Armistice Day 11th November

[kasie]

I was surprised and delighted that the national Service of Remembrance in Westminster Abbey included an extract from Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. Britten took the Requiem Mass and interspersed it with settings of poems by Wilfred Owen, making a moving and solemn piece of work. It was commissioned for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962 and its first performance was all the more poignant for taking place in the new building which has a glass west wall through which can be seen the ruins of the old cathedral, destroyed by enemy action in November 1940, with the words 'Father Forgive' over the altar rebuilt from the rubble in the days following the raid.

[neilgee]

Dead Man's Dump



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 soul's 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,
Those 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.

Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,
The impetuous storm of savage love.
Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul
With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,
Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?

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.

Isaac Rosenberg [1890 - 1918]


Rosenberg isn't often mentioned amongst the great war poets but I find his work as touching as I do Wilfred Owen's.

[Rachel1965]

thankyou all for the many war poems that I have read through on this thread, we have very briefly looked at them in university last week a bit of owen anf brook and then on to the poets of the second world war.
I was told that brook was very chivalric and looked on the war as an adventure but he did die in 1915 prehaps if he had lived longer his hopefullness would have deserted him as it did the others.
thanks again
Rachel

[Paulclem]

Hi Paul. I thought I'd bring this thread up from last year. I couldn't copy the thread, so I posted on it to bring it back up. Perhaps one of the whiz kid mods could merge the threads, as there is an abundance of brilliant war poetry on here. I think what your wife saw in the shopping centre sounded very moving. When I was at school, poppy day was very important, and you could get them everywhere. But I think over the years that seemed to decline, and you didn't see as many sellers. I suppose that because of what's going on now, it's being noted more. Our school has done the 2 minutes silence over the last few years, but I'm not sure that it always has. I haven't seen many kids with poppies though, I had a few of them ask me where to get one from, but it sort of went without saying when I was a kid, that you all got one, as they were everywhere. Very moving though. Our school is near the hospital where the casualties are treated, and having a close relative who has served in Afghanistan a number of times, I pray he will never need it.

Hi Wessexgirl. That was a good idea. I didn't realise it had been done last year. It all adds to the thread.

When I was a Primary School teacher, the kids used to take poppies round to sell each morning. I suppose it depends upon the management's priorities. I think it's important to remember the past, as it helps reflection upon the present conflict.

It was sad not seeing the last WW1 veterans at the service on Sunday.

I was surprised and delighted that the national Service of Remembrance in Westminster Abbey included an extract from Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. Britten took the Requiem Mass and interspersed it with settings of poems by Wilfred Owen, making a moving and solemn piece of work. It was commissioned for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962 and its first performance was all the more poignant for taking place in the new building which has a glass west wall through which can be seen the ruins of the old cathedral, destroyed by enemy action in November 1940, with the words 'Father Forgive' over the altar rebuilt from the rubble in the days following the raid.

Hi Kasie. That's interesting for me as I live in Coventry, though I am not a native. (Been here since '91).

There's been quite a bit about the Coventry Blitz in WW2 this year as well. Our Old Uncle narrowly escaped the bombing as his family's houe was next to the largest ordnance store in the country. Not the best placed house in a conflict.

[tailor STATELY]

From http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/nichols.htm about the English poet, to whom I have an especial affinity, Robert Nichols:

Fulfilment

Was there love once? I have forgotten her.
Was there grief once? Grief yet is mine.
Other loves I have, men rough, but men who stir
More grief, more joy, than love of thee and thine.

Faces cheerful, full of whimsical mirth,
Lined by the wind, burned by the sun;
Bodies enraptured by the abounding earth,
As whose children we are brethern: one.

And any moment may descend hot death
To shatter limbs! Pulp, tear, blast
Belovèd soldiers who love rough life and breath
Not less for dying faithful to the last.

O the fading eyes, the grimed face turned bony,
Oped mouth gushing, fallen head,
Lessening pressure of a hand, shrunk, clammed and stony!
O sudden spasm, release of the dead!

Was there love once? I have forgotten her.
Was there grief once? Grief yet is mine.
O loved, living, dying, heroic soldier,
All, all my joy, my grief, my love, are thine.


And my meager attempts at war poetry some time ago:

WARranted

Righteous men
pointlessly meet
A glorious
bloody hell
Bullets rage
onwards
mass graves
Honour but
poignant memories


The Children of War

Innocents trapped
look in fear
fragile behind
their glass tears


From: My Poems, by tailor STATELY................. Most definitely a work in progress.