Here is a not so famous poem by Alan Seeger. Would be interested to hear whether you prefer this one to "I have a rendezvous with death", or vice versa.

Sonnet V111

Oh, love of woman, you are known to be
A passion sent to plague the hearts of men;
For every one you bring felicity
Bringing rebuffs and wretchedness to ten.
I have been oft where human life sold cheap
And seen men's brains spilled out about their ears
And yet that never cost me any sleep;
I lived untroubled and I shed no tears.
Fools prate how war is an atrocious thing;
I always knew that nothing it implied
Equalled the agony of suffering
Of him who loved and loves unsatisfied.
War is a refuge to a heart like this;
Love only tells it what true torture is.

Alan Seeger - "Last Poems" 1916.


Robbie

MATHEW COPSE.

Once in thy secret close, now almost bare
Peace yielded up her bOuntiful largesse,
The dawn dropp'd sunshine through thy leafy dress,
The sunset bathed thy glade with beauty rare.

Now 'mid thy splinter'd trees the great shells crash,
The subterranean mines thy deeps divide;
And men from Death and Terror there do hide
Hide in thy caves from shrapnel's deadly splash.

There by thr fallen youth, where heroes lie,
Close by each simple cross the flowers will spring,
The bonnes enfants will wander in the spring.
And lovers dream those dreams that never die.

Will. Streets, JUNE 1916

Will. Streets K. I. A. 1st JULY 1916.

There are so many poems I love, particularly those by Sassoon and Owen, but these poems by Henry Mond are my favourites (sorry about two, but I'm indecisive). They are quite rare, I waited four years before I could finally get a copy. I approached our reference library long ago to get a copy as I saw they had one in their collection. However, the staff told me that it was removed from circulation then packed in a box. As there were many such boxes, no one was going to go through all the boxes for me. So I thought it was hopeless. However, one day a few months back I was back at the library, and a librarian came over and asked if I need any help. I again asked about the poems, just in case things had changed, but this person kindly agreed to go look for it. So I got the book. What was strange was that the card index in the book showed the last time it was taken out was 1923, and then it was removed from the library circulation. I still wonder why - censorship, too risque for those times... So I was the first to look at it again.

*************************************
Henry Mond, "Poems of Dawn and the Night" (London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1919).


The Silver Corpse

All night the spirit of his mother hovered there,
Sat crouched and silent on the traverses,
Above his feet, over his blood-mucked hair,
Until my blood iced in my arteries.
I passed the bay each hour, and as I went,
The wet clay trench was silver 'neath the moon,
And on the fire-step, very still, lay rent
A silver corpse; all round about was strewn
Chloride of lime upon his darkening blood.
A sodden sandbag covered up his face
And lay across his shoulder. As I stood
Watching his grey and clotted hand, the place
Filled with his mother, sped to him from home.
"Come back to me, my son," she whispered,
"Come.
I cannot lose the only thing I have,
There is a God in Heaven! I am brave,
But still your mother; I must speak to you."
My soul filled up with sorrow as a sponge,
For in the noonday, when the sky was blue,
I saw the shell-burst smash him, saw him plunge
Onto the duckboards: saw his nostrils splutter
His own blood and the mud,
Face downward in the gutter.
Under the brilliance of the summer sun
His soul sped outward to eternity,
Thinned into space, and with the world was done.
In vain into the darkness breathes the sign
"My son, my son, I need you."
Stinking Farm
Is getting strafed like Hell. See, they have put his arm,
Torn clean off, parted from the shoulder bone,
Close by his side, a little too far down.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *


A Dirge on the Triumphal March of the Australian Forces Through London

May, 1919

Oh people not by mourning overswept
In the great tragedy that has befallen earth,
Oh generation that shall lie unwept,
Even by the very children of your birth,
March on your empty triumphal and sing,
For at your gloomy death no hands shall bring
The coronet of grief that should have crowned you King.

Exult ye at the symbol of your soul
The culminant expression of your lies;
Your vasty edifice whereof the whole
Is but a golden heap of perjuries.
For wide beyond the cracking of your domes,
Tottering towards you for your dusty tombs,
A light, a word, a song, out of the rending comes.

Stride upon stride, and proud the warriors swing,
With all the scorn of battle in their eyes;
Hard-bitten scorn of those who shout the thing
They dared not face, and did not dare despise.
So the processions made of old to please
The gaping crowds, the wealthy at their ease,
In the light of war-scorched souls are dismal parodies.

Oh spirit of the Universe, stoop down
And hear the constant humming of machines;
Listen against the dry anguishing tone
Of living souls caught living in machines.
Hollow and hollow tramp the labourer's feet,
Hollow as all his strivings to complete,
Hollow as all his weariness when the wings of life are fleet.

Hum on the increase, oh, machines! and shriek,
Shriek with the tongues of all the tangled world,
Rising magnificent on Death to speak
The gathering truth, the song victorious hurled
Out of the shout-stretched throats of liberate men
Thronged up the gilded stairway that has been
The glory way to falsehood and our bane.

Till, leaping the steps with eyes aflame,
And naked arms and loosened neck and hair,
Swept in the breathing of her glorious frame,
A girl shall lead them, knife in hand, to clear
The master perjurers, the queenly whores,
Till, with the welter of their blood, the floors
Shall rot and crash upon the throne of Mars.

Love "the Silver Corpse", Canadaww1.
Robbie

I should like to post part of a poem written by one of the men I'm researching: Second Lieutenant J. A. B. Jolley, 1/5th Lincolnshire (T.F.).

It was written in 1912, before he went off to war, but it is somewhat prophetic. Second Leiutenant Jolley was KIA at Loos on 13th October 1915, aged 20.

The Dying Heracles

Once did I fight with Death to save a friend,
Now Death, recovered from his first defeat,
Seeks to regain his own, and in the end
He conquers me.
I strove to conquer death, and in the heat
Of passing Triumph, thought that I did bend
Him to my will, that I in fight could meet
Him, and be free

But none can conquer Death, no hero can
Escape his clutches, be he ne’er so strong,
For dreaded Death and Hades cast their ban
Upon them all.
What Death is, none must know, for it is wrong
To seek out knowledge too divine for man,
But e’en for heroes there awaits ere long-
A sable pall

Reading the last two lines, the tragic irony of the poem is that Second Lieutenant Jolley has no known grave.

I have two favourite poems.

Firstly, John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields". This poem has special significance for me because my wife is a distant relation of his. My son (aged 12) is very proud of this association.

My second favourite (poem that it, not son!) is also special because of the man who wrote it. He lived just down the road from me and was killed in action just a few weeks after he wrote it.

Somebody’s Soldier Boy

Somewhere in the fighting line,
There’s a soldier boy
Thinking of his home and friends,
And he thinks of them with joy.
It was for their sake he left them,
His duty it was clear.
He must go to fight for England,
His home and loved ones dear.

He’d no regret, nor any care,
His heart was staunch and true.
He knew that England called him,
She had work for him to do.
He left his home, his mother dear,
Her blessing on him shed.
He left his sweetheart and his friends
And o’er the foam he sped.

And now he’s fighting side by side,
With other British sons.
His time is spent midst shot and shell
And the booming of the guns.
He has no fear, he only prays
That someday he’ll return,
Back to that dear old home
Whose heart for him does yearn.

Back to that dear old country
And to all those he holds dear,
He knows that they are praying,
His heart they are ever near.
But wherever he may wander,
Or whatever may befall,
His thoughts will ever be of home
His prayer, God bless them all.

Pte. 3135 John (Jack) Halewood
1/9th King’s Liverpool Regiment
of Scarisbrick, Lancashire
Killed in Action 31st August 1916, aged 25
Buried in Guillemont Road Cemetery, Somme

Jon,

I've just checked Robert Services work......... I really like them!

regards
Soren

Thanks to canadawwi for the Henry Mond-I had never heard of him,but was highly impressed by the 2 poems you posted.

I've had a think about what people have shared here (many thanks) and it seems very clear that there are amazing poems that don't belong to the "Big 2"(Wilfred and Siegfried) I will nail my colours to the mast-they were both great and important poets,in my opinion,but their public preminence tends to mean very little is known (esp taught in schools) about the others,even relatively well known men like Charles Sorley (I'm sure neither of them would have wanted this)

How to overcome this? I had an English teacher who loved Sorley,Rosenberg,Edward Thomas and Seeger,so we did read them,but I'm not sure teachers today(absolutely no offence to them meant) have the freedom or the time to introduce "new" people"

Don't know-half digested thoughts-but it does seem sad that poems of the quality of those people have posted here are not more widely known.

It think the poem by Moina Michael whose inspiration was John McCrae's poem. She started off the tradition of the red poppy.

We Shall Keep the Faith

Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields
Sleep sweet - to raise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.

We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valour led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never vdies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flowers that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We'll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.

This one is a Belgian poem of 1915 by Franz De Backer:

I translated it in English for you:
Na den aanval (after the battle)

the low sun is red of blood; - you was a child,
with a slight smile on your mouth, and blond hairs,
en happy, bright eyes

the low sun is red of blood; - you were loved,
silent love-light, that hang around you
in soft rainbows

the low sun is red of blood; - the hard stroke
in the wild fight for the country, the poor , that let slip away
your bright and warm life

the low sun is red of blood; - you are so pale,
with al that rest on your face, and your lips
still ready to scream

the low sun is red of blood; - I weep for you

Vlaamsche stem 12 august 1915, F. De Backer

I thought some of you might like this.

The Cenotaph.

Not yet will these measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild.sweet,blood of wonderful youth was shed:
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long,too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly we may tread.
But here,where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph:Victory,winged,with Peace,winged too,
at the columns head.
And over the stairway,at the foot-oh! here,leave desolate passionate
hands to spread
Violets,roses,and laurel,with the small,sweet,twinkling country things
Speaking so wistfully of other Springs
From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born
and bred.


In splendid sleep,with a thousand brothers
To lovers--to mothers.
Here,too,lies he:
Under the purple,the green,the red,
It is all young life:it must break some women's hearts to see
Such a brave,gay coverlet to such a bed!
Only when all is done and said,
God is not mocked and neither are the dead.


For this will stand in our Market-place-
Who'll sell,who'll buy
(Will you or I
Lie to each other with the better grace)?
While looking into each every busy whore's and huckster's face
As they drive their bargains,is the Face
Of God:and some young,piteous,murdered face.

Charlotte Mew,1869-1928.

My favourite poem is Futility by Wilfred Owen but this one is oh so very close.

ANZAC Cove By Leon Gellert.

There's a lonely stretch of hillocks:
There's a beach asleep and drear:
There's a battered broken fort beside the sea.
There are sunken trampled graves:
And a little rotting pier:
And winding paths that wind unceasingly.

There's a torn and silent valley:
There's a tiny rivulet
With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.
There are lines of buried bones:
There's an unpaid waiting debt:
There's a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.

January, 1916

I'm sorry it's such a long one - but I really love this poem written by an Aussie Trooper who went by the pseudonym 'Gerardy', Palestine 1918.

A Mountain Fight.

The shadows fall on the lonely dead,
Where the murderous guns held spree,
And spattered the stones of Moab red,
In the sight of the blue Dead Sea.
The hills are mute in the aftermath
Of a long and bitter fray,
And the shattering voice of battle-wrath
Has died with the fatal day.

The moon rolled over the naked range,
On the night we ambled forth.
Fair was the tranquil vale, and strange
All trails that led to the north.
The Jordan wound like a monster snake
Away to the left below;
And flickering faint in our dusty wake
Were the lights of Jericho.

We followed the trail up scars and seams
On a flood-worn broken floor;
The sky looked down, as a night-sky gleams
Through a roofless corridor.
We climbed where the crags weave sombre shades
On the ledges lone and high;
Where the rocks are sharp as bayonet blades
Held sheer at the limpid sky.

Our guns moved close in the trailing rear,
And many a curse was thrown
At the brazen hills we purchased dear
With blood and muscle and bone.
We stumbled on till the dawn awoke,
And cradled the moon to rest;
Till a golden bar of sunlight broke
On a tapering mountain crest.

The light of an amber sun was blent
With the mists of morning then,
And the hoofs of the surging regiment
Rang clear in a wid'ning glen;
But sudden and sharp, on either flank,
The rattle of rifles told
How fate had played us a murder prank
In the heart of Dead Man's Hold.

As a shaft leaps forth from an archer's bow,
Through a withering rain of lead,
We sprang from the shock of a sudden blow,
And raced for the rocks ahead.
The foeman hurried us on as hard
As a blast of autumn wind;
And the guns with the straggling afterguard
Kept rumbling on behind.

We turned at last where a mountain wall
Arose in our broken course -
No more would a speechless horseman fall,
Hard hit, from his startled horse.
We left the saddle and screened the guns,
And our rifle bolts replied
To the soulless Turks and the master Huns
Who approached on either side.

They swarmed like ants, till the vale seemed black
With a seething human flood,
That the shrapnel failed in holding back
With its toll of life and blood
They tumbled over the men that fell
From the frantic, foremost line,
And gave us a taste of earthly hell,
In the hills of Palestine.

The mass bore down, as a greedy tide
Sweeps over an ocean beach,
While the bombardiers toiled side by side
At the hot, recoiling breech.
But the saving shells gave out too soon,
And the batt'ry ceased to rave,
As many a man was seen to swoon,
And sprawl on his stony grave.

We sought the saddle and bounded then,
Like a team of startled stags;
We left behind us the crowded glen
And clambered among the crags.
But ere the Turk, in his hasty greed,
Was able to hold us all,
We gave him a taste of hell indeed,
From the leaning mountain wall.

We hung to the high ground all that day;
And all through the night we kept
The cowering foe from the guns away,
While never a horseman slept.
When anxious hours began to drag,
And the fight seemed left to chance,
They set their guns on the Red Cross flag,
And shattered out ambulance.

A fresh dawn broke on a day of dread,
Our bandoliers were light;
We hadn't enough of rifle lead
To commence another fight.
But the beat of hoofs rang sharp and clear
Ere the noon-sun crowned the day,
And we knew relief was forging near -
That the Turk had crept away.

They found us perched on the mountain wall
Where the twisted dead were strown;
The perishing wounded ceased to call,
And the dying ceased to groan.
We staggered away like listless ghosts
To the heart of Dead Man's Hold,
While the fresh relief took up their posts,
And the guns began to scold.

The shadows fall on the lonely dead,
Where the murderous guns held spree,
And spattered the hills of Moab red,
In sight of the blue Dead Sea.
And memory robs my eyes of sleep,
For half my comrades sprawl
Where half of my heart lies buried deep.
In the stones of a mountain wall.

Hello,

I would like to add Isaac Rosenberg 'Break of Day in the Trenches'

- ".... Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German -
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure..."

and how about this for a piece of prose from Wilfred Owen ?

'For 14 hours yesterday I was at work - teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands at attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.'

'the topography of Golgotha' - what an image.

KF Kelly

Thanks to everyone on here-amazing poems.

Laura

Gwyn

Thanks for the ifo.. in many ways I had supected it as much of the songs etc changed as the war went on...

Many thanks

John

Hi Folks

Some very interesting entries cropping up here, some I have heard of, a lot that I have not, so will need to expand my reading to accomodate them in the future.

For what it's worth, here are my choices, most are listed, but I think at least one hasn't been mentioned, maybe because it is not really a "War" poem.......

Dulce Et Decorium Est Wilfred Owen

Rendezvous Alex Seeger

Tommy Rudyard kipling

Cheers

Mark

Mark, do you mean 'I have a rendezvous with death' by Alan Seeger?

I used part of that in my Remembrance pages on my website.

If you're interested in war poetry in general, rather than specifically Great War poetry, you might consider The Faber Book of War Poetry, edited by Kenneth Baker. It's an excellent, comprehensive and sensitively selected anthology.

Gwyn

While my favourite poem is ‘Man at Arms’, I also like ‘The Kid’ By Tony Spagnoly. This is about Rifleman Albert French buried at Hyde Park Corner (Royal Berks) Cemetery, Ploegsteert.
But the main reason for this post was to mention a CD of 1st World War Poems I found at Tommy’s Bar.
It has 13 poems written by Robert Service and narrated by Peter Dumville plus some incidental music and battle sounds.
I thought it an excellent buy particularly as all proceeds will be donated to cancer charities in memory of a gentleman named William ‘Bill’ Link, and others, who lost their battles against cancer.
John

My favorite World War I poem is In Flanders Fields written by the Canadian John McCrae:


In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Regards

My son Tom who is 14 in 9 days is studying Great War Poetry at school at present. It is very interesting reading and sharing with him his ideas and interpetations of what he is reading. He has been sharing with me his thoughts on Dulce et Decorum Est after school today.

(I suppose he has a slight advantage in his background knowledge of the Great War, he has been visisting the battlefields since he was 6 months old, and was part of the "Strange Meeting" at Ors communal cemetery on November 4th, 1993.)

Hello,

I find this discussion quite interesting and have had a long interest in Great War poetry. My two favorite pomes to come out of the war, both by men killed in combat, are:

Come ye who may,
Foeman in air, or Earth!
For my machine-gun
Sings for you alone,
And in his lay
To silvery death gives birth.
Now lifts now lowers he
His deadly tone.
Here do I lie,
Hidden by grass and flowers,
With my machine-gun,
Ghost of modern war.
The sun floats high,
The moon through deep blue hours,
I watch with my machine-gun
At Death’s grim door

= by Lieutenant John Hobson of the British Machine Gun Corps killed 1917 23yrs at Passchendaele

IN MEMORIAM
Private D. Sutherland Killed in Action in the German
Thrench, May 16th 1916, and others who died.

So you were David's father
And he was your only son,
And the new-cut peats are rotting
And the work is left undone,
Because of an old man weeping,
Just an old man in pain,
For David, his son David,
That will not come again

Oh, the letters he wrote you,
And I can see them still,
Not a word of the fighting
But just the sheep on the hill
And how you should get the crops in
Ere the year got stormier,
And the Bosches have got his body,
And I was his Officer.

You were only David's father,
But I had fifty sons
When we went up in the evening
Under the arch of the Guns,
And we came back at twilight-
Oh God! I heard them call
To me for help and pity
That could not help at all

Oh, never will I forget you,
My men that trusted me,
More my sons than your fathers',
For they could only see
The little helpless babies
And the young men in their pride.
They could not see you dying,
And hold you while you died.

Happy and young and Gallant,
They saw their first-born go,
But not the strong limbs broken
And the beautiful men brought low,
The piteous writhing bodies,
They screamed, "Don't leave me, Sir,"
For they were only your fathers
But I was your officer.

=by Lieutenant Ewart Alan MacKintosh, 5th Bat Seaforth Highlanders, killed November 21st 1917 at age 24, Flesquieres, France

To add an example to this question and to the explination given by Gwyn, in A Deep Cry: First World War Soldier-Poets Killed in France and Flanders edited by Anne Powell there is a great depiction of this.

In 1917 Captain Arthur Graeme West wrote "God! How I Hate You, You Young and Cheerful Men!" in responce to Rex Freston's (whom he attended Oxford with prior to enlistment) poems "O Fortunati" and "To the Atheists'"

Freston was killed 24 Jan 1916 at 24 years of age. He enlisted in 1915 and during his brief time he wrote many poems of a very romantic and idealistic nature, the above mentioned probably his most romantic.

O Fortunati

O happy to have lived these epic days!
To have seen unfold, as doth a dream unfold,
These glorious chivalries, these deeds of gold,
The glory of whos splendour gilds death's ways,
As a rich sunset fills dark woods with fire
And blinds the traveller's eyes. Our eyes are blind
With flaming heroism, that leaves our mind
Dumbstruck with pride. We have has our heart's desire!
O happy! Generations have lived and died
And only dreamed such things as we have seen and known!
Splendour of Men, death laughed at, death defied,
Round the great world, on the winds, their tale is blown;
Whatever pass, these ever shall abide:
In memory's Valhalla, an imperishable throne.

To the Atheists

I know that God will never let me die.
He is too passionate and intense for that.
See how he swings His great suns through the sky.
See how He hammers the proud-faced mountains flat.
He takes a handful of a million years
And hurls them at the planets; or he throws
His red stars at the moon: then with hot tears
He stoops to kiss one little earthborn rose.

Don't nail God down to rules, and think you know!
Or God, who sorrows all a summer's day
Because a blade of grass has died, will come
And suck this world up in His lips, and lo!
Will spit it out a pebble, powdered grey,
Into the whirl of Infinity's nothingless foam.

West enlisted as a Private and was later commisoned. He was sent back to Scotland to for his officer's traning in March of 1916. By reading his letters during this period it is easy to see how greatly the war had effected him. He questioned the war his integrety and his ability to go on. In 1917 he penned a poem that was very critical of the romantic idealistic poetry that surrounded him.

God! How I Hate You, You Young Cheerful Men!

Gos! How I have you, you young and cheerful men,
Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves
As soon as you are in them, nurtured up
By the salt of your corruption, and the tears
Of mothers, local vivars, college deans,
And flanked by prefaces and photographs
From all your minor poet friends - the fools-
Who paint their sentimental elegies
Where sure, no angle treads; and, living, share
The dead's brief immortality.
Oh Christ!
To Think that one could spread the ductile wax
Of his fluid youth tyo Oxford's glowing fires
And take her seal so ill! Hark how one chants -
"Oh happy to have lived these epic days" -
"Thses epic days"! And he'd been to France,
And seen the trenches, glimpsed the huddled dead
In the periscope, hung in the rusting wire:
Choked by their sickly foetor, day and nught
Blown down his throat: stumbled through ruined hearths,
Proved all that muddy brown monotony,
Where blood's the only coloured thing. Prehaps
He has seen a man killed, a sentry shot at night,
Hunched as he fell, his feet on the firing-step,
His neck against the back slope of the trench,
And the rest doubled up between, his head
smashed like an egg-shell, and the warm grey brain
Splattered all bloody on the parados:
He slashed a torch on his face, and known his friend,
Shot, breathing hardly, in ten minures - gone!
Yet still God's in His heaven, all is right
In the best possible of worlds. The woe,
Even His scaled eyes must see, is partial, only
A seeming woe, we cannot understand.
God loves us. God looks down on this our strife
And smiles in pity, blows a pipe at times
And calls some warriors home. We do not die,
Too "passionate", a whole day sorroes He
Because a grass-blade dies. How rare life is!
On earth, the love and fellowship of men,
Men sternly banded: banded for what end?
Banded to maim and kill their fellow men -
For even Huns are men. In heaven above
A genial umpire, a good judge of sport,
Won't let us hurt each other! Let's rejoice
God keeps us faithful, pens us still in fold.
Ah, what a faith is ours (almoat, it seems,
Large, as a mustard-seed) - we trust and trust,
Nothing can shake us! Ah, how good God is
To suffer us be born just now, when youth
That else would rust, can slake his blage in gore,
Where very God Himself does seem to walk
The bloody fields of Flanders He so loves!

The Homecoming
by Joseph Lee

When this blast is over-blown,
And the beacon fires shall burn
And in the street
Is the sound of feet -
They also shall return.

When the bells shall rock and ring,
When the flags shall flutter free,
And the choirs shall sing, -
"God save our King"
They shall be there to see.

When the brazen bands shall play,
And the silver trumpets blow,
And the soldiers come
To the tuck of drum -
They shall be there also.

When that which was lost is found;
When each shall have claimed his kin,
Fear not they shall miss
Mother's clasp, maiden's kiss -
For no strange soil might hold them in.

When Te Deums seek the skies,
When the Organ shakes the Dome,
A dead man shall stand
At each live man's hand -
For they also have come home.

Aye
Malcolm

Can I recommend the following book, which I found to be very interesting, and opened up the field of WW1 poetry and literature to me.

The book is: The Great War and Modern Memory written by Paul Fussell.

Leslie Coulson’s “who made the Law”, but the following makes a change from the usual fare.

“I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder,
To kill some other mother’s darling boy?
The nations ought to arbitrate their quarrels,
It’s time to put the sword and gun away.
There’d be no war today,
If mother’s all would say,
I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier.”

A Working Woman.
Holmfirth, July 1915.

One of my favourites (as well as many already named) is "Dead Man's Dump" by Isaac Rosenberg:-

The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan,
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended--stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit
Earth! have they gone into you?
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their souls' sack,
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us, who flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
These dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called 'an end!'
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.
Burnt black by strange decay,
Their sinister faces lie
The lid over each eye,
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead;
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
To reach the living word the far wheels said,
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break,
Or the wheels to break,
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

Will they come? Will they ever come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned sight,
So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead face.



Some of the desparate imagery in this is so vivid that it brings the hopelessness and waste into the present with great immediacy.

I'd also mention "Prelude: The Troops" by Sassoon, "Exposure" by Owen, "The Watchers" by Edmund Blunden and "Rouen" by May Wedderburn Cannan(sp?).

Regards,
MikB

It's great to see so many lesser-known poems! With that said, I'm a fan of Sassoon - love his bitterness and irony, but I also enjoy his less cynical works, such as...

The Dug-Out

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen, cold
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadow'd from the candle's guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head...
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

St Venant, July 1918.

And for a lesser-known contribution, here's one by Patrick MacGill:

In The Morning

The firefly lamps were lighted yet,
As we crossed the top of the parapet,
But the East grew pale to another fire,
As our bayonets gleamed by the foeman's wire.
And the Eastern sky was gold and grey,
And under our feet the dead men lay,
As we entered Loos in the morning.

The dead men lay on the shell-scarred plain,
Where death and the autumn held their reign--
Like banded ghosts in the heavens grey
The smoke of the conflict died away.
The boys whom I knew and loved were dead,
Where war's grim annals were writ in red,
In the town of Loos in the morning.

The turrets twain that stood in air
Sheltered a foeman sniper there;
They found who fell to the sniper's aim,
A field of death on the field of fame--
And stiff in khaki the boys were laid,
To the rifle's toll at the barricade;
But the quick went clattering through the town,
Shot at the sniper and brought him down,
In the town of Loos in the morning.

The dead men lay on the cellar stair,
Toll of the bomb that found them there;
In the streets men fell as a bullock drops,
Sniped from the fringe of Hulloch copse.
And stiff in khaki the boys were laid--
Food of the bullet and hand-grenade--
This we saw when the charge was done,
And the East grew pale to the rising sun
In the town of Loos in the morning.


Interesting, but this version (which I pulled from the chapter headers in MacGill's book, The Great Push, is slightly different than the official version I found online here. I actually like some of the book version better.

Also, here's a site with a fairly comprehensive list of Great War Poets.

Later!

Nice to see Rosenberg being quoted. Ther is a line from one poem which deals with a casualty:
"Move him into the sun"
It's so evocative because that is what people in action involved say.
Also Binyon, At Northampton Saints RFC this is read over the memorial in the ground every Saturday game nearest to November 11th - Edgar Mobbs and others the connection. Never fail to blub personally.
Chris

Another poem most of you won't have heard of before.
It was written by May Dyer (as she was known then - later became a well know childrens writer - Elinor Brent-Dryer, it is believed to be written in 1916 sometime. According to her biography she was engaged to a soldier who never came back from the great war but he is only known as Hugh)

WAR

Death; hideous death, naked and unashamed;
Distorted fragmenys; cursing bleeding men;
Thunders that rend the startled air again;
Murder, and rape, and violence all unblamed;
Black crimes that pass in silence and un-named;
Fears, that avail naught; horror past all ken
Of generations gone; the world, a den
Where loathly creatures walk, with blood inflamed;
Slow breaking hearts; Famine; and Famine's twin
The pestilence, that stalks with chilling breath;
Starved children; Hate embracing ghastly Sin;
Men turned to vultures; Death; and Death; and Death;
Pain stalking forth with empty craving maw;
God nigh forgotten; Hell gaping widely; War!

Claire,
Poor woman...how she must have suffered - such raw emotion.
Robbie

I thought I'd re-awaken the muse with a few by Leon Gellert [10th Bn AIF]:


A NIGHT ATTACK.

Be still. The bleeding night is in suspense
Of watchful agony and coloured thought,
And every beating vein and trembling sense,
Long-tired with time, is pitched and overwrought.
And for the eye, the darkness holds strange forms.
Soft movements in the leaves, and wicked glows
That wait and peer. The whole black landscape swarms
With shapes of white and grey that no one knows;

And for the ear, a sound, a pause, a breath,
A distant hurried footstep moving fast.
The hand has touched the slimy face of death.
The mind is raking at the ragged past.
.... A sound of rifles rattles from the south,
And startled orders move from mouth to mouth.



THE LAST TO LEAVE [Gallipoli]

The guns were silent, and the silent hills
Had bowed their grasses to a gentle breeze.
I gazed upon the vales and on the rills,
And whispered, "What of these?" and "What of these?-
These long-forgotten dead with sunken graves,
Some crossless, with unwritten memories-
Their only mourners are the moaning waves,
Their only minstrels are the singing trees."
And thus I mused and sorrowed wistfully.
I watched the place where they had scaled the height,
The height whereon they bled so bitterly
Throughout each day and through each blistered night.
I sat there long, and listened - all things listened too.
I heard the epics of a thousand trees,
A thousand waves I heard; and then I knew
The waves were very old, the trees were wise:
The dead would be remembered evermore-
The valiant dead that gazed upon the skies,
And slept in great battalions by the shore.



RETURNED ANZACS [which could apply to all returned soldiers]

They walk along these quiet October ways
Trying to understand forgotten sights,
- The tittering girl, soft hands and matinees
And painted whispering lips and city nights.
These hearts have seen life choke and lived with screams
As Death went hurriedly from field to field;
But now, slow-wandering in their half-caught dreams
They fumble with their childhood half-revealed.

And they have been most intimate with Pain,
- Been friends with Sorrow on a Summer Day
- And Guests of Terror in the Winter Rain;
- Drunk deep with Death upon a wild carouse;
But having now returned to Youth again,
They come as Strangers to a Stranger's House.

RETURNED ANZACS is superb, thanks for sharing.

These are amrvellous poems - and I have never even heard of Gellert - forst class!
Marina

Leon Gellert was an Aussie who survived WW1 and had a career as, I think a journalist and writer. I believe he lived to a good age.
His best poem in my opinion is Anzac Cove which I think I have posted here before.

So you did, Sapper - I had forgotten. I think I like Night Attack best though.
Marina

Frances Ledwidge (Irish) and Ellis Evans (Welsh), both born in the same year 1887, fought in the same battle (Battle of Pilckem Ridge), died the same day - 31st July 1917, and buried feet from each other in Artillery Wood Cemetery at Boezinghe, nr Ypres.

I post just two of the poems written by these wonderful poets.

Soliloquy

When I was young I had a care
Lest I should cheat me of my share
Of that which makes it sweet to strive
For life, and dying still survive,
A name in sunshine written higher
Than lark or poet dare aspire.

But I grew weary doing well.
Besides, 'twas sweeter in that hell,
Down with the loud banditti people
Who robbed the orchards, climbed the steeple
For jackdaws' eyes and made the cock
Crow ere 'twas daylight on the clock.
I was so very bad the neighbours
Spoke of me at their daily labours.

And now I'm drinking wine in France,
The helpless child of circumstance.
To-morrow will be loud with war,
How will I be accounted for?

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.

Frances Ledwidge

The Black Spot

We have no right to the stars,
Nor the homesick moon,
Nor the clouds edged with gold
In the centre of the long blueness.
We have no right to anything
But the old and withered earth
That is all in chaos
At the centre of God's glory.

Ellis Evans (Hedd Wynn)

sunflower

Thank you Marina, I agree Night Attack is great.
It is so evocotive but I will still stand by ANZAC COVE.
New Zealanders are allowed to be biased and there was much sobbing in the south here.

'Tisn't bias, Sapper - it's your personal taste. One of the great things about poetry is that it will strike a chord that resonates for reasons that may go beyond its actual words. How about that Welsh poet Evans up above? Why does thta resonate with me more than the Ledwidge which i can see is also very fine. I don't know - it just does. So thanks to sunflower for those two!
Marina

Hi Marina

Glad you enjoyed my selection. I agree with you about Hedd Wynn's poem - there is just something about it that really gets you.


sunflower

I thought I'd add this poem to the list belatedly.
I like my poems simple and not too flowery of language. so when I read this one in a book I was given recently called Poets and Pals of Picardy , it struck a chord.

It is by 2nd Lieutenant Eric Wilkinson, in memory of his friend Capt Leslie Hossell, killed in action-August 1916.

Sleep deep, sleep well,
Your requiem knell
The whine and drone of passing shell.
Come cold, come rain,
Their grip is vain,
For you have passed beyond all pain,
Sleep deep, sleep well.

Sleep sound, sleep deep,
Our watch we keep,
And little chance have we to sleep.
Your watch is done,
Your rest begun,
The long, long rest you nobly won,
Sleep sound, sleep deep

This just says it all........

Very touching, Spike.
Marina

I have a book of poems by a guy called John Still, he was taken Prisoner by the Turks and held for 1179 Days has anyone heard of him. His Poems tend to be on the lengthy side and not all of them about war. I rescued the book after someone threw it in a skip.

Len

I have many poems, never published, by my Grandads and Great Uncles, that are so very poignant. They were pretty tough roosters when I knew them as a kid, but after they died I saw the side of them that was removed from the brutality that they endured.
I still like the piss take my paternal Grandad did on Brooke, with a poem that ends " and is there Huns still left for me ".
To find the original look up Brooke , the brave soldier that died of a sandfly bite.

Sapper and Piscator - any chance of seeing a poem?
I like the sound of the Brooke one in particular!
Marina

I'm with Marina - please let us see some poems.
Len - glad to see you rescued the book - what a sad loss it would have been.

Meanwhile, I came across this one today by Winifred M. Letts - so short & simple - but really packs a wallop!


WHAT REWARD?

You gave your life, boy,
And you gave a limb:
But he who gave his precious wits,
Say, what reward for him?

One has his glory,
One has found his rest.
But what of this poor babbler here
With chin sunk on his breast?

Flotsam of battle,
With brain bemused and dim,
O God, for such a sacrifice
Say, what reward for him?

Frev.

Oh, That is a good one, Frev.
Marina

Marina,
Heres one of the poems by John Still, written in 1917 at a place which I understand to be a POW Camp.

When I look out and see the spring
I wonder when the race of men
Will wake to wisdom once again


For deep and wantonly we've sown,
And wide have caste our very best.
But can it be that those who rest
Can die in truth until we've grown
The crops for which their lives were lent,
And harvested where they were spent?


The harvest of their sacrifice
Must crown the winter of their pain
Before they turn to dust again;
Then, well content to pay the price
Dissolve into the deathless whole,
Made nobler by their dauntless soul.


Deep in our soil their seed is set,
Deep in the hearts of us who live;
Trusted to us that we may give
Fulfilment to their harvest yet,
That those who gave their lives may gain
The one reward that crowns their pain.

Its a little deep for me but perhaps you may appreciate it. Many of his other works have nothing to do with the war, I think he was trying to escape the boredom and constrictions that imprisonment had placed on him. I can put some more on if it interest you or anyone else.


Len

Thanks, Pisactor,
I think it's his thoughts about what it would take to make the blood sacrifice ofthe best men worthwhile, Interesting, and as you say, rather deep.
Marina

Len

As you say, your John Still was a deep thinker - he would have had plenty of time as a POW to think about the waste of war.
To me he is saying that hopefully these men haven't died in vain (as Marina says, that their deaths were worthwhile) - that we who follow on - will learn from the mistakes of war - learn & grow - and move on to a better world.
Unfortunately, we all know this didn't happen, and probably never will - war in one form or another will probably always be with us (it's a part of who we are).

I would like to see another one (poem, not war).
What was the place (that you understand to be a POW camp)? And what nationality was John? (I won't just assume that he was British)


This one reminds me of how insignificant we humans really are:

'THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS'
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows calling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild-plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Sara Teasdale.


Cheers, Frev.