Going Down of the Sun heartfelt poetry of the Trenches
by Cavan Wood
It is mid-morning on November 11th , 1918 and the church bells are ringing to signify the end of the war. Susan Owen hears a knock on the door and goes to answer.
There is the postman, clutching a telegram, probably saying something like “I am sorry”, as he had done to others a hundred times before.
Susan opens the envelope at this moment of international celebration and reads of the death of her son, Wilfred, in France at around eleven o’clock on November 4th. He had been ‘Killed in Action’ – a hero. He had survived through all the years of trench warfare – only to die just one week, to the hour, before the signing of the Armistice.
Wilfred Owen had a very humble background. His father was the local railway stationmaster. He had been unable to pursue a full time university course, but had worked for a local church near Reading, which enabled him to take some courses at the college there. It was here he had begun to write.
He had joined the armed forces at the beginning of the First World War and, highly influenced by the Bible and John Keats, his poetry shaped many people’s experiences and understanding of what it was like to fight in the most brutal war of modern times.
‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ is one of his poems that did this in particular. The full phrase comes from the Latin poet Horace, ‘It is sweet and good to die for your country’, and was the heartfelt, angry cry from the man in battle describing the horrors of serving your country.
.jpg)
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
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 descriptions Owen gives are startling. The soldiers wearied by moving through the rain sodden trenches – too exhausted to fight, but still doing so. They are constantly further injured by the need to carry on night and day.
Then there comes the terror of the gas attack. Owens’s description of one man drowning in the gas is vivid and alarming: it is cinematic; we feel we are there.
The descriptions of the doomed man’s final moments are set against the phrase encapsulated in the title of the poem. It leaves you in no doubt that there is nothing ‘sweet or good’ about dying for your country.
It’s a scene straight from Sam Mendes’ masterpiece, ‘1917’ – by using the soldiers in the trench and the figure of the dying man, Owen effectively retells the story. We have in these economic lines a whole understanding of the horror.
Rupert Brooke, however, was a poet with a very different understanding of the First World War. A son of a teacher at Rugby school, he had studied at Cambridge and had become part of the Bloomsbury circle, counting Virginia Woolf as one of his friends. At the onset of the First War, he joined the Royal Navy.
His best-known poem, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ is a hymn to the charm of the English countryside, yet his contribution to war poetry is focused on a branch of the armed services other than his own.
The polar opposite to Owen’s ‘Dulce’, Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ seems to represent an unthinking glorification and patriotism when compared to Owen’s stark realism about the conflict. Indeed there are some who see the issues around the World War as a debate between the two poets.
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.
There are two characters in the poem, the Narrator as a soldier and England, personified as a woman. England is an idealised land of flowers, dreams and memories. By the burying of the Soldier in ‘a foreign field’, England is brought to that place.
The core emotions here are the pride in the nation, the idea of bravery. It was written early in the War, reflecting that optimistic, yet futile, heroism that sent many to their deaths.
Like Owen’s work, the poem seems cinematic – we imagine the place, we begin to see in our heads the personified country calling the bravery of its sons. In today’s world, however, it is difficult to see the uncritical patriotism as something that would be embraced.
Owen’s poetry violently demonstrated to civilians, and those who served in the armed forces, the pain and cost of the war.
Brooke’s naïve patriotism seemed to be a cruel irony for many at the end of the War, when it appeared that ‘the Land Fit For Heroes’ the politicians had promised had not materialised.
The emotions that Brooke had stirred – and the experiences that Owen had vividly illustrated – were universal. Indeed, in his 1928 novel, ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’, the German writer Eric Marie Remarque, retrospectively illustrated that German soldiers, entering the conflict with patriotism and a commitment to duty, were also ultimately wearied by the ensuing carnage.
As the War ended, jubilation was tempered by exhaustion at what many had endured on both sides. As the 1920’s proceeded, by not bringing the better world promised to those fighting, the anger and resentment at war and its futility grew – as did the literature to support that view.
It fed into much of the population a desire that similar national conflicts must never happen again – at any cost.
More about Cavan Wood
Cavan is a well sought after writer, teacher and speaker based in Sussex of over thirty years experience. He has written about religious, moral, cultural and political themes , having written or contributed chapters to over twenty books published by Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press , The Bible Reading Fellowship and Hodder amongst others. He is interested in politics, literature, cinema and is a leader in his local church. He is married with a wife, two children and a somewhat surly cat called Chloe.
www.HappyLondonPress.com
No comments:
Post a Comment