Great War Poetry, What's your favorite poem. Options

[squirrel]

Thank you. Remembered the poem but didn't have a chance to look it up last night.
Strange how some poems just stick in the mind. "A thousand strong" was from memory as well and "Man At Arms" is indeliby printed there as well.

[truthergw]

I have a terrible memory for memorising poetry, it caused me endless problems at school and is not improving with age. I do however remember themes and that one struck a chord. I was able to find it again fairly easily.

[marina]

The Rear-Guard
(HINDENBURG LINE, APRIL 1917)
(from Counter-Attack)
GROPING along the tunnel, step by step,
He winked his prying torch with patching glare
From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know;
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;
And he, exploring fifty feet below
The rosy gloom of battle overhead.

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw some one lie
Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,
And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug.
'I'm looking for headquarters.' No reply.
'God blast your neck!' (For days he'd had no sleep,)
'Get up and guide me through this stinking place.'

Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,
And flashed his beam across the livid face
Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore
Agony dying hard ten days before;
And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

Alone he staggered on until he found
Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair
To the dazed, muttering creatures underground
Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.
At last, with sweat of horror in his hair,
He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,
Unloading hell behind him step by step.


Another shivery one.
Marina

[Derek Robertson]

Indeed it is.

[Arras100]

That one gives me goosebumps every time I read it, Marina.


Another one I thought to add, this one by Rupert Brooke:


The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever 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.

[Theo]

Does anyone know of an anthology of German poetry of the Great War? I have read some in German but need one as a present for a friend who does not speak the language. I have had a search online but not come up with anything.

Thanks

[marina]

THE DEATH-BED

Rain ; he could hear it rustling through the dark ;
Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;
Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers
That soak the woods ; not the harsh rain that sweeps
Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace
Gently and slowly washing life away.



He stirred, shifting his body ; then the pain
Leaped like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore
His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.
But some one was beside him ; soon he lay
Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.
And Death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and
stared.



Light many lamps and gather round his bed.
Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
Speak to him ; rouse him ; you may save him yet.
He's young; he hated war; how should he die
When cruel old campaigners win safe through?

But Death replied : " I choose him." So he went,
And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.

Siegfried Sassoon

[MartinBennitt]

Just finished John Ellis's 'Eye-Deep in Hell' which quotes from poems by A.G. West, of whom I'd never heard before. One was given early on in this thread, here is another.

The Night Patrol
France, MARCH 1916.

Over the top! The wire’s thin here, unbarbed
Plain rusty coils, not staked, and low enough:
Full of old tins, though — “When you’re through, all three,
Aim quarter left for fifty yards or so,
Then straight for that new piece of German wire;
See if it’s thick, and listen for a while
For sounds of working; don’t run any risks;
About an hour; now, over!”
And we placed
Our hands on the topmost sand-bags, leapt, and stood
A second with curved backs, then crept to the wire,
Wormed ourselves tinkling through, glanced back, and dropped.
The sodden ground was splashed with shallow pools,
And tufts of crackling cornstalks, two years old,
No man had reaped, and patches of spring grass.
Half-seen, as rose and sank the flares, were strewn
The wrecks of our attack: the bandoliers,
Packs, rifles, bayonets, belts, and haversacks,
Shell fragments, and the huge whole forms of shells
Shot fruitlessly — and everywhere the dead.
Only the dead were always present — present
As a vile sickly smell of rottenness;
The rustling stubble and the early grass,
The slimy pools — the dead men stank through all,
Pungent and sharp; as bodies loomed before,
And as we passed, they stank: then dulled away
To that vague fœtor, all encompassing,
Infecting earth and air. They lay, all clothed,
Each in some new and piteous attitude
That we well marked to guide us back: as he,
Outside our wire, that lay on his back and crossed
His legs Crusader-wise: I smiled at that,
And thought on Elia and his Temple Church.
From him, at quarter left, lay a small corpse,
Down in a hollow, huddled as in a bed,
That one of us put his hand on unawares.
Next was a bunch of half a dozen men
All blown to bits, an archipelago
Of corrupt fragments, vexing to us three,
Who had no light to see by, save the flares.
On such a trail, so light, for ninety yards
We crawled on belly and elbows, till we saw,
Instead of lumpish dead before our eyes,
The stakes and crosslines of the German wire.
We lay in shelter of the last dead man,
Ourselves as dead, and heard their shovels ring
Turning the earth, then talk and cough at times.
A sentry fired and a machine-gun spat;
They shot a glare above us, when it fell
And spluttered out in the pools of No Man’s Land,
We turned and crawled past the remembered dead:
Past him and him, and them and him, until,
For he lay some way apart, we caught the scent
Of the Crusader and slide past his legs,
And through the wire and home, and got our rum

ARTHUR GRAEME WEST, 1891-1917

Educated at Blundell's and Oxford. Enlisted with the Public School's Battalion in February 1915.
He grew to hate the war, and lost his faith in God. He was convinced he should protest or desert but could not find the courage to do so.
He was killed by a sniper's bullet, 3 April, 1917 at Bapaume. His war diary, The Diary of a Dead Officer, which contained his poetry, was published in 1919.

(from the War Poetry website)

cheers Martin B

[marina]

Very powerful - I've never seen that one before.
Marina

[truthergw]

That is a very bitter phrase for during the war, " the remembered dead ".

[salesie]

"the remembered dead" - I too sense a touch of bitter irony in the author's words, Tom.

Once living, breathing and brave, but now reduced to sign-posts to guide them "home" - at least of some use still to members of that patrol. What a strange and unholy world they found themselves in.



Cheers-salesie.

[redorchestra]

I'm not sure if anyone has already mentioned this as I haven't got time to go through 14 pages of this thread, as good as it is! My favourite Great War poem is 'England to her sons' by W. N. Hodgson. I first heard this poem on the 'Private peaceful' album, where the a capella folk singers Coope Boyes and Simpson set it to a hymn. It moved me in the context of the play, and even listened to or read on its own I find it powerful.

I think one of the reasons I like it is that it captures something of the patriotic fervour of August 1914, which is when it was apparently written. As much as I like Sassoon, Owen et al, often I wonder if they spoke for the vast majority of soldiers, and especially they didn't reflect the mindset of the millions who volunteered (at least not at first).

The poem for me conjures up the image of a wise and weary Britannia, who from Agincourt to Waterloo has seen generations of her children leave her shores never to return, including the author of the poem who was killed on 1st July 1916.

England to her sons

Sons of mine, I hear you thrilling
To the trumpet call of war;
Gird ye then, I give you freely
As I gave your sires before,
All the noblest of the children I in love and anguish bore.
Free in service, wise in justice,
Fearing but dishonour's breath;
Steeled to suffer uncomplaining
Loss and failure, pain and death;
Strong in faith that sees the issue and in hope that triumpheth.

Go, and may the God of battles
You in His good guidance keep:
And if He in wisdom giveth
Unto His beloved sleep,
I accept it nothing asking, save a little space to weep.

The author is mostly remembered for the poem 'Before Action', written two days before his death.

[truthergw]

There is a tendency to forget or at least push into the background, the poets who saw the war and a soldier's part in it as a patriotic duty. Who spoke of the glory and the right of the country to demand the lives of its citizens in a just war. Rupert Brooke was one of the better known, McRae is another. Kipling, Thomas Hardy of course and Laurence Binyon.

[Yoshi]

I'm not sure if anyone has already mentioned this one, but it's one of my favourites. The grief is palpable.

'Have you news of my boy Jack?'
Not this tide.
'When d'you think that he'll come back?'
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

'Has any one else had word of him?'
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

'Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?'
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind -
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

[Peter Anderson]

I remember reading Sassoon at school. The more I found out about him, the more I realised Golf is Hell. Dislike the man, his attitude, his bein, and Golf, ever since. Not a fan of Wilfred Owen either.

[marina]

I'm not sure if anyone has already mentioned this one, but it's one of my favourites. The grief is palpable.

'Have you news of my boy Jack?'
Not this tide.

Yes, it is. Did you see the drama 'My Boy Jacck' on TV? The poem was recited - wonderful stuff.

Marina

[truthergw]

Yoshi, that was after he had lost his son. Here is a verse from " The Irish Guards ",
We're not so old in the Army List
But we're not so new in the ring.
For we carried our packs with Marshal Saxe
When Louis was our king.
But Douglas Haig's our marshal now,
And we're King George's men
And after one hundred and seventy years
We're fighting for France again.

More like the tenor of your quotation is " The Nativity".

The Babe was laid in the Manger
between the gentle kine--
All safe from cold and danger--
" But it was not so with mine,
( With mine! With mine!)
" Is it well with the child, is it well?"
The waiting mother prayed.
" For I know not how he fell,
And I know not where he is laid."

This is one where the very strange syntax and complex setting tend to come between the reader and the harrowing plea of the poetry. Very personal, and strange that Kipling could be writing that at the same time as celebrating The Irish Guards, his son's regiment.

[marina]

Does anyone have the full text of Alfred Noyes's 'The Victory Ball'? I've managed to glean some fragments from the internet, but obviously there are huge chunks missing:


The Victory Ball
Alfred Noyes

I

The cymbals crash,

And the dancers walk.

With long white stockings

And arms of chalk,

Butterfly skirts,

And white breasts bare,

And shadows of dead men

Watching 'em there.

II.

Shadows of dead men

Stand by the wall,

Watching the fun

Of the Victory Ball.

They do not reproach,

Because they know,

If they're forgotten

It's better so.

IV.

Fat wet bodies

Go waddling by,

Girdled with satin,

Though God knows why:

Gripped by satyrs

In white and black.

With a fat wet hand

On the fat wet back.

In Atlanta


Marina

[Yoshi]

Yes, it is. Did you see the drama 'My Boy Jacck' on TV? The poem was recited - wonderful stuff.

Marina

Yes it was very well done I thought.

[Yoshi]

The Babe was laid in the Manger
between the gentle kine--
All safe from cold and danger--
" But it was not so with mine,
( With mine! With mine!)
" Is it well with the child, is it well?"
The waiting mother prayed.
" For I know not how he fell,
And I know not where he is laid."

This is one where the very strange syntax and complex setting tend to come between the reader and the harrowing plea of the poetry. Very personal, and strange that Kipling could be writing that at the same time as celebrating The Irish Guards, his son's regiment.

Yes Kipling's poetry offers all sorts of strange contrasts. I haven't heard the Babe in the manger one before. I assumed there was a change in his poetry after his son's death but the sentiments in this one are similar to the 'Not this tide' one.

[truthergw]

Kipling was deeply affected by the loss of his son and wrote poetry reflecting that. He also seems to have still been able to write ' official ' verse. A lifetime of patriotic zeal for the British Empire would not be easily thrown aside. He must have struggled to come to terms with the actuality of the sacrifice which he had called on all to be prepared to make.

[redorchestra]

Talking of Kipling, has anyone read his short story 'Mary Postgate'. One of the most bizarre stories about the Great War I've ever read, particuarly coming from a writer like Kipling. The last few paragraphs were quite horrifying..

[marina]

Powerful story!

Marina

[Nickoby]

Does anyone have the full text of Alfred Noyes's 'The Victory Ball'? I've managed to glean some fragments from the internet, but obviously there are huge chunks missing:


The Victory Ball
Alfred Noyes

I

The cymbals crash,

And the dancers walk.

With long white stockings

And arms of chalk,

Butterfly skirts,

And white breasts bare,

And shadows of dead men

Watching 'em there.

II.

Shadows of dead men

Stand by the wall,

Watching the fun

Of the Victory Ball.

They do not reproach,

Because they know,

If they're forgotten

It's better so.

IV.

Fat wet bodies

Go waddling by,

Girdled with satin,

Though God knows why:

Gripped by satyrs

In white and black.

With a fat wet hand

On the fat wet back.

In Atlanta


Marina

[Nickoby]

This is the full text of The Victory Ball (although some of the punctuation may be wrong):
The Victory Ball by Alfred Noyes

The cymbals crash
And the dancers walk
With long silk stockings
And arms of chalk
With butterfly skirts
And white breasts bare
And shadows of dead men
Watching 'em there.
God! how the dead men
Grin by the wall
Watching the fun
Of the victory ball.
They do not reproach
Because they know
If they're forgotten
It's better so.
Under the dancing feet
Are the graves
Dazzle and motley
In long bright waves.
Brushed by the palm fronds
Grapple and whirl
Ox-eyed matron
And slim white girl.
Fat wet bodies
Go waddling by
Girdled in satin
Tho' God knows why,
Gripped by satyrs
In white and black
With a fat wet hand
On the fat wet back.
See, there's a new girl
Fresh from school
Learning the ropes
As the old hands rule.
God! how that dead boy gapes and grins
As the tom-toms bang
And the shimmy begins.
'What did you think you'd
Find' asked a shade
'When the last shot echoed
And peace was made?'
'Christ' laughed the
Fleshless jaws of his friend,
'I thought they'd be
Praying for worlds to mend
And making earth better
Or something damn silly
Like whitewashing hell
Or Picc-damn-dilly.
They've a sense of humour
These women of ours,
These exquisite lilies,
These fresh young flowers'.
'Pish', said a statesman
Standing near, 'we mustn't
Reproach 'em, they're young you see'.
'Ah', said the deadmen,
'So were we'.
Victory! Victory!
On with the dance
Back to the jungle
The new beasts prance.
God, how the dead men
Grin by the wall
Watching the fun
Of the Victory Ball.