temple of Literature, founded in 1076 after the Vietnamese had finally driven out their Chinese overlords.  Until 1919 when the Temple’s function ended under the French, this was the academy where Vietnam trained its governing elite in poetry, history, and philosophy, selecting gifted students from all social classes in the belief that a mind trained and tested in such subjects is a quick, sharp, and careful mind, and that such minds are important resources to the nation.

One enters the Temple grounds through a large stone gate topped with recoiling dragons indicating royal rule and its mandate from heaven.  One then proceeds past gardens and ponds through another large gateway under a tile-roofed balcony where, over the centuries, new graduates  declaimed their poetry. Perhaps the most striking thing one then sees are rows of 6-foot stone blocks standing on the backs of massive stone turtles.  On these blocks are carved the names of those who graduated from the Temple and entered Vietnam’s civil service. Even today, hundreds of years after these graduates served the nation, one can see their descendants lighting incense sticks and placing them before those stone blocks in familial veneration.

Further on, in a room inside the Temple itself, there is a square stone carved in Chinese characters and next to it translations into modern Vietnamese and in English, which read as follows:

Virtuous and talented men are state sustaining elements. The strength and prosperity of a state depend on it[s] stable vitality and it becomes weaker as such vitality fails.  That is why all the saint emperors and clear-sighted kings didn’t fail in seeing to the formation of men of talent and the employment of literati to develop this vitality.

–Examination Stele, Đai Bảo Dynasty, Third Year (1442).

Literati?  Literary people as “state sustaining elements”? How on earth, we Americans might ask, can citizens trained in literary skills be “state-sustaining elements”?  Why would the Vietnamese royal court set up a university for its best and brightest, regardless of class or wealth, and then train them largely in poetry, history, and philosophy?

If that seems a little far-fetched, consider this: Confucius, the Chinese philosopher to whom the Vietnamese Temple of Literature is dedicated along with the Duke of Chou (this after the Chinese were finally driven out) was once asked the perennial philosophic question of 4th century China—as it was the perennial question for Socrates in Plato’s The Republic —“what would you first do if allowed to rule a kingdom?”  Confucius’ reply, as recorded in his Analects , was: “to correct language.”  Because, he said, if language is not precise, “then what is meant cannot be effected. If what is meant cannot be effected, society falls apart.”

The useful application of the Confucian reply to our affairs today must be obvious. Here is the exchange from Book XIII of the Analects , written around 400 BC.

Tzu-lu said, “If the prince of Wei were waiting for you to come and administer his country for him, what would be your first measure?”

The Master said, “It would certainly be to correct language.”

Tzu-Lu said, “Did I hear you right? Surely what you say has nothing to do with the matter. Why should language be corrected?” 1

The Master said, “Lu! How simple you are! A gentleman, when things he does not understand are mentioned, should maintain an attitude of reserve. If language is incorrect, then what is said does not concord with what was meant; and if what is said does not concord with what was meant, what is to be done cannot be effected. If what is to be done cannot be effected, then society falls apart.”

Such precision in the use of words is of course a lifelong pleasure in-and-of itself, but it has immense practical value as well. Without such precision in the way we communicate with ourselves, with ourselves as a society, and with the world beyond, our private and public affairs falter and fall apart.  Precision in the use of words is the talent which lends all other professions and skills their usefulness. It is a skill which goes beyond utilitarian technology.  Such precision in speech, writing, and the reading of complex works of the human imagination brings to its practitioners and to their societies a more enriched sense of self and an inevitable moral expansion.

This skill, most notably found in poetry, is indeed “a state-sustaining endeavor.”  It is no mere curiosity that from Vietnam’s earliest nationhood its rulers and foreign emissaries were always known poets.  The 18th century ambassador to China, Nguyễn Du, decorated by his emperor as a “pillar of the nation,” is also Vietnam’s most famous poet. In modern times, Ho Chi Minh wrote quite good poetry in Vietnamese and in Chinese.  The North Vietnamese Head of Delegation to the 1973 Paris Peace Talks was Xuân Thủy, known first as a poet.

Traditionally, the chief poetic vehicle for study and composition, was the “regulated” lü-shih verse form made classic by the Chinese master Tu Fu in the 8th century, and called th ơ đ ườ ng lu ậ t in Vietnamese.  It is always eight lines, seven syllables to a line, rhyming usually on the first, second, fourth, sixth, and eighth lines, and requiring syntactic parallel structure in the middle four. For several East Asian societies it became the main lyric vehicle for centuries, serving them in the way the sonnet served the West.  This form—whether written in Vietnamese or in Chinese—streamed with history and culture in generations of individuals possessing “bright mind.” As the stone tablet suggests, the strength and prosperity of a state depend on its stable vitality created by men and women who are trained to inquire, sharpen their minds, and expand their souls by an active engagement, we would say, with “the best words in the best order,” as Coleridge defined poetry in 1835 in his Table Talk .

This notion of poetry’s affecting voice resulting in moral action, is increasingly foreign to us. The idea that a poem can change political events probably seems to us quaint if not preposterous.  Yet, even today, Vietnamese will gamble on a person’s ability to aptly end a poem, and political debates can be won by an appropriate poetic quotation.  Indeed, legend has it that a Chinese invasion was once turned back by the poem below, supposedly painted on banana leaves and eaten by ants, the resulting poem causing panic in the invading troops.  Whether this really happened isn’t as significant as the legend itself and its existence in popular belief:

 南 國 山 河 南 帝 居  Our mountains and rivers belong to the Southern Ruler.

截 然 定 分 在 天 書  This is written in the Celestial Book.

如 何 逆 虜 來 侵 犯  Those who try to conquer this land

汝 等 行 看 取 敗 虚  Will surely suffer defeat.  

–Marshall Lý Thường Kiệt (1019-1105)

One is reminded in our more recent times of poetry’s ability to change human events by George Washington’s decision, on December 26, 1776, on the eve of his attack on Trenton–as his flotilla of farmers prepared their crossing of the Delaware, in the night, in a blizzard– to assemble his troops to hear a reading of Thomas Paine’s just-published poetic essay regarding “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots.”  Their subsequent attack, and perhaps that reading, changed the course of the war.

Christmas Eve at Washington’s Crossing

Out on the freezing Delaware, ice sheets bob the surface, breaking against granite pilings of the colonial river inn swept by winter storm.

Gusts of snow blow off a sandbar and sink in plunging currents where a line of ducks paddle hard against the blizzard

as cornfields on the Jersey banks are whisked into bits of stalks and broken sheaves spinning in the squalls.

This is where, one such Christmas night, the tall courtly general with bad teeth risked his neck and his rebels to cross the storming river and rout the Hessians.

What made them think they could succeed?…farmers mostly, leaving homesteads to load cannon into Durham boats

to row into the snowstorm, then march all night to Trenton, saving the Republic for Valley Forge and victory at Yorktown.

Before crossing, legend says, they assembled in the snow to hear Paine’s new essay about summer soldiers and sunshine patriots.

What words could call us all together now? On what riverbank? For what common good would we abandon all?

2 But what about the success of political poetry today including, say, the Joseph Biden inaugural poem written by Amanda Gorman?  Why do some poems stay alive in us, while others never even take hold?  Some poems disappear as their immediate events fade from memory.  But why do others endure?  And why do a handful of poems referring to politics or war take hold when most are immediately forgotten?  Do poems based in the shocks of warfare or in popular political sentiment belong to a different category of aesthetics?

In a letter to me in Vietnam in 1968, in response to some poems I had mailed him, my former teacher, novelist John Barth wrote:

The poems get it said, even to me, who do not find very much war poetry successful if it has more than one topical proper name in it.  Most of Lowell’s and Bly’s & Who-Have-You’s Vietnam verse, sincere as its horrification and indignation is, will fare as badly as Karl Shapiro’s V-Letter poems, I believe, once the bloody war is over and the verses have to survive on their excellence alone.

Nonetheless, Randall Jarrell, writing in his Fifty Years of American Poetry , said this about Shapiro’s style in his war poems:  “Karl Shapiro’s poems are fresh and young and rash and live; their hard clear outlines, their flat bold colors create a world like that of a knowing and skillful neoprimitive painting, without any of the confusion or profundity of atmosphere, of aerial perspective, but with notable visual and satiric force.”  “Neoprimitive”…”without any of the confusion or profundity of atmosphere.”  Not much of in the way praise.

During WW II, Shapiro was stationed as a military clerk in Australia and New Guinea. (Perhaps a poet’s proximity or distance from the battlefield is one factor in a war poem’s success, even for accomplished, established poets like Robert Lowell.) Indeed, in the 2014 edition of his centuries-spanning collection of The New Oxford Book of War Poetry , Jon Stallworthy writes that “the charge against a poem like Lowell’s ‘Women, Children, Babies, Cows, Cats’ is that, far from shocking an exposed nerve, it has the numbing effect of second-hand journalism,” adding in regards to Vietnam War poets, that “a problem for many American poets then aspiring to be war poets was that, rightly perceiving it to be an unjust war, they could not participate as servicemen or women; and lacking first-hand experience, could not write convincingly of the war ‘on the ground.”

Yet this does not explain the many forgettable poems in the 1985 anthology (in which I am included), called Carrying the Darkness , 3 edited by a foremost poet of that war and including no less than seventy-five poets, all witnesses to the war, writing mostly in loose free verse, offering raw scenes and harsh ironies in often conversational, colloquial, cool, and hip dictions. The anthology included for its readers back home, not only topical names, but also a three-page glossary of military terms, slang, and war-related abbreviations: “AK-47, ao dai, ARVN, beaucoup, beaucoup dien cai dau, berm, BOQ/PX” etc. ending with “Zippo, zoomie.”

Other factors must be working to ensure a war poem’s success besides having the author’s feet on the battlefield. The connection of a poem with its reader surely must have to do, not only with its topic—war or whatever— but with essentials of craft , the poet’s ability to summon appropriate use of imagery, rhythm, sound play, and argument or, as Ezra Pound put it in his 1934 ABC of Reading, “you still charge words with meaning mainly in three ways, called phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. You use a word to throw a visual image on to the reader’s imagination, or you charge it by sound, or you use groups of words to do this.”  These are the shifting but essential elements of all effecting poetry, whatever the topic.

Today, in the blither of 21st century media that floods our eyes and ears each day, it is no wonder if poetry seems weak and irrelevant. In Humboldt’s Gift , Saul Bellows’ powerful 1975 novel based on his brilliant and crazed poet friend, the catastrophical Delmore Schwartz, Bellow describes poets as “poor loonies,” and seems to cast a cold view on the importance of poets in modern society:

The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either . . .”

4 That is to say, their poetic artistry of words means very little compared to the real skills, the visible , demonstrable powers of technology.

In modern America, even poets will seem to claim that “poetry makes nothing happen,” as in W.H. Auden’s famous passage in his “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.

Poetry survives.  It is a way of happening. A mouth.

Auden’s apparent criticism in fact points to poetry’s power, including war poetry and political poetry. When its voice is memorable, poetry’s “mouth” can to speak to our innermost selves and to the universe beyond us. This is no slight thing. This changes everything . With this qualification, poetry becomes as essential for us now as it ever was—even if it is hardly read today and rarely reviewed—for if (and when) poetry gives us a “mouth,” a voice to express our most private and public concerns, poetry makes everything happen, extending our own voice and human self, opening paths to address our inmost thoughts and the universe outside of us. Poetry “objectifies the subjective; subjectifies the objective,” as the philosopher Suzanne Langer argues in her essay on the cultural importance of art. 5

But how can any art form make things happen? By changing us.

And how can it change us?  By opening in us a new sense of ourselves in the world.

My “if (and when)” above refers both to the skills of craft employed and to the “genius” of the poet evoking those skills as needed for the task at hand.  Early in our English speculations about the uses of poetry, Sir Philip Sydney wrote in his Defense of Poetry of 1580 that “a poet no industry can make if his own genius be not carried into it…”

The philosopher therefore and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example; but both not having both, do both halt. … Now doth the peerless poet perform both; for whatsoever the philosopher says should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it in someone by whom he presupposes it was done, so as he couples the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture, I say; for he yields to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestows but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth.

Genius and craft.  The first is impossible to talk about and the second can’t be talked about enough, especially when engaging young writers.  As with any poetry, mere rhetorical claim or assertion may be the start of a poem, but rarely are they its completion. Rhetorically determined poetry isn’t less or different or necessarily off-putting because of its topic but for its want of persuasive skills.

Some years ago Mona Van Duyn, then the Poet Laureate of the United States, was interviewed by Ted Koppel on his ABC television show, Nightline .  Mr. Koppel must have ticked off Ms.Van Duyn because here is because here is what she said: 6

“Mr. Koppel, I have watched you over the years as you challenge, manipulate, contradict, humiliate the world’s leaders, the world’s visible powers.  Those powers are very great: they can change the world.  Now you are in a new world, the world of invisible powers, the world of literature, of poem and story.  These do not force their powers upon their subjects, who freely choose to submit to them.  You cannot contradict, challenge, manipulate or humiliate them.  They work invisibly—they widen and deepen the human imagination, they increase empathy (without which no being is truly human), they train the emotions to employ themselves with more appropriateness and precision, they change or modify the very language in which human thought is formed.  Like love, but stronger, since love’s power is limited by mortality, they are holders and keepers of what Time would otherwise take away from us—the world, both natural (its creatures, colors, shapes, textures, sounds, smells, tastes) and the social (the others we love or hate or have never known, their voices, appearances, assumptions, the inner and outer contexts of their lives).  These powers, too, are very great: they can change the self.”

An Introduction to English War Poetry

The poet’s career doesn’t end once he dies. The soldier’s career arguably does. The poet-soldier, then, has died physically, but what remains of him is his art. Both Edward Thomas and Francis Ledwidge managed to create something that transcended their persons and lasted long after being killed in war.

One of the greatest contributions to modern English poetry came through the works that described World War I, in great part because of WWI’s significance on human history. Poetry written by soldiers is one of the best ways to approach literature on the subject, and it will be the focus of this essay to introduce two war poets, one Englishman and one Irishman, who conveyed the sense of being a soldier in the Great War and, in turn, were transformed by this event. Edward Thomas and Francis Ledwidge were two such poets whose pieces drew upon elements of nature to communicate a soldier’s isolation and his acceptance, even embrace, of imminent death. These two poets were common men, and sometimes within the canon of English and Western literature we may forget that there were talented writers of value even if they did not reach international renown. Many times, it is only through the art of small men that we can understand the impact of the forces that we create and that envelop us as they grow out of control.

Edward Thomas was an English poet born in 1878. He enlisted as a soldier at the age of thirty-seven in 1915 and was killed, after two years of training, on the first day of battle in Arras, France in 1917.[1] Francis Ledwidge, born in 1887, enlisted as a soldier in 1914 at the young age of twenty-seven and was killed three years later in Boezinge, Belgium.[2] Though both of these men wrote several poems inspired by their experiences fighting during the Great War, they were not concerned with the war as a political or controversial topic. In fact, those familiar with war poetry might wonder why I don’t mention better-known WWI poets, like Wilfred Owen. All soldiers were diverse people who understood war differently. Owen had one of the most explicit critiques of war, and I think most of his fame came from that political statement. Take his most famous poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the message of which can be understood from a first reading:

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 gas-shells dropping softly 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 poem is moving, no doubt, because it is a true depiction of war. Even in his blunt description of battle, Owen manages to describe death in beautiful verse, “Dim through the misty panes and thick green light / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning” (13-14), followed by a nightmarish description of the image that haunts him in his sleep. The moral of the story? It is a lie, that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. Owen’s message resonated with many anti-war activists, and this statement is not meant to detract from what is an exceptional poem with intricate literary devices (just read the first two lines out loud! Alliteration, assonance, almost onomatopoeic, making the sound of soldiers marching—amazing). But I do think Owen’s political message has influenced his appreciation as a poet as being more for his message, not for his poetry .

What I prefer about the lesser-known war poets is the humility of their voice, which is more preoccupied with coming to terms with themselves as soldiers, as the helpless victims of circumstance, rather than criticizing the world for what’s happened to them. What Thomas and Ledwidge seemed to understand was that during times of war wherein a soldier found himself lost and alone, it was man’s relationship with himself that took priority over everything else. While the spirit of the soldier who sacrifices himself for others is revered, I do believe that, internally, what took place in the minds of these soldiers was a necessary form of isolation that turned into self-reflection. This excerpt of a letter from Ledwidge to a woman named Katherine conveys a similar sentiment to Owen’s poem, but in a very different tone:

If I survive the war, I have great hopes of writing something that will live. If not, I trust to be remembered in my own land for one or two things which its long sorrow inspired… You ask me what I am doing. I am a unit in the Great War, doing and suffering… I may be dead before this reaches you, but I will have done my part… I am always homesick. I hear the roads calling, and the hills, and the rivers wondering where I am. It is terrible to always be homesick. —Francis Ledwidge, Letter to Katherine Tynan, dated 6 January 1917 .[3]

It is not poetry, of course, but it was written by a poet. Notice how Ledwidge says that if he “survives,” he wants to write something that will “live.” He does not use the word “live” for himself, although we usually say, “if I live.” It is almost as though Ledwidge is recognizing that he’s already lost a part of himself. Ledwidge viewed himself as a “unit,” just going through the motions of what needed to be done. It was not on the battlefield or while doing his duty as a soldier, then, that the individual fighter contemplated himself. Their relationship with the self, then, was the solution to their loneliness and feeling of insignificance.

The machinery used during the Great War meant that infantry combat was only a secondary resource in battle, and this change in weaponry prevented the individual soldier from playing a direct part in this industrialized war.[4] People’s belief in a heroic image of one body of men fighting arm in arm was shattered upon realizing that soldiers were dying undignified and by the thousands. The question then became, what was a singular man’s place amidst such mass destruction? Truly, his identity was overcome by an agglomerate of soldiers who were treated as objects. What “greater” sense of himself could the soldier contribute to a cause devoid of greatness?

For Edward Thomas and Francis Ledwidge, the way that they contemplated their place and themselves was through their poetry, and nature was an integral part of this relationship because it was a direct way for them to envision home. Since home was seldom in proximity for the soldier, it can be deduced that he often resorted to his immediate surroundings to find comfort and reassurance. Both Thomas and Ledwidge developed this sort of companionship with nature.

Nature’s characteristic as an ongoing duality between life and death, the beauty of creation and destruction, bore resemblance to what they were experiencing on a daily basis, and they perceived it, therefore, as a reflection of their own lives. Thomas and Ledwidge did not solely use nature in their poetry to recount their personal experiences, however, but they also used it to create a space of recognition for the individual faceless soldier as a method of remembrance. They used the symbol of a grave to manifest this sentiment.

The Grave Symbolic for Death and Life

Since there were no number of graves that would suffice for the number of casualties in the Great War, the grave as it was used by these two poets is a symbol for what it represents. In the case of Edward Thomas, the grave as a symbol of remembrance was more important than the physical tombstone. He did not mention graves in his poems, nor did he describe or reference them. Thomas’ focus on the grave was on the writings that would commonly go on the tombstone, and he replicated them in lyrical structure and form in his verses. This elegiac form, often meant for epitaphs, is common in several of his poems.[5] Thomas saw a contrast with epitaphs since they represented what was fixed but also what was transcendent, and he even attributed a literary value to them.[6] An example of such a poem is titled, “In Memoriam (Easter 1915)”:

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood This Eastertide call into mind the men, Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should Have gathered them and will never do again. (1-4)

This poem, written in iambic pentameter with an alternating end-rhyme, is typical of an elegiac stanza, which is a fitting style based on the content of Thomas’ piece since it is a poem of remembrance for the men who left for war and did not return. Nature is immediately invoked when Thomas mentions the flowers “left thick at nightfall in the wood” (1) that should have been gathered by the young soldiers and their sweethearts. Thomas acknowledges that seeing the life of the flowers that have not been picked calls to mind the death of the soldiers: the presence of one thing represents the absence of another.

Thomas used the flower as a symbol of both remembrance and impermanence to recall the past, note the present, and contemplate the future. The importance of nature in the poem might be further stressed upon considering that Thomas used un-plucked flowers in the woods as the main subject. It is only upon seeing the flowers that he is reminded of the dead soldiers. Rather than addressing the dead soldiers directly, Thomas prefers to invoke them through nature even though the poem, as the title expresses, is meant to be an elegy or epitaph of some sort for the men who died in war.

Another poem that expresses this notion of the grave as a point of convergence for death and life is “A Soldier’s Grave” by Francis Ledwidge. It bears some similarity to “In Memoriam (Easter 1915)” since flowers are also mentioned and used as a symbol of remembrance, but the flowers are only secondary to the greater symbol that is the actual earth-grave, which is the main subject of the poem. Here, however, the grave is one with nature, or, rather, the grave is a platform for nature:

And where the earth was soft for flowers we made A grave for him that he might better rest. So, Spring shall come and leave it sweet arrayed, And there the lark shall turn her dewy nest (5-8)

Spring is personified to depict a regenerating force that will decorate the soldier’s grave with different forms of life. A grave was made where “the earth was soft” (5), and spring will use this ground as its stage to grow new flowers and attract birds to lay their nests (8). In the context of this poem, death relieves the soldier from his burdens and even results in beauty and harmony as nature pushes the cycle forward, thus demonstrating that time continues to pass as one life ends by turning the soldier’s resting place into a display of new life. Both poets console the horrors of war with the beauty of nature and portray nature as playing an active role in death and life. By attributing these characteristics to nature, Thomas and Ledwidge are displaying self-awareness in their role as a soldier. They hint, likewise, at their acceptance of death since their poems display a similar disposition towards mortality, where the thought of dying comes no longer as a fear, but as a part of nature.

The Notion of “Passing” as Nature

Francis Ledwidge was able to depict nature as serene and personify it as a force of aid for the dying soldier. We can further analyze his poem “A Soldier’s Grave” and look at the first stanza to corroborate this point:

Then in the lull of midnight, gentle arms Lifted him slowly down the slopes of death Lest he should hear again the mad alarms Of battle, dying moans, and painful breath (1-4)

With his opening line, Ledwidge immediately assumes a narrative tone, which serves to calm the reader since the poet sounds like he is telling a pleasant story that is taking place in a tranquil setting, “the lull of midnight” (1). The simple alternating end-rhyme scheme enhances this emotion as each stanza concludes in such a way that sounds complete, and the word-choice (lull, gentle, lifted, slowly) reassures the reader that what is happening to the soldier is a good thing rather than a negative one. In terms of the story that Ledwidge is telling, an unknown entity is introduced whose role is to ease the soldier’s passing and carry him peacefully towards death: But the reader is not told who or what it is; it is simply described as “gentle arms” (1). Though it might be difficult to infer who or what the gentle arms refer to, Ledwidge seems to imply that the entity is a gracious and sympathetic one since it is taking the soldier away from “the mad alarms of battle, dying moans, and painful breath” (3-4).

Francis Ledwidge briefly mentioned the journey from life towards death in “A Soldier’s Grave” when he describes the soldier being lifted down death’s slopes (2). Edward Thomas elaborated on this journey to a greater extent in “Lights Out,” which was written by Thomas in 1916 just before going to war.[7] The poem is about the process of dying, and he describes this gradual passing, which he calls a sleep, by relating it to walking in a forest. The presence of nature here plays a distinct role: It is no longer a kind and sympathetic force as Ledwidge portrayed in his poem; rather, Thomas depicts it as intense and inescapable:

I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late; They cannot choose.

Many a road and track That, since the dawn’s first crack, Up to the forest brink, Deceived the travelers, Suddenly now blurs, And in they sink. (1-12)

Nature, here in the form of a forest, is bottomless; if sleep were a land, Thomas describes the borders of this realm as abysmal since he chooses to break the sentence at a moment where the sentence reads, “I have come to the borders of sleep / The unfathomable deep…” (1-2) It is only after continuing the poem that Thomas reveals a forest that is inevitable; “where all must lose their way, however straight or winding, soon or late; they cannot choose” (3-6). Considering the conditions and timing under which Thomas wrote this poem, prior to going to war and a year before his death, we can assume that Thomas used sleep to refer to death and the forest as a metaphor for the passing. The two symbols of sleep and the forest combined emphasize the inevitability of death since Thomas explains that everyone will eventually succumb to this sleep regardless of the path they take. All the roads and tracks that “deceived” travelers, perhaps into thinking death would not come for them, blur at the forest brink. That forest is a whole wherein they sink: A deep sleep.

Nature, in this respect, has tricked and captured the traveler wandering through the forest, which might cause the reader to view nature as a negative force. The subsequent stanzas, however, rectify this false assumption as Thomas defends the forest as being a neutral place where all emotion is distilled and where the traveler can rid himself of all earthly cares:

Here love ends, Despair, ambition ends; All pleasure and all trouble, Although most sweet or bitter, Here ends in sleep that is sweeter Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book Or face of dearest look That I would not turn from now To go into the unknown I must enter, and leave, alone, I know now how. (13-24)

It is interesting to note that Thomas describes death as neither good nor bad: both pleasure and trouble end, both love and despair (1-3). The fourth stanza in the poem indicates a type of personal relief in death that is incomparable to any worldly joy. “Face” (20) in this context represents any family or friend that would normally keep Thomas from dying, while “book” (19) might be a symbol for any moral, intellectual, or philosophical code of ethics that might make a man believe that it is better to continue living. Alternatively, it could be a metaphorical representation of literature and of Thomas’ potential career as a literary figure, since he was a well-reputed writer and book reviewer before he enlisted in the army. Thomas determines, nonetheless, that neither will stop him from entering the unknown.

In the fifth and final stanza of the poem, Thomas returns to his nature imagery and completes a cycle not only in the mechanical structure of the poem as he brings back the image of the forest, but also in a metaphorical sense since he concludes by expressing the embrace of death as a release from the self and a unification with nature:

The tall forest towers; Its cloudy foliage lowers Ahead, shelf above shelf; Its silence I hear and obey That I may lose my way And myself. (25-30)

There is a clear contradiction when Thomas states that he is able to “hear” (28) the forest’s silence and that this absence of sound is what persuades him to obey it. It is as though the forest did not need to do anything to convince Thomas to comply; rather, the impulse to follow it comes intuitively and subconsciously. While the forest seems to overpower Thomas as “its cloudy foliage lowers” (26) over him and beckons him to venture deeper, Thomas simultaneously displays free will and choice by acknowledging the fact that in so doing he will lose his path in the forest and ultimately himself (30). The facts that Thomas senses an invitation from the forest, that he understands what he must do without the need for an audible command or signal, and that he is well aware of the consequences, serve to support the idea that he views passing to be almost instinctive and part of nature.

By placing such an emphasis on dying while concurrently using nature as a metaphor and analogy to describe the process, Thomas and Ledwidge affirm an instinctual connection between their deaths and their environment. For both of these poets, the transience of nature was a way to understand and justify their role as a soldier likely to die at any moment. Thomas’ poem opens the important subject of English WWI poetry: the self.

The “Self” and Individual Life

Although the previous poems might insinuate that Thomas and Ledwidge had accepting dispositions towards death, they wrote other poems on the matter that conflicted with the notion of them having one view of death. The thought of death might have served as alleviation for these poets, but it did not resolve many questions in regard to their place amidst the Great War, after all. Their poetry was the attempt to validate the life and death of the soldier more than it was an outward critique on war. Thomas and Ledwidge placed a heavy importance on the “self” and the individual life of the soldier as he lived and suffered the war, for this experience tremendously affected his perception of the world, of life, and of death. From the traumatizing events that they endured, an existential question correspondingly arose and troubled the soldier’s mind: were his efforts and his death justified? Would he ever have recompense for his efforts, even after death? Francis Ledwidge addressed these questions in one of his most famous poems, “Lament for Thomas MacDonagh.” MacDonagh was a revolutionary leader during the 1916 Easter Rising who was executed by the British Army.[8] Ledwidge wrote a poem in his honor where he revealed his thoughts on the individual who sacrificed his life and died for a greater cause:

He shall not hear the bittern cry In the wild sky where he is lain Nor voices of the sweeter birds Above the wailing of the rain

Nor shall he know when loud March blows Thro’ slanting snows his fanfare shrill Blowing to flame the golden cup Of many an upset daffodil (1-8)

The opening stanza bears some resemblance to Thomas’ poem, “Lights Out” in the sense that Ledwidge is describing death indifferently as a state of neither pain nor happiness: Ledwidge states that MacDonagh will hear neither “the bittern cry” (1) nor the sounds of “the sweeter birds” (3). MacDonagh, moreover, will not be able to witness the winter: “Nor shall he know when loud March blows / Thro’ slanting snows his fanfare shrill” (5-6). Ledwidge strengthens this sentiment by using words like “wild” (2) to describe the sky, and the winter and the rain as cacophonous with their “wailing” (4) and “shrill” (6). This desolate landscape depicts nature as harsh, destructive, and violent as the winter “blows to flame” (7) the golden cups of daffodils.

The first two stanzas paint a bleak landscape to reflect how Ledwidge feels about the death of Thomas MacDonagh as he uses words such as “upset” (8) and “bittern” (1) to further emphasize his discontent. Through these statements, Ledwidge addresses the existential question of the life and soul of a man after death, but he seems to lean towards the opinion that MacDonagh is completely gone. It isn’t until the third stanza that Ledwidge introduces a hesitation, providing an optimistic and alternative view to MacDonagh’s untimely death:

But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor And pastures poor with greedy weeds Perhaps he’ll hear her low at morn Lifting her horns in pleasant meads (8-12)

Ledwidge continues to describe the landscape in a negative form, “pastures poor with greedy weeds” (9). This adjective choice for the weeds implies that there is some sort of corruption occurring on this field, which perhaps is a reference to the political instability occurring in Ireland at the time of the Easter Rebellion, since it was during this event that MacDonagh died (again, history is vital for good poetry writing and study). This negative landscape is reconciled once Ledwidge inserts an important shift by introducing the Dark Cow leaving this field. The “Dark Cow” (8) that Ledwidge foresees eventually leaving the moor is turned into a proper noun, which supports the idea that the cow is a metaphor for his country and Ledwidge’s way of optimistically expressing the possibility of Ireland overcoming its tumultuous state.

The most important lines in the poem are the final two where Ledwidge readdresses the question of MacDonagh’s death by considering the possibility that, if and once Ireland overcomes its strife, MacDonagh will be able to see (even from beyond the grave) his country prosper once again. Ledwidge achieves this optimistic shift by using the key word “perhaps” (11) to state that MacDonagh will be able to hear the Dark Cow (that is, Ireland) and see her “lifting her horns in pleasant meads” (12), an image of triumph and pride. This gesture that Ledwidge attributes to the cow not only reveals his hopes for Ireland, but also his feelings towards MacDonagh’s death: By being able to hear the cow upon lifting her horns, MacDonagh’s senses are restored and his memory, therefore, brought back to life.

Ledwidge’s interest in the soul of Thomas MacDonagh reveals his own personal curiosity regarding the soul of the individual before and after death. Edward Thomas also addressed this issue in his poem, “Rain,” by questioning this same subject and placing emphasis on the senses to express the possibility of the self ceasing to exist after death:

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 solitude. (1-6)

The prominence and repetition of the word “rain” in the first line replicates the rhythm of raindrops, which implies that Thomas is actively listening to the rain and is therefore in a state of deep contemplation. The third line of the poem reveals that Thomas is thinking about his death; yet, it is not his death that is troubling him, but rather the notion of losing his senses and, therefore, of losing himself.

Francis Ledwidge wrote a similar poem titled “Soliloquy,” in which he assesses the importance of being a soldier and the probability of dying. The poem opens with a reflection on his youth and progresses chronologically with him through the years. The third stanza is the break in the poem where his thoughts come back to the present moment:

And now I’m drinking wine in France, The helpless child of circumstance. Tomorrow will be loud with war, How will I be accounted for? (15-18)

By questioning what will happen if he dies, Ledwidge acknowledges the risk he runs of potentially being killed; yet, in the last stanza of his poem, he seems to dispose of this worry by glorifying himself as a soldier:

It is too late now to retrieve A fallen dream, too late to grieve A name unmade, but not too late To thank the gods for what is great; A keen-edged sword, a soldier’s heart, Is greater than a poet’s art. And greater than a poet’s fame A little grave that has no name. (19-26)

Ledwidge refers to himself indirectly when he states, “A keen-edged sword, a soldier’s heart / Is greater than a poet’s art” (23-24). He adds, “And greater than a poet’s fame” (25) is “a little grave that has no name” (26). This statement seems to contradict the aforementioned letter he sent to Katherine Tynan expressing how he hoped to live and become a great poet. Is he being sarcastic? It is difficult to say.

Within these poems, Thomas and Ledwidge make clear that their words are more than a mere expression of observations and recounting of events as soldiers in the Great War. Their quest was more profound, directed inwards towards themselves and less directed towards their audience.

The Great Grave

The poet’s career doesn’t end once he dies. The soldier’s career arguably does. The poet-soldier, then, has died physically, but what remains of him (as Ledwidge noted in his letter) is his art. There was, however, a certain inhumanity about the way soldiers’ deaths were regarded.

Since both poets managed to create something that transcended their persons and lasted long after being killed in war, their absence was not necessarily detrimental to the poetry itself. But what of that part of them that was a mere soldier, a unit in the war? The day that Ledwidge was killed, for example, the chaplain recorded his death as follows:

Crowds at Holy Communion. Arrange for service but washed out by rain and fatigues. Walk in rain with dogs. Ledwidge killed, blown to bits; at Confession yesterday and Mass and Holy Communion this morning. R.I.P.[9]

Ledwidge’s collection of poems titled “Songs of Peace” was published in September 1916, three months after his death, under the description of a “Soldier Poet Fallen in the War.”[10] This image rendered him as an epitome of the brave soldier, and it seems that the soldier brand stuck with him more than the poet part. But although this image was a kind way of portraying him to a greater cause—the fallen soldier—it set aside Francis Ledwidge’s identity as an individual who experienced the world (or which war was the last part). A contemporary poet at the time, John Drinkwater, was one of the few who refuted how Ledwidge’s death was portrayed to people, which he believed to be insulting. In regards to Ledwidge’s death, he wrote:

The continual insistence, not that his devotion is splendid, but that it is upon us that his devotion may splendidly bestow itself, is contemptible… his poetry exults me, while not so his death. And it is well for us to keep our minds fixed on this plain fact, that when he died, a poet was not transfigured, but killed, and his poetry was not magnified, but blasted in its first flowering.[11]

As Drinkwater observed, death, despite being a source of influence for many of his poems, managed to abruptly halt what would have been a promising career for Ledwidge. This is a problem that is difficult to overcome: What role does strife play for the artist? Pain and suffering may help him develop his art, but at what cost? Although he enlisted voluntarily, the setting in which he died was artificially created; the way his death was recorded, almost absurd.

There are only some of the questions that come to me when I read war poetry, but it is a great genre in poetry that merits more study beyond this (very short) introduction. The most fitting way to conclude this essay is with one more poem by Ledwidge. The bucolic poem, “Behind The Closed Eye,” describes what Ledwidge understood to be his personal encounter with death: A return home, to Ireland.

I walk the old frequented ways That wind around the tangled braes, I live again the sunny days Ere I the city knew.

And scenes of old again are born, The woodbine lassoing the thorn, And drooping Ruth-like in the corn The poppies weep the dew.

Above me in their hundred schools The magpies bend their young to rules, And like an apron full of jewels The dewy cobweb swings.

And frisking in the stream below The troutlets make the circles flow, And the hungry crane doth watch them grow As a smoker does his rings.

Above me smokes the little town, With its whitewashed walls and roofs of brown And its octagon spire toned smoothly down As the holy minds within.

And wondrous impudently sweet, Half of him passion, half conceit, The blackbird calls adown the street Like the piper of Hamelin.

I hear him, and I feel the lure Drawing me back to the homely moor, I’ll go and close the mountains’ door On the city’s strife and din.

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1 Biography of Edward Thomas by Poets.org .

2 Francis Ledwidge Museum .

3 Alice Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge, A Life of the Poet , (Dublin: New Island Books, 1998.) 170.

4 Helen B. McCartney, “The First World War Soldier and his contemporary image in Britain,” International Affairs , Feb. 2014: 299.

5 Move Him Into the Sun .

6 Judy Kendall, Edward Thomas: Origins of His Poetry (LLandybïe: University of Wales Press, 2012), 57.

7 Wojciech Klepuszewski, “ ‘Lights Out’: Edward Thomas on the Way to War ,” Revue LISA/LISA e-journal , Mar. 2012, 69-82.

8 Thomas Macdonagh Heritage Centre

9 Alice Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge, A Life of the Poet (Dublin: New Island Books, 1998) 188.

10 Ibid. 190.

11 Ibid. 191.

Editor’s note: The featured image is a battle scene which depicts the bravery of Alvin C. York, one of the most decorated United States Army soldiers of World War I, (1919 ) by Frank Schoonover (1877-1972), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons .

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“Things Happen, As They Do in War”: From Chaucer’s Siege of Troy to the Siege of Gaza

For the love of God, is the siege over? I’m so scared of the Greeks that it’s killing me.

— Troilus and Criseyde, Book II, ll. 123–24

“However you feel about the conflict, these are points of connection worth bearing in mind,” I said. I was teaching the first class of an undergraduate seminar on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde at the University of Oxford in fall 2023.* I was anxious, and I suspect I garbled my words. I told my students to track how the Trojan War flickers in and out of focus through the poem; I mentioned the old Crusader knights still knocking around court when Chaucer was a young man. In the process, I also attempted to reference the horror that Israel was, at that point, only beginning to unleash on Gaza.

I wanted to talk about Gaza because Israel’s siege against Palestinians has fundamentally changed how I read Troilus . When I read Chaucer in 2024, the pictures that drift through my mind are not of romantic schemes and interpersonal intrigue—ostensibly the bulk of the poem’s plot—but of rubble, bodies, unfathomable grief. Troilus , I began to see, is a poem soaked in blood.

Geoffrey Chaucer is not often thought of as a war poet. Troilus and Criseyde , his epic romance of the 1380s that unfolds against the backdrop of the Trojan War, is not often regarded as war poetry. A story of love, fate, sex, subtly shifting gendered power dynamics: Troilus tends to be described as all these things, before being identified as a poem meaningfully constituted by the conflict through which its main characters are living. Chaucer himself invites us to ignore the violent collisions of bodies playing out in and around Troy. Early in the poem, his narrator claims that explaining Troy’s destruction would be a “long digression” from his twisty love plot. 3 The narrator is almost bored by the conflict: we can imagine him sighing as he tells us that “The thynges fellen, as they don of werre” (Things happened, as they do in war). War is banal, he seems to say, following predictable patterns—it doesn’t make for a good story.

But, recently, while rereading Troilus in order to teach it, I was struck by the blunt reality of what lies at the core of Chaucer’s plot. Troilus is a poem about a city under siege. Its protagonists are a combatant—Troilus—seeking to defend that city, and a civilian woman—Criseyde—trying to negotiate her survival, even while being traded as a hostage as part of political negotiations in which she has no say. The war is not mere “backdrop.” It’s the engine of Troilus ’s plot, grounding its every action: from the vulnerable Criseyde turning to Troilus for “lordshipe” (protection), to the revelation of Criseyde’s “betrayal,” when Troilus sees her brooch pinned on a coat of arms captured from the Greek soldier Diomede.

The realization startled me, and I don’t think that my reading would have shifted so dramatically were it not for a coincidence of timing. I was rereading the poem in October 2023.

Every day, as I cycled to the library, I listened to news about how, following the deadly Hamas attacks of October 7, the Israeli state had unleashed cataclysmic violence on Gaza. Thus far, that violence has seen more than 34,000 Palestinians killed, more than 77,000 wounded, and approximately 1.9 million displaced. Those numbers are probably out of date even as I write this.

I couldn’t shake Palestine from my mind as I read Troilus . I didn’t want to. Now, more than four months into the program of mass Palestinian death recently ruled by the ICJ to risk constituting a genocide, I want to talk about reading and teaching medieval poetry in wartime. I want to talk about how Chaucer’s 600-year-old lines seem utterly changed to me now in light of what’s happening to the people of Gaza and the West Bank. And, most importantly, I want to talk about how that context needs to have a place in our classrooms.

academics—even precarious ones—cannot afford to turn a blind eye to Gaza, because, for many of us, Gaza is inextricably bound up with our work.

Troilus is the one compulsory text on Oxford’s English Literature curriculum. Students have to read it in order to demonstrate a working knowledge of Middle English. That Chaucer’s poem has been accorded this status testifies both to Chaucer’s canonicity and Troilus ’s perceived teachability. Chaucer is a deft craftsman, weaving an elaborate lattice of cloaked jokes, clever rhymes, and literary allusions over 8,239 lines. As an undergraduate, I learned to unpick that lattice, to mine the poem for Boethian phrasings and subtle manipulations of rime royal. Now, as a tutor, I am expected to teach my students how to do the same.

But I wonder now if it might be the other way around: if Chaucer crams his readers’ minds with the tragic love story of two individuals in order to avoid us glancing at the very public tragedy unfolding around them.

Crossings into Indigenous Palestine

If Calais and Acre and Alexandria came to mind for medieval readers when Chaucer describes the Greeks and Trojans spilling out one anothers’ “braynes,” is it any wonder if, reading Troilus in 2024, I think of the images of torn bodies emerging every day from Gaza? As Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh writes, exploring the continuum between medieval and modern Islamophobia, “The historical objects I engage with in my research may be temporally distant from me, but the stories they tell are not old. The violences they describe are not old.” 8 Troilus ’s violences feel piercingly fresh to me now.

When I look from the news app on my phone to the Riverside Chaucer on my desk, for example, I read of Criseyde, constantly calibrating her performance of feminine vulnerability in order to survive. I think of her first speech in the poem, appearing before the Trojan hero Hector in her widow’s habit to beg with “pit[e]ous vois” and “[tendre] wepynge” for protection, and of her last speech, correctly lamenting that she will be “rolled … on many a tonge” for having decided to accept Diomede as a lover-protector while being held hostage in the Greek camp. Criseyde’s gendered calculations recall the similarly devastating contingency of victimhood for Palestinians; the ways in which, to quote Mohammed El-Kurd , that status is accorded only to those, mostly women and children, seen to be “wounded, wailing, and weak,” and the ways in which that status is liable to be rescinded from anyone calling for, or engaging in, resistance.

Or again, I think of Diomede “wooing” Criseyde by telling her that his army will kill everyone she’s ever known; that the “folk of Troie” (Trojan people) are “alle” in “prisoun” (prison) and the city must be given up; his proclamation that “ther shal not scapen oon / That Troian is” (not a single Trojan shall escape). When I first read the poem, I never understood how Diomede could repeat these unspeakable things over and over to a woman he’s supposedly seducing. But I understand them a little better now, because I think of the Law for Palestine database of more than 500 instances of Israeli officials, legislators, army commanders, and other prominent public figures openly inciting genocide; the ease with which Israeli politicians describe their will to destroy the “ empire of evil ” that amounts to a population half made up of children; the gleeful TikToks made by IDF soldiers as they bomb and bulldoze homes and schools; and the impunity with which the Israeli state can declare its intent over and over on the international stage while hovering its finger above the detonator of the next bomb.

When I read Chaucer in 2024, I began to see that “Troilus” is a poem soaked in blood.

I want to be clear here: I am not drawing parallels for the sake of drawing parallels. I am a white British scholar, living thousands of miles from the bombings. I do not want to make Palestinian death into an academic exercise. There can be no equivalency between the Trojan War and the war in Gaza. The war in Gaza does not arise from the ‘“ravysshyng” (abduction) of legendarily beautiful women, and it is not being fought by demigods and princes. There is no question as to Gaza’s historicity and reality: Troy, by contrast, is a hazy concatenation of fantasy and garbled memories. The critical distinction is that Troy, for the medieval reader, is “always already destroyed,” available as an inert jumble of ruins onto which to project whatever national or personal grief lies to hand. 10 The destruction of Gaza City, of Khan Yunis, and, now, of Rafah, are not historical objects. They are unfolding before our eyes; they demand our intervention.

Myth and poetry, like all language, fail us when we confront Gaza. As the poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in 1973 , “We do injustice to Gaza when we turn it into a myth, because we will hate it when we discover that it is no more than a small poor city that resists.”

Still, I can’t help thinking of Gaza when I read Troilus in the same way that I can’t help reading Troilus by anachronistic electric light: because it is the stuff of my modern world, because it is sifted into everything I think and do. Gaza is being bombed when I get dressed in my bedroom in Oxford to give a seminar, when I walk through the beautiful buildings of a centuries-old university.

It is still being bombed when I sit down in a cool quiet room with a group of 19- and 20-year-olds and read a medieval poem.

Solidarity with Palestinians is often treated, in UK higher education and elsewhere, as a controversial position. Suspicion from university administrators and government ministers alike has only intensified since October 7.

In October 2023, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan circulated a letter to university vice-chancellors urging them to act “swiftly and decisively” against pro-Palestinian groups that threatened the “welfare” of Jewish students. Also in October, the national research funding agency UKRI suspended an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion advisory group, following pro-Palestine posts by members that another minister, Michelle Donelan, had branded “extremist.” At UCL, the Marxist Student Society was suspended for refusing to remove posters that called for “Intifada Until Victory” in Palestine. At my own institution, our branch of UCU, the lecturers’ trade union, came under fire from the national press for proposing to hear a motion that contained similar language; a different Palestine solidarity motion was overwhelmingly passed months later. And, in January, a SOAS student was reportedly raided and arrested at her home for statements she had made at a Palestine protest held in October.

These threats are only the palest shadow of the attacks academic institutions are facing in Gaza , where, as of May, every single university has been bombed, and at least 231 educators have been killed. Still, anxiety surrounding public solidarity with Palestine is hardly conducive to pedagogy that confronts the violent realities of our current moment—especially for racialized or precariously employed academics.

But academics—even precarious ones—cannot afford to turn a blind eye to Gaza, because, for many of us, Gaza is inextricably bound up with our work. Like many UK institutions, the university in which I teach and study benefits from the profits of Gaza’s destruction. My institution received an estimated £19 million from arms manufacturers between 2013 and 2021, placing it within the top five UK universities for arms trade research funding. These funders—Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, to name a few —also supply products to the Israeli military, handing out cash for labs with one hand and components for F-35 fighter jets with the other.

My students and I are part of the university; we are, therefore, complicit in the contacts it forges with weapons dealers. It seems preferable for us to at least try to reckon with what, exactly, we are being made complicit in.

Our Siege Is Long

After I’d made my opening remarks in the fall of 2023, the seminar moved on—probably to talk about rhyme or sources or themes, or one of the other hefty Chaucerian components one has to discuss in an introductory Troilus class. As the class progressed, I wondered if I had made the right decision—if I should have plotted out my phrasing more carefully, or waited, or said nothing at all.

But when, weeks later, a student emailed me to ask if they could leave class a little early to help facilitate a Palestine solidarity demonstration, I was glad I had spoken, if only to create an environment in which that was something they felt empowered to declare. I am glad, too, that I still have classes to teach, and, therefore, that the conversation is not over.

There is a Chaucer quotation that I didn’t include in that first anxious introduction, but now wish I had. Not being a Chaucer scholar, I wasn’t familiar with it until I came across it in a paper by Jamil Al-Asmar, an academic at Al-Azhar University, which was destroyed around November 6, 2023 , after repeated airstrikes. The quotation is from the Canterbury Tales , and is, as far as I know, the only explicit reference to Gaza in Chaucer’s corpus.

While recounting the story of the Jewish hero Samson—an Israelite locked into bitter conflict with the Philistines—Chaucer’s Monk relates an incident from the Book of Judges:

By verray force at Gazan on a nyght, Maugree Philistiens of that citee, The gates of the toun he hath up plyght, And on his bak ycaryed hem hath hee Hye on an hill whereas men myghte hem see… 11 (By sheer force, one night at Gaza, despite the Philistines of that city, he yanked up the gates of the town, and carried them on his back, placing them high up on a hill where men might see them…)

As Chaucer’s audience would have known, Samson’s stand against the Philistines does not hold: his hair is cut, his strength is lost, and he is imprisoned, only escaping by pulling a temple down on himself and his captors, killing everyone inside. But here, just for a moment, we catch a glimpse of wild resistance, of liberation, of the instant in which that which had been inconceivable becomes possible.

• Here, I am thinking, as I often am, about Dorothy Kim’s description in her essay “ Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy ” of medievalists as “ideological arms dealers,” who must actively “choose a side” in order to defend against racist appropriations of the history that preoccupies our working days. ↩
• Refaat Alareer, “Gaza Asks: When Shall This Pass?”, in Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire , edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Michael Merryman-Lotze (Haymarket Books, 2022). ↩
• Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde , in The Riverside Chaucer , edited by Larry D. Benson (Houghton Mifflin, 1987), Book I, l. 143. All subsequent references are to this edition. All translations from the Middle English are my own. ↩
• Jenni Nuttall, Troilus and Criseyde: A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 81. ↩
• On the Hundred Years’ War’s traces in the poem, see Patricia Clare Ingham, “Chaucer’s Haunted Aesthetics: Mimesis and Trauma in Troilus and Criseyde ,” College English vol. 72, no. 3 (2010), pp. 226–47; Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 187–200; and Daniel Davies, “‘Wereyed on every side’: Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Logic of Siege Warfare,” in New Medieval Literatures 20, edited by Kellie Robertson, Wendy Scase, Laura Ashe, and Philip Knox (Boydell & Brewer, 2020), pp. 74–106. ↩
• On Chaucer’s experience of the Hundred Years’ War as a soldier, see Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 71–88. ↩
• On crusading anxieties as reflected in Chaucer’s work, see Marcel Elias, “Chaucer and Crusader Ethics: Youth, Love, and the Material World,” Review of English Studies , vol. 70, no. 296 (2019), pp. 618–39; and Celia M. Lewis, “History, Mission, and Crusade in the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review , vol. 42, no. 4 (2008), pp. 353–82. ↩
• Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure,” Literature Compass , vol. 16, no. 9-10 (2019), pp. 1-8 (p. 2). ↩
• Adania Shibli, Minor Detail , translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), p. 60. ↩
• Marilynn Desmond, “Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy,” in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature : Vol. 1, 800–1558 , edited by Rita Copeland (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 251–68 (251). ↩
• Chaucer, Canterbury Tales , in The Riverside Chaucer , ll. 2047–51. ↩

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War Poetry In English Literature | Fight during World War 1st | War Poets

Table of Contents

Introduction

” War Poetry” is a literary genre that developed during the period of the First World War. It is the shadow of brutal life among the soldiers during the “First World War”. The war poets were mostly young men who volunteered or were conscripted to fight in the trenches of the Western Front. The war poets wrote their poetry to raise the question of either life or death; National pride or own existence; duty Or guilt; courage or cowardness.

The war poets or Trench poets are known as “Anti-war poets” because the soldier cum poets do not show war’s gravity but the war’s futility. They witnessed the horrors of modern warfare, such as gas attacks, shell shock, machine guns, barbed wire, mud, and rats. they also experienced the boredom, futility, and disillusionment of life in the trenches. Some of them died in battle, while others survived with physical and psychological scars.

Broadly speaking Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ or Ancient ‘Beowulf’ are mainly concerned with battles and heroism and thus regarded the war poem. But our immediate concern is war poetry in the 1920s which is notable for the sea change in attitude. In contrast to the romantic attitude to war as a glorious occasion for showing patriotism and heroism.

The theme of ‘War Poetry’

Randall Jarrell coined the term in his essay “The Literature of War.” Jarrell defines war poetry as a poem that has its theme of war and is written during or about war.

◽ The loss of innocence ◽ Brotherhood and Relationship ◽ The Horror of War ◽ Disillusionment with Religion ◽ Destruction of Nature ◽ Irrationality of War ◽ Emotional and Feelings

Purpose of ‘War Poetry’

◽ Poetry is the best way to express someone’s emotion and expression during the war. ◽ Another main reason for writing war poetry is to show the true picture of the war. ◽ It creates a sense of honor.

Characteristics of War Poetry

◽ It uses gruesome and showing imagery. ◽ It signed a break-off from the contemporary poetic tradition. ◽ Realistic document of war with all its brutality.

most prominent Anti-War poets

The war poets used poetry as a way of expressing their feelings and opinions about the war. They also questioned the authority and morality of those who started and continued the war.

There is a list of the most prominent Anti-War poets, who were involved directly in the war and eye-witnessed to see the brutality in the name of National pride on the battlefield:

◽ Wilfred Owen ◽ Siegfried Sassoon ◽ Robert Graves ◽ Issac Rosenberg ◽ Rupert Brooke ◽ Edward Thomas

Wilfred Owen ( 1893 – 1918 )

Owen was one of the most prominent Anti-War poets during the First World War as well as a soldier. He wrote only five poems published in his Lifetime but the most important poems are published posthumously. Futility, Strange Meeting, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum Est, and Insensibility are his most important poem. In his poem, he showed the terror of trenches, the pitiful shadow of soldiers’ lives. He wrote about War poems in the preface to the Edition:

“This book is not about heroes.   Nor is it about deeds or lands nor anything about glory, honour might, majesty, dominion, or power, except war. My subject is war, and the pity of war.”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967 )

War poetry is not complete without the work of ‘Siegfried Sasson’ who was awarded the Queen’s Medal for poetry in 1957. He was not only a poet but also a soldier. He shook the literary world to write his angry and compassionate poems about First World War. Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and ironically criticized those men who were blind supporters of a brutal war. The Hero, Counter-Attack, The Death Bed, Attack, Memorial Tablet, Banishmen, and The Last Meeting are the most important poems written by him. He wrote in his poem ‘Trench Duty’ about the extreme situation of the soldiers.

Robert Graves (1895 – 1985 )

Robert Graves was a great British writer, poet, and novelist. He served as a captain in the First World War. He was a good friend of Siegfried Sasson. He was badly wounded in the First world war and reported dead but he returns a few months later. Among his world-famous war poem include “Goodbye to All That” and “The White Goddess”.

Issac Rosenberg (1890 – 1918 )

Rosenberg is known for his “Trench Poem” written between 1916 and 1918. He was only 28 when he died. He was killed while fighting in the First World War. Among his world-famous war poems included ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, ‘In the Trenches’ and ‘On Receiving News of the War.’

Rupert Brooke ( 1887 – 1915 )

Brooke was an English poet known for his Idealistic war sonnets written during the first world war, especially The Soldier. He was also known for his good look.  W. B. Yeats described him as ‘The most handsome young man in England’. The Great, The Dead, Lover, Heaven, Peace, and Cloud Safety are his most prominent poem.

Edward Thomas ( 1878 – 1917 )

He is commonly considered a war poet. His poem ‘The Pity of the War to Aftermath’ reflects his changing attitude to the war. His most prominent poems are Owl When First, The Owl is a poem which shows the mental depression, grief, disgust, and panic of the brutal war.

The war poets had profoundly impacted the literary and cultural landscape of their time and beyond. Their poems challenged the prevailing attitudes and propaganda about war and revealed its true nature and consequences. Their poems also influenced the development of modernism and realism in literature and art. Their poems also inspired generations of readers and writers who faced or witnessed other wars and conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The war has been transmitted in the poetry and so the realistic atmosphere of deadly warfare and the bloodshed on the battlefield but the eyewitness soldier-poets. The poets mentioned above contributed a lot to the development of War poetry. Some other minor war poets are I would get Kingsley Aims, John Beaching, Sydney Keys, and Vere Britain. War poetry contributed a lot to the development of the history of English literature .

War poetry is a powerful and enduring form of expression that can help us understand and empathize with the human condition in times of war. War poetry can also help us question and critique the causes and effects of war and violence. War poetry can also help us hope and strive for peace and justice in our world.

Related Topic: Suicide In The Trenches Indo-European Language

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Anaphora and Propaganda in The Mother/Child Papers

Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s collection The Mother/Child Papers was originally released in 1980. Many of the poems include dates, such as “Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas,” which is dated 1975–1979. The poems are rooted in the family life of the speaker, who gives birth to her third child, a son, but are also infused with the presence of the Vietnam War, the US war in Cambodia, and violence in the US, such as the shootings of college students at Kent State in 1970. The first section of the book, in fact, is called “Cambodia,” a little surprising at first for a book titled The Mother/Child Papers . But the first line makes clear how intertwined these events are for the speaker: “My son Gabriel was born on May 14, 1970, during the Vietnam War, a few days after the United States invaded Cambodia, and a few days after four students had been shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest demonstration.” “Cambodia” continues as a prose poem/essay to set the violent political stage into which the speaker gives birth and is raising children while also working and maintaining a marriage.

I came to read The Mother/Child Papers because I was looking for poets who had written honestly about the experience of motherhood. I wanted—needed—to read poems that spoke about both the heart-splitting wonder and also the crushing loneliness and terror and pain of being a parent. Especially a parent in a time of war and emergency, as we are now, and as Ostriker was then.

“Cambodia” ends with a description of the speaker’s harrowing experience of giving birth under Demerol (an opioid given to laboring mothers for pain) and a spinal tap, which made her disoriented and unable to feel below her waist while needing to push. The speaker asks:

Cut off from joy, how many women conceive? Cut off, how many bear? And cut, how many give birth to their children? Now I am one of them. I did not fight. Beginning a day after my son’s birth, and continuing for a week, I have swordlike headaches, which I attribute to the spinal. I am thirty-three. In the fall I will be back at work, back East. My husband and I have two daughters, both all right so far, and now the son for whom we were hoping. There will never be a next time. What does this have to do with Cambodia?

The continuous background of war is important to keep in mind as the reader reaches “Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas.” Propaganda, of course, is a tool of war. Propaganda relentlessly surrounds citizens and is every bit as powerful as the weapons fired. The second section of “Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas” heavily uses the tool of anaphora. The very first sentence on the Poets.org page about anaphora states, “Often used in political speeches and occasionally in prose and poetry, anaphora is the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines to create a sonic effect.”

The first section of “Propaganda Poem” uses delicate language and imagery, “both gently just lightly / separated from each other / swaying, swinging / like a vine, like an oriole nest.” This opening focuses on the pleasures of mothering and birthing, on

the pleasure of            touching and being touched by this most perfect thing this pear tree blossom this mouth these leafy hands these genitals like petals

This first section is gentle and seductive in its propaganda–mothering as pleasure and delight, as part of the natural world, with all the appealing imagery of nature used to describe the mother and child. A reader may be curious, after reading just the first section, why it is titled “Propaganda Poem” at all. Section one concludes with “the power of a woman / close to a child, riding our tides / into the sand dunes of the public spaces” (again, note the conflation of woman and child with nature).

In the second section, there is a marked shift in language, most noticeable at first in the use of the anaphoric phrase “that they.” Titled “Postscript to Propaganda,” this section opens:

That they limit your liberty, of course, entirely. That they limit your cash. That they limit your sleep. Your sleep is a dirty torn cloth. That they whine until you want to murder them. That their beauty prevents you.

The repetition of the phrase “that they” begins each line throughout this section, with only one or two exceptions, until the final line. This repetition, used so effectively in all types of propaganda, is fascinating in a poem that has declared itself so blatantly to be propaganda , and then proceeds to complicate and argue against itself, even while using propaganda’s tools, such as anaphora and also the blatant symbolic imagery. The tender and positive nature imagery of section one also changes noticeably in section two—now the images are of “a dirty torn cloth” and the children’s “eating and excreting exactly resembles / the slime-trails of slugs.” The mother in the poem is no longer powerfully riding the tides with her child, now she is trapped “like a thrashing fish.”

Interestingly, the fact that Ostriker has told us this poem is propaganda does not seem to detract from the power of each section. Section two builds and builds with the powerful pulse of the anaphora driving the reader through the relentlessness of mothering, the violence to the female body and mind, the degradation: “That their sullenness is a damp that rots your wood, their / malice a metal that draws your blood, their disobedience the fire that / burns your sacred book, their sorrows the webbing that entraps you / like a thrashing fish.” The reader follows all that is being inflicted upon the speaker, all that is being taken from her, under the spell of the repeated “that there,” so that the interruption of the final line is all the more jolting: “Come on, you daughters of bitches, do you want to live forever?”

Later in the collection, Ostriker’s poem “This Power” uses anaphora again, with most lines beginning, “Mother.”

Mother, your rooted garden Mother, I address you as if you had dignity… Mother, your folders of secret poems Mother, your boyish energy… Mother, fish in your giant tank Mother, scars puckering your skin…

“This Power” builds and builds upon the repeated direct address of “Mother,” moving towards the final image of the speaker’s children, jumping off her shoulders into a swimming pool, “they flew / off me, and made a good splash / and I fell back, into the water / welcoming.” Many of the later poems in the collection describe the long and fraught process of a parent letting go of the children they have spent so much time and energy raising. The poem “In the Dust” describes taking a daughter to get her ears pierced for her birthday, and then watching her run out to her friends.

What is that whirling in the dust? What is that powerful movement, everywhere, so rapid she cannot see it? The fireflies are making their phosphorus, slow circles, the appletrees ripening, and she is going willingly. I send her willingly.

Propaganda is inevitably all about power, and Ostriker both describes and questions power dynamics in this collection—from the power of nation states to wage war, to the ever-shifting power that children and parents have over each other. Some of the poems, such as “Propaganda Poem” turn and argue against themselves—yes, it will be wonderful, it will be terrible, it will be beautiful, what did you expect? Come on, says the propaganda, whether it says it with the lure of the beautiful or the honesty of the hard work and the injunction to go ahead and do what is hard. Ultimately, The Mother/Child Papers is about not only the propaganda the world uses against us, but also the propaganda we use against ourselves.

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Guest Essay

America’s Military Is Not Prepared for War — or Peace

By Roger Wicker

Mr. Wicker, a Republican, is the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

“To be prepared for war,” George Washington said, “is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” President Ronald Reagan agreed with his forebear’s words, and peace through strength became a theme of his administration. In the past four decades, the American arsenal helped secure that peace, but political neglect has led to its atrophy as other nations’ war machines have kicked into high gear. Most Americans do not realize the specter of great power conflict has risen again.

It is far past time to rebuild America’s military. We can avoid war by preparing for it.

When America’s senior military leaders testify before my colleagues and me on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee behind closed doors, they have said that we face some of the most dangerous global threat environments since World War II. Then, they darken that already unsettling picture by explaining that our armed forces are at risk of being underequipped and outgunned. We struggle to build and maintain ships, our fighter jet fleet is dangerously small, and our military infrastructure is outdated. Meanwhile, America’s adversaries are growing their militaries and getting more aggressive.

In China, the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has orchestrated a historic military modernization intended to exploit the U.S. military’s weaknesses. He has overtaken the U.S. Navy in fleet size, built one of the world’s largest missile stockpiles and made big advances in space. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has thrown Europe into war and mobilized his society for long-term conflict. Iran and its proxy groups have escalated their shadow war against Israel and increased attacks on U.S. ships and soldiers. And North Korea has disregarded efforts toward arms control negotiations and moved toward wartime readiness.

Worse yet, these governments are materially helping one another, cooperating in new ways to prevent an American-led 21st century. Iran has provided Russia with battlefield drones, and China is sending technical and logistical help to aid Mr. Putin’s war. They are also helping one another prepare for future fights by increasing weapons transfers and to evade sanctions. Their unprecedented coordination makes new global conflict increasingly possible.

That theoretical future could come faster than most Americans think. We may find ourselves in a state of extreme vulnerability in a matter of a few years, according to a growing consensus of experts. Our military readiness could be at its lowest point in decades just as China’s military in particular hits its stride. The U.S. Indo-Pacific commander released what I believe to be the largest list of unfunded items ever for services and combatant commands for next year’s budget, amounting to $11 billion. It requested funding for a raft of infrastructure, missile defense and targeting programs that would prove vital in a Pacific fight. China, on the other hand, has no such problems, as it accumulates the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal with a mix of other lethal cruise and attack missiles.

Our military leaders are being forced to make impossible choices. The Navy is struggling to adequately fund new ships, routine maintenance and munition procurement; it is unable to effectively address all three. We recently signed a deal to sell submarines to Australia, but we’ve failed to sufficiently fund our own submarine industrial base, leaving an aging fleet unprepared to respond to threats. Two of the three most important nuclear modernization programs are underfunded and are at risk of delays. The military faces a backlog of at least $180 billion for basic maintenance, from barracks to training ranges. This projects weakness to our adversaries as we send service members abroad with diminished ability to respond to crises.

Fortunately, we can change course. We can avoid that extreme vulnerability and resurrect American military might.

On Wednesday I am publishing a plan that includes a series of detailed proposals to address this reality head-on. We have been living off the Reagan military buildup for too long; it is time for updates and upgrades. My plan outlines why and how the United States should aim to spend an additional $55 billion on the military in the 2025 fiscal year and grow military spending from a projected 2.9 percent of our national gross domestic product this year to 5 percent over the next five to seven years.

It would be a significant investment that would start a reckoning over our nation’s spending priorities. There will be conversations ahead about all manner of budget questions. We do not need to spend this much indefinitely — but we do need a short-term generational investment to help us prevent another world war.

My blueprint would grow the Navy to 357 ships by 2035 and halt our shrinking Air Force fleet by producing at least 340 additional fighters in five years. This will help patch near-term holes and put each fleet on a sustainable trajectory. The plan would also replenish the Air Force tanker and training fleets, accelerate the modernization of the Army and Marine Corps, and invest in joint capabilities that are all too often forgotten, including logistics and munitions.

The proposal would build on the $3.3 billion in submarine industrial base funding included in the national security supplemental passed in April, so we can bolster our defense and that of our allies. It would also rapidly equip service members all over the world with innovative technologies at scale, from the seabed to the stars.

We should pair increased investment with wiser spending. Combining this crucial investment with fiscal responsibility would funnel resources to the most strategic ends. Emerging technology must play an essential role, and we can build and deploy much of it in less than five years. My road map would also help make improvements to the military procurement system and increase accountability for bureaucrats and companies that fail to perform on vital national security projects.

This whole endeavor would shake our status quo but be far less disruptive and expensive than the alternative. Should China decide to wage war with the United States, the global economy could immediately fall into a depression. Americans have grown far too comfortable under the decades-old presumption of overwhelming military superiority. And that false sense of security has led us to ignore necessary maintenance and made us vulnerable.

Our ability to deter our adversaries can be regained because we have done it before. At the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, in the twilight of the Soviet Union, George H.W. Bush reflected on the lessons of Pearl Harbor. Though the conflict was long gone, it taught him an enduring lesson: “When it comes to national defense,” he said, “finishing second means finishing last.”

Regaining American strength will be expensive. But fighting a war — and worse, losing one — is far more costly. We need to begin a national conversation today on how we achieve a peaceful, prosperous and American-led 21st century. The first step is a generational investment in the U.S. military.

Roger Wicker is the senior U.S. senator from Mississippi and the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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The Genesis of the Trojan War: Causes and Conflicts

This essay about the Trojan War explores its origins and complexities, blending myth and history. It begins with a divine dispute at a banquet, leading to the judgment of Paris and the abduction of Helen. The conflict is rooted in both personal and geopolitical motives, showcasing the interplay of human ambition and divine influence. The narrative highlights the heroes and their deeds, culminating in the infamous Trojan Horse and reflecting on the enduring impact of the war on human imagination and storytelling.

How it works

In the grand tapestry of ancient lore, there exists a tale brimming with intrigue and rich in legend, so much so that its essence transcends the boundaries of time. This is the saga of the Trojan War, a narrative woven from divine caprices, human ambitions, and the relentless march of fate. Within this labyrinthine blend of myth and history lie nuances that paint a far more vivid picture than a mere recounting could capture.

The origins of the Trojan War are a mosaic of conflicting desires and cosmic machinations, unfolding in a world where gods and mortals coexist.

It all begins, as many epic tales do, with a grand banquet—a gathering of immortals celebrating the union of Peleus and Thetis, destined to birth Achilles, the greatest of heroes. Yet, it is not the joyous revelry that sets the stage for war, but the vengeful spite of Eris, the goddess of discord, who throws a golden apple among the guests, sparking a fierce rivalry among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite.

The judgment of Paris, a mortal prince caught in the crossfire of divine rivalry, becomes the linchpin of disaster. Each goddess offers Paris a tempting bribe: power, wisdom, or love. He chooses love, awarding the prize to Aphrodite and securing for himself the love of Helen, queen of Sparta and the most beautiful woman in the world. Thus, the wheels of destiny are set in motion, and Troy’s fate is sealed.

Beyond the realm of myth, the roots of the Trojan War extend deep into the soil of geopolitics and ambition. Troy, strategically located at the crossroads of ancient trade routes, wielded significant influence over the fortunes of empires and the flow of commerce. Its wealth attracted the envious, its formidable walls challenged the mighty, and its very existence threatened the dominance of Mycenae and its allies.

The war thus becomes more than a clash of arms; it is a struggle for supremacy in the Aegean world. Greek expansionism confronts Trojan resistance, setting the stage for a conflict that would shape the course of history. Territorial ambitions, economic interests, and the thirst for glory converge in a storm of violence and intrigue, drawing both heroes and gods into its swirling chaos.

The heroes of the Trojan War—Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and many others—become pawns in a grand game played by gods and mortals. Their deeds, immortalized in song and story, blur the lines between myth and reality, their struggles resonating through the ages. Yet, amidst the clash of titans and the din of battle, it is the human drama that strikes the deepest chord—the love of Paris and Helen, the sorrow of Priam and Hecuba, the hubris of Agamemnon, and the wrath of Achilles.

As the war drags on in an endless cycle of bloodshed and betrayal, it culminates in the most infamous of stratagems—the Trojan Horse. Conceived by the cunning of Odysseus and born out of Greek desperation, it stands as a testament to human ingenuity in the face of divine caprice. Its entry into Troy signals the city’s doom, bringing an end to a decade-long conflict that claimed countless lives.

The legacy of the Trojan War endures not only in historical chronicles but in the very fabric of human imagination. Its heroes and villains, triumphs and tragedies, serve as a reflection of our own aspirations and failings, highlighting the timeless power of myth to shed light on the human condition. As we gaze upon the ruins of Troy and the echoes of its former glory, we are reminded that the true legacy of the war lies not in the conquest of empires, but in the stories we tell and the lessons we draw from the folly of gods and men.

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The Genesis of the Trojan War: Causes and Conflicts. (2024, May 28). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/the-genesis-of-the-trojan-war-causes-and-conflicts/

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Genesis of the Trojan War: Causes and Conflicts . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-genesis-of-the-trojan-war-causes-and-conflicts/ [Accessed: 31 May. 2024]

"The Genesis of the Trojan War: Causes and Conflicts." PapersOwl.com, May 28, 2024. Accessed May 31, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/the-genesis-of-the-trojan-war-causes-and-conflicts/

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Genesis of the Trojan War: Causes and Conflicts . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-genesis-of-the-trojan-war-causes-and-conflicts/ [Accessed: 31-May-2024]

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