W. W. I
 

I have been thinking a lot about WWI lately as it relates to history and poetry. I thought I would post, as book-ends to the war, Larkin’s “MCMXIV” and Hardy’s “And There Was a Great Calm” (1918).

It’s interesting to have Mr. Modern Larkin writing about the beginning of the war and the Victorian hold-out Hardy writing about its end. If we want the middle of the war, we can look to Wilfred Owen, who died only a few weeks before Hardy wrote his poem.

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.


And There was a Great Calm

1
There had been years of Passion--scorching, cold,
And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,
Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,
Among the young, among the weak and old,
And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, "Why?"

2
Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught
Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,
Philosophies that sages long had taught,
And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,
And "Hell!" and "Shell!" were yapped at Lovingkindness.

3
The feeble folk at home had grown full-used
To "dug-outs," "snipers," "Huns," from the war-adept
In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;
To day--dreamt men in millions, when they mused--
To nightmare-men in millions when they slept.

4
Waking to wish existence timeless, null,
Sirius they watched above where armies fell;
He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull
Of night a boom came thencewise, like the dull
Plunge of a stone dropped into some deep well.

5
So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly
Were dead and damned, there sounded "War is done!"
One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,
"Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly,
And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?"

6
Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had raised it through the four years' dance
Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;
And murmured, "Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?"

7
Aye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not,
The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.
One checkless regiment slung a clinching shot
And turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, "What?
Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?"

8
Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,
No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,
No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;
Worn horses mused: "We are not whipped to-day";
No weft-winged engines blurred the moon's thin horn.

9
Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: "It had to be!"
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, "Why?"

Ah, the Larkin is wonderful. Although I love Hardy, I don't think that is one of his best. Better, I think (although not written about WWI, it clearly applies to it, and all wars), is this:

"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

"I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
No other reason why.

"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."

I am impressed that Hardy, who was in the middle of it, fully understood the implications of "The Great War," "The Chemists' War:"

"old hopes that earth was bettering slowly
Were dead and damned. . ."

I too especially like the Larkin. His lines:

"And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses"

can't help but remind me of Adlestrop:

BY EDWARD THOMAS

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

NB written or at least published in 1917.

Whereas Larkin's closing line "Never such innocence again" reminds me of Yeats: not just "The ceremony of innocence is drowned", but also

"All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born",

from "Easter, 1916".
Interesting to hear these voices -Thomas, Yeats - coming through the Larkin. I suspect the Thomas meant a fair bit to him, think of the end of "The Whitsun Weddings".

Cheers,
John

The implications ... do you mean that he foresaw the next one, Aaron?

You're right, John. Hard not to think of that.

Also, just wondering idly - do American readers understand the significance of (and the rightness of ) "The Oval or Villa Park"?

To me, there's a bit of a class distinction there.

David, I meant that Hardy recognized WWI was an epoch-making event--the West's assumption that civilization was improving with the passage of time was no longer tenable. Twentieth century history certainly did go on to blow that assumption to bits. The war marked the beginning of "the Modern": http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/30/opinio...rt-modern-wwi/

The author argues that Victorian art was not adequate to express WWI's chaos, so Modernism stepped in.

That pretty much describes the case of Apollinaire: revolutionary before the war, more revolutionary during it. Writing from the trenches.

Clearly they do, John! Although you've taken it a step further than I had, and allocated the cricket and the football to different social classes. I hadn't even thought of it in those terms.

Thanks for clarifying that for me, Aaron. (I need a lot of clarification sometimes.) I just wish he hadn't couched it in those lofty, almost obscure terms.

Without knowing much about the intellectual history of the time, I do wonder whether he can have been the first to recognise it. There must have been others? Perhaps not. I was just wondering about Spengler, but I've never read him.

Hi David,

To be fair, I spent a good part of my misspent youth in the British Isles. My salad days.

Cheers,
John

Your salad cream days as well, probably, John. It's an acquired taste. (Best on egg sandwiches.)

Cheers

David

Salad cream, not something one sees in Texas...

John Isbell, it's known as Miracle Whip. I've never actually seen anyone buy a jar of it.

Few pay much attention to Sassoon anymore, though without him there would have been no Owen. S.S. was much devoted to Hardy. It was good to see James Fenton quoting Sassoon in this week's NYRB.

Dreamers

BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

Sassoon's skillful use (and non-use) of the comma is an object lesson in punctuation.

Not one of Hardy's best, perhaps, with some echoes of "Channel Firing" and other poems. Still, there's this:

Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,
No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,
No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;
Worn horses mused: "We are not whipped to-day";
No weft-winged engines blurred the moon's thin horn.

"No weft-winged engines blurred the moon's thin horn" is pure Hardy and, thus, as good as anyone.

Sam, thanks for sharing the Sassoon--I only know him from the "Immortal Verse" anthology.

For the lines you quote from Hardy's poem--I swear Frost had one of them in mind for several images in "Range-Finding:"

The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung
And cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest
Before it stained a single human breast.
The stricken flower bent double and so hung.
And still the bird revisited her young.
A butterfly its fall had dispossessed
A moment sought in air his flower of rest,
Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.

On the bare upland pasture there had spread
O'ernight 'twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread
And straining cables wet with silver dew.
A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.
The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,
But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.

--It's the image of a bullet/shell shaking the dew from things.

There's a play Not About Heroes by Stephen MacDonald on the relationship between Sassoon and Owen. I played Owen in a production, the play's quite fun to act (at least, i enjoyed it).
Here's my own favorite Sassoon:

"The General
BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack."

Cheers,
John

This sonnet was, I believe, based on his correspondence with Thomas.

The film Behind the Lines is about Owen and Sassoon. It was based on a Booker Award-winning novel by Pat Barker. The film focuses on the psychiatric hospital at Craiglockhart. It is good. Incidentally, John, this is the poem that Fenton quotes in the NYRB article (on American art during the WWI period).

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017...ers%20of%20War

There's quite a bit at Craiglockhart in the play as well, as I recall. Both poets come across quite sympathetically in it.

Thank you, Sam, for that interesting article. The contrast between US and UK folk memories of the war is apt, in my experience. Belleau Wood shows up in Mel Gibson's recent Hacksaw Ridge, with the father arriving at the court martial in full WW I uniform and recalling his service at Belleau Wood.
We had a big book on that war in my childhood which as I recall mostly displayed both sides' propaganda. Fenton's tone recalls my childhood memories of those somewhat absurdly jingoistic images. They do something to encapsulate WW I for me, and form a fitting backdrop to Britain's war poets and to Erich Maria Remarque.
Also - could it have been Taps we heard at my UK boarding school every November 11th, as we stood outside for a minute in silence?

Thanks for this thread, Aaron. Very interesting to see Larkin's and Hardy's poems side by side, so to speak.

Paul Fussell's great book on the literature of the First World War, The Great War and Modern Memory, actually begins with a discussion of Hardy's volume Satires of Circumstance, which came out in November 1914 - meaning that most of the poems were written before the war (there's just one patriotic and seemingly non-ironic poem tacked on at the end, "Men Who March Away", which refers specifically to the war). Analysing poems like "Channel Firing", Fussell says Hardy almost wrote the war before it happened. He says: “One reason modern English poetry can be said to begin with Hardy is that he is the first to invite into poems the sound of ominous gunfire heard across the water.” And Hardy himself wrote about “Channel Firing” that he had not foreseen “the coming so soon of such a convulsion as the war, though only three or four months before it broke out he had printed a prophetic poem […] whereof the theme, ‘All nations striving strong to make / Red war yet redder,’ was, to say the least, a perception singularly coincident.”

It's not surprising that Sassoon was a great admirer of Hardy's poetry.

And the Penguin anthology of First World War Poetry edited by Jon Silkin actually begins with Hardy's poem "Drummer Hodge", which dates from the Boer War, precisely because it seems to anticipate Brooke's sonnet "The Soldier". Here are the two poems:

Drummer Hodge

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined -- just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around:
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the drummer never knew --
Fresh from his Wessex home --
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.

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

May I bring in Robert Graves's anger...

A Dead Boche

To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

And a personal favourite...

Sergeant-Major Money

It wasn't our battalion, but we lay alongside it,
So the story is as true as the telling is frank.
They hadn't one Line-officer left, after Arras,
Except a batty major and the Colonel, who drank.

'B' Company Commander was fresh from the Depot,
An expert on gas drill, otherwise a dud;
So Sergeant-Major Money carried on, as instructed,
And that's where the swaddies began to sweat blood.

His Old Army humour was so well-spiced and hearty
That one poor sod shot himself, and one lost his wits;
But discipline's maintained, and back in rest-billets
The Colonel congratulates 'B' Company on their kits.

The subalterns went easy, as was only natural
With a terror like Money driving the machine,
Till finally two Welshmen, butties from the Rhondda,
Bayoneted their bugbear in a field-canteen.

Well, we couldn't blame the officers, they relied on Money;
We couldn't blame the pitboys, their courage was grand;
Or, least of all, blame Money, an old stiff surviving
In a New (bloody) Army he couldn't understand.


I think the latter adds a touch of outraged humanity to Sassoon's "General".

On Edward Thomas’s “Adlestrop”(See Post 4 above.) – According to his most recent editor, Edna Longley, “Adlestrop” was written on 8 January 1915, some two years before Thomas shipped out to France. He was killed on 9th April 1917.

Clive

"Or, least of all, blame Money, an old stiff surviving
In a New (bloody) Army he couldn't understand."
Great ending.

Dulce et Decorum Est

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.



When I first read this Wilfred Owen poem at school I assumed (and don't recall being told otherwise) that the second person address that begins in the final stanza (If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in) was simply directed at a generic 'reader' who might harbour Romantic ideas about warfare.

It fascinated me to later discover that it's actually very specifically addressed to a female poet called Jessie Pope, whose jingoistic 'recruiting' verse was widely published in British newspapers of the time. This sort of thing...



Who's for the Game?

Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played,
The red crashing game of a fight?
Who’ll grip and tackle the job unafraid?
And who thinks he’d rather sit tight?
Who’ll toe the line for the signal to ‘Go!’?
Who’ll give his country a hand?
Who wants a turn to himself in the show?
And who wants a seat in the stand?
Who knows it won’t be a picnic – not much-
Yet eagerly shoulders a gun?
Who would much rather come back with a crutch
Than lie low and be out of the fun?
Come along, lads –
But you’ll come on all right –
For there’s only one course to pursue,
Your country is up to her neck in a fight,
And she’s looking and calling for you.

The original handwritten manuscript has the words 'To Jessie Pope etc' scrawled at the top. Fascinating stuff.

https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/vide...et-decorum-est

Edit: the academic in the video doesn't actually mention the Jessie Pope dedication but if you pause at about 35 seconds you clearly see 'to Jessie Pope etc' which is crossed out and replaced with 'to a certain Poetess'

Australians I guess still remember that war. Erick Bogle published "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" in 1971:

"And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay,
I looked at the place where my legs used to be,
And thank Christ there was nobody waiting for me,
To weep, and to mourn, and to pity."

The song to my mind pretty effectively contrasts the world of Wilfred Owen with the world of Jessie Pope.

https://youtu.be/cZqN1glz4JY

Absolutely John. For my money the definitive version of that song was recorded by The Pogues in 1985.

Yes, and off a great album...
I saw The Pogues in concert in the late 80s, at Hammersmith Palais. It was a memorable evening.

Yes, 'Rum, Sodomy and the Lash'! Fantastic album! Possibly their best amid some stiff competition. I've seen them three times at various points in their colourful career. Always good to find a fan!

Anyway. Back to the trenches...

Gregory, thank you for introducing me to Rupert Brooke's "The Solider." Yes, I'm ashamed to say I didn't know it. I imagine generations of young Englishmen and Englishwomen memorizing and reciting it in class. That is patriotism. Puts me to shame.

WOW, Mark! That is fascinating. Thanks for that.

(Wish I'd known it when I was blathering about Owen's use of the second person in the poem here some time ago, but live and learn.)

"Dulce et decorum est" usually omits the "dedication" these days. It's worth a footnote regarding the "you" of the poem, but the poem is much bigger than a personal rebuke. Sassoon wisely removed the mention of Pope or "a certain poetess" from his 1921 edition of Owens's poems.

https://archive.org/details/poemswilf00owenuoft

Brooke's "The Soldier" is the last of a five-sonnet sequence titled "1914." It captures the naive enthusiasm at the outbreak of the war that was shared by many (including Owen in an early poem).

http://www.rupertbrooke.com/poems/1914/

Larkin's poem captures this sense of innocence and blind patriotism that seemed general among the combatant countries at the beginning. It didn't last very long.

Some years ago I wrote a five-sonnet sequence titled "1916" about Brooke and the general disillusionment that had set in by then. I won't post it here, but I'll be happy to share it with anyone who wants to see it.

rsgwynn1@cs.com

I wrote it while teaching a course in WWI literature. Fussell's book was a great inspiration. Fussell also edited a collection of Sassoon's poetry and prose that I highly recommend.

Incidentally, Brooke became something of a poster boy for the British war effort, and he has taken his lumps over the years for "The Soldier." He was a young poet of considerable skill, but he never saw any real combat. He died shortly before the beginning of the Dardanelles Campaign, which probably would have opened his eyes to the reality of trenches, faulty command, and the machine gun. Someone once said that if he had survived he might have become the first socialist Prime Minister. Churchill wrote his obituary for the Times.

Rupert Brooke... In Grantchester, a village up the Cam from Cambridge, the church clock stands permanently at ten to three, or did last time I looked at it.

Julie, glad you found that interesting!

Hi Sam. I agree the poem is much bigger, and the 'you' of the poem much more universal, than any feelings of personal distaste at Pope's poetry that may have prompted Owen to write it. Still, fascinating nonetheless to see how a poem that has become such an icon began with such a personal, small-scale rebuke.

Interestingly, it was Sassoon who more frequently cast a caustic eye over the jingoism of the 'smug faced' crowds back in Blighty, as seen in these two poems:

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.


'Blighters'

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
“We’re sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!”

I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or “Home, sweet Home,”
And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.