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 The
subject for this week is War Poetry. War, or battles, have been
a subject for poetry since the earliest times. The Iliad,
after all, is a war poem; and much of the message is concerned with
the individual heroism and the ultimate overall pointlessness of
it all. In the poems we have used or quoted from before in The Mediadrome
there are many that are war or battle poems: The
Soldier,
by Rupert Brooke; Sennacherib,
by George Gordon, Lord Byron; Horatius,
by Thomas Babbington, Lord Macaulay; Dulce
et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen; Sestina:
Altaforte, by Ezra Pound; Everyone
Sang, by Siegfried Sassoon; The Agincourt
Speech, by William Shakespeare; and A
Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim, by Walt Whitman.
In the main, war gets a very poor press from the poets, perhaps
because many of them were combatants at a very low level. Wilfred
Owen's poem, for example, ends:
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
quote is from Horace; the second ode in Book 3; it is usually translated
"Lovely and honorable it is to die for one's country".
Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (1661-1720) wrote The Soldier's
Death, which in part said:
Trail all your pikes, dispirit every drum,
March in a slow procession from afar,
Ye silent, ye dejected men of war!
Be still the hautboys, and the flute be dumb!
Display no more, in vain, the lofty banner.
For see!where on the bier before you lies
The pale, the fall'n, th'untimely sacrifice
To your mistaken shrine, to your false idol Honour.
 The
First World War produced a number of poets, and the best anthology,
in my view, is The
Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, edited by Jon Silkin,
and published in the Penguin Modern Classics series by Penguin Books,
Ltd. Get the Second Edition, which was published in 1981. Silkin's
introduction is an excellent discussion of the whole topic of war
poetry, and is also a very complete analysis of Wilfred Owen's poetry.
The First World War began in 1914, and one of the really sad things
about the book is to see the dates of birth and death of the poets
quoted: 14 of them died in the war itself.
There are three themes (to oversimplify greatly) in war poetry:
(1) the patriotic responsibility; (2) the pointlessness of the whole
thing; and (3) the incompetence of the strategic guidance from the
central staff.
There is another theme: World War I was a major conflict between
groups of nations, driven by geopolitical imperatives; many other
struggles are between relatively small groups, concerned with issues
of local boundaries or local religious issues. In this latter context,
one might perhaps quote Sir John Harington (1561-1612):
Treason doth never prosper - What's the reason?
If it doth prosper, none dare call it treason.
History
tells us that the eventual victors in many of these conflicts were
at first rebels, or terrorists, according to the establishments against
which they struggled; they themselves were patriots, combating oppression.
This is often reflected in the poetry, not only in that of the triumphant
winners, but in the sorrow of those who failed to dislodge the tyrants
- this time, at least!
So what does one pick? I thought we might choose first the Charge
of the Light Brigade, because not only was it a massacre,
but it was due to a plan originated by people far away who had no
idea of the local conditions. Next, I thought we might choose Drummer
Hodge, by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) because it relates to
the Boer War in South Africa, and it illustrates the British practice
of burying the fallen men where they lay: the idea of recovering
bodies and bringing them home appears to be a uniquely American
practice. It has a striking similarity to the later poem by Rupert
Brooks from World War One, The Soldier. Finally, I select
Summer 1969
by Seamus Heaney. It echoes his own concerns with the 'Troubles'
in Northern Ireland, but it was written in Spain.
Read
more war poetry here.
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