Poems for the Week:
The Poetry of War

The subject for this week is poetry relating to war. Thursday isVeterans’ Day in the USA, or Remembrance Day in Canada and the UK. Veterans Day was originally called Armistice Day, and it was a day to pay tribute to the veterans, and to the dead, of World War I; the date chosen was to commemorate the formal ending of that War, November 11th, 1918 (the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month). Similar days of observance were established in France, and The United States. After World War II, the scope was expanded to include the veterans and the dead of both World Wars, and in 1954, after the Korean war, the date was renamed Veterans Day in the US to honor servicemen and women of all U.S. wars. Of course, there is also Memorial Day, which was originally established to commemorate soldiers killed in the American Civil War, but this was later extended to all U.S. war dead. I suppose that the difference is that Memorial Day remembers the fallen in past wars; Veterans’ Day is to honor the survivors. However, the veterans themselves remember and honor those of their comrades who did not return.

We have used the subject of war as it appears in poetry before, and this week’s piece repeats a number of those remarks, and quotations.

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.

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. The actual heroism is less frequently discussed: a conspicuous exception is Macaulay’s Horatius, although it's imprtant to note that this poem was written before the Crimean War, which was, in many senses, the first modern conflict.

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. 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 considered themselves 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, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 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. The war was the Crimean War, which was fought mainly on the Crimean Peninsula (a part of the Ukraine) which is in the Black Sea; Sevastopol is perhaps the best known city. The conflict began in October 1853 and ended in February 1856. The combatants initially were Russia and the Ottoman Turks; the British and French were allies of the Turks. The Russians occupied the Danubian Principalities (modern Romania) on the Russo-Turkish border in July 1853. The objective was to establish Russian protection of the Orthodox inhabitants of the Ottoman sultanate; however there was also a dispute between France and Russia over the privileges of the Russian Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches in the Christian holy places in Palestine, which was part of the Ottoman Empire at that time. Following the destruction of the Turkish squadron by the Russian Black Sea fleet, the British and French fleets entered the Black Sea at Constantinople (Istanbul). On March 28th, 1854 they declared war on Russia.

In September 1854 the allies landed troops on the Crimea, and began a year-long siege of Sevastopol. Finally, on September 11th, 1855, the Russians blew up their forts, sank their ships, and abandoned Sevastopol. It is generally agreed that the war was very badly managed and commanded on both sides; the losses were about 250,000 men on each side. The majority of these deaths were caused by disease, a fact that was brought to the public attention back home via the articles that nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale wrote for The Times.  The coverage of the war by The Times and other newspapers was critical in changing public opinion.  It was also the first war to be photographed, bringing events out of the realm of government spin and into the immediate experience of the people at home (most notably, Queen Victoria herself). Tennyson’s poem was published in 1855, and the Charge referred to was at the Battle of Balaklava, which took place on October 25th, 1854. (Read an eyewitness account of the charge here.)

Last time, I chose 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, and in part this is because in recent conflicts the actual number of deaths among the US combatants has been relatively small. The concept of returning the bodies of those who died in the trenches in the earlier part of World War I (1914 – 1918) is unimagineable. In one day, July 1, 1916, in the battle of the Somme, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties; overall, 8,500,000 soldiers died in the war. It is because of this that the practice in wars such as those was to memorialize the fallen using a ‘Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’ to represent all of those who did not return. Often, national remembrance events in different countries would involve marches ending at the symbolic Tomb, and memorial wreathes would be placed there by military and political leaders. Recently, there have been attempts to identify such a representative using DNA, and this appears to me to miss the point altogether.

Local communities would list the names of those of its citizens killed, and that practice has continued, of course; often engraved on tablets surrounding a symbolic Tomb. Hardy’s poem has a striking similarity to the later poem by Rupert Brooke from World War One, The Soldier; and I have decided this week to include the Brooke poem instead. In my earlier article, I selected a poem by Seamus Heaney (Summer 1969). It echoes his own concerns with the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland, though it was written in Spain. However, I do not believe that this poem is the most appropriate choice for this week, and instead I will use a poem related to the American Civil War (1861 – 1865).

This too was a war with a large number of casualties, and I will use a poem of Walt Whitman’s. The first edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, and the third edition in 1860. By the time the Civil War started, Whitman was 42, and he saw no service as a soldier. However, his brother George was a lieutenant in the Union Army; and he was listed as wounded in Virginia in 1862. Walt took over the family responsibility for going to the battlefield to find him. He was shocked by the suffering he saw, and he stayed on after he had found his brother to help in the immense task of caring for the hurt and the maimed. In 1865 he published a volume of poems entitled Drum-Taps, based on his experiences. Later this was incorporated into Leaves of Grass. The poem I shall use for this week is, again, one the we have used before: A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.

I hope these poems give you a feeling for how devastating wars can be: it is as well also to remember that the people who are killed and maimed in a war are generally the poor and disadvantaged; and the real differences between the dead on one side and the dead on the other is small or none. In global conflicts, the people who do the dying are usually those who lived in or near the combat zone itself, and nowadays many are killed by weapons that are launched a long way away. I believe that when we remember the dead in wars, we should remember all the young lives that have been ended for reasons that they almost certainly did not understand. I wonder (for example) if we will ever know exactly how many Afghanis and Iraqis were killed (on both sides) over the course of the last two or three years.

Read more war poetry here.