The Columbia History of British Poetry (135 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 537
est, the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself." Receiving recognition of this kind, Brooke took a place among the legendary poets who have died in their primeChatterton for the Romantics, Keats for the Victorians, Brooke for the Georgians.
Other Georgian poets approached the horror and violence of world war either with Darwinian cynicism about sacrifice and death or a Coleridgean sense of the nightmare wrought from mankind's violation of the order and beauty of nature. For Edward Thomas, whose poetic career began at the time of the war and who died on the western front, war presented seasons of despair:
The cherry trees bend over and are shedding
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.
                                           ("The Cherry Trees")
                                      It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.
                                       ("Digging")
Far more bitter, twice-wounded Siegfried Sassoon wrote wartime poems on the model of Blake's
Songs of Experience
, attacking the authorities and their patriotic and sentimental clichés. "The General" greets his troops with smiling "good-mornings" before sending them to destruction with "his plan of attack." "They" presents a Blakean dialogue between a Bishop's naive and abstract pieties about "the boys'' who fight "the last attack on Anti-Christ" and who will "not be the same" spiritually and the realistic and specific voices of "the boys" themselves:
"We're none of us the same!" the boys reply.
For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find
A chap who's served that hasn't found
some
change."
And the Bishop said: "The ways of God are strange!"
 
Page 538
One of those killed in the trenches, Isaac Rosenberg, wrote vividly and honestly of the surreal experiences of soldiers on the western front: the "queer sardonic rat" amid the poppies at "Break of Day in the Trenches," naked soldiers, "Nudesstark and glistening, / Yelling in lurid glee," engaged in ''Louse Hunting," the wheels of caissons crunching bones and faces of the newly killed in "Dead Man's Dump." For Wilfred Owen, who met Sassoon while being treated for shell shock, the hell of the war is essentially emotional and psychological rather than physical. The real horror, he writes in "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo," comes from thought and understanding of one's condition in war, "Where death becomes absurd and life absurder." "Insensibility" speaks of the loss of not only feeling and compassion but imagination and mind in battle. And terror at the loss of mind is summed up in the plight of poor Jim told in dialect in "The Chances":
                                       'e's livin' an' 'e's not;
'E reckoned 'e'd five chances, an' 'e 'ad;
'E's wounded, killed, and pris'ner, all the lot,
The bloody lot all rolled in one. Jim's mad.
For the "Disabled" confined to a wheelchair in a hospital and awaiting an attendant to remember to put him to bed, the final hardship is the terrible indifference of fellow human beings that his condition brings, the loss of beauty and the possibility of warm affection; for the "blind, and three parts shell" who speaks in "A Terre (Being the Philosophy of Many Soldiers)," it would be better to be dead and buried, "Pushing up daisies," as he recalls soldiers saying, than to live disabled, "dead-old," "a dug-out rat": "Friend, be very sure / I shall be better off with plants that share / More peaceably the meadow and the shower." Owen himself escaped both disability and madness; he was killed in action a week before the armistice.
Some poets who survived continued to cope with their experiences long after the armistice. Ivor Gurney was wounded and gassed and was eventually confined for mental problems for the rest of his life. His were poems recounting times of quiet terror for the soldiers, moments of anticipation within the action when troops on the march notice the sweet air" and experience "homethoughts soft coming," as they anticipate the barbwire and "ditches of heart-sick men" they win soon join at the front ("Towards Liners"), or in "The Silent One," when a soldier quietly refuses to advance the line in the face of certain death:
 
Page 539
"Do you think you might crawl through there: there's a hole."
"I'm afraid not, Sir." There was no hole no way to be seen.
Darkness, shot at: I smiled, as politely replied
Nothing but chance of death, after tearing of clothes.
David Jones published in 1937 a retrospective epic on the war, combining poetry with prose to describe the experiences of an infantry unit from their arrival in France in December 1915 to their tragic discoverybogged down a few months later at the western front in the Somme offensivethat the legendary role of the amateur soldier had been transformed by trench warfare of the twentieth century. As Jones writes in his preface: "July 1916 . . . roughly marks a change in the character of our lives in the Infantry on the West Front. From then onward things hardened into a more relentless, mechanical affair, took on a more sinister aspect. The wholesale slaughter of the later years, the conscripted levies filling the gaps in every file of four, knocked the bottom out of the continuing, intimate, domestic life of small contingents of men. . . ." Only one (wounded) soldier of the English and Welsh unit survives at the end of Jones's epic, testimony to the terrible suffering and loss of a war in which 780,000 British troops were killed. Published in 1937 and entitled "In Parenthesis""I don't know between quite what,'' as Jones saidthis epic effort commemorated the past war and anticipated the frightening, unknown violence of a second world war about to begin.
Laurence Binyon, a Red Cross orderly too old for soldiering, predicted accurately in his poem "For the Fallen": "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn." Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum with special interests and competence in Oriental art (and in Blake), Binyon, like his friend T. Sturge Moore, dedicated his life to art, a Romantic vein of poetry, and poetic drama. After an almost continuous flow of lyrics on the sweetness of love in London and life abroad, he survived to ask, "Where lost we then, this peace?" Moore, looking to classical subjects and resorting often to awkwardly classical diction, only occasionally achieved the creative tension central to the aesthetics of his
Armour for Aphrodite
.
In spite both of the involvement of many of the Georgians in the war and their poems expressing post-Darwinian naturalism, the movement became denounced as a "bloodless school" of pallid Romanticism.

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