The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (17 page)

How's poetry? I bet you've written a stack.'

What shall I say? That it's been damnable?

10             That all the time my soul was never my own?

That we've slaved hard at endless make-believe?

It isn't only actual war that's hell,

I'll say. It's spending youth and hope alone

Among pretences that have ceased to deceive.

Geoffrey Faber

The Survivor Comes Home

Despair and doubt in the blood:

Autumn, a smell rotten-sweet:

What stirs in the drenching wood?

What drags at my heart, my feet?

What stirs in the wood?

Nothing stirs, nothing cries.

Run weasel, cry bird for me,

Comfort my ears, soothe my eyes!

Horror on ground, over tree!

10             Nothing calls, nothing flies.

Once in a blasted wood,

A shrieking fevered waste,

We jeered at Death where he stood:

I jeered, I too had a taste

Of Death in the wood.

Am I alive and the rest

Dead, all dead? sweet friends

With the sun they have journeyed west;

For me now night never ends,

20             A night without rest.

Death, your revenge is ripe.

Spare me! but can Death spare?

Must I leap, howl to your pipe

Because I denied you there?

Your vengeance is ripe.

Death, ay, terror of Death:

If I laughed at you, scorned you now

You flash in my eyes, choke my breath…

‘Safe home.' Safe? Twig and bough

30             Drip, drip, drip with Death!

Robert Graves

Sick Leave

When I'm asleep, dreaming and lulled and warm, –

They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.

While the dim charging breakers of the storm

Bellow and drone and rumble overhead,

Out of the gloom they gather about my bed.

     They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.

     ‘Why are you here with all your watches ended?

     From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the Line.'

In bitter safety I awake, unfriended;

10             And while the dawn begins with slashing rain

I think of the Battalion in the mud.

‘When are you going out to them again?

Are they not still your brothers through our blood?'

Siegfried Sassoon

Reserve

Though you desire me I will still feign sleep

And check my eyes from opening to the day,

For as I lie, thrilled by your gold-dark flesh,

I think of how the dead, my dead, once lay.

Richard Aldington

Wife and Country

     Dear, let me thank you for this:

That you made me remember, in fight,

     England – all mine at your kiss,

At the touch of your hands in the night:

     England – your giving's delight.

Gilbert Frankau

Girl to Soldier on Leave

I love you – Titan lover,

My own storm-days' Titan.

Greater than the son of Zeus,

I know whom I would choose.

Titan – my splendid rebel –

The old Prometheus

Wanes like a ghost before your power –

His pangs were joys to yours.

Pallid days arid and wan

10             Tied your soul fast.

Babel-cities' smoky tops

Pressed upon your growth

Weary gyves. What were you

But a word in the brain's ways,

Or the sleep of Circe's swine?

One gyve holds you yet.

It held you hiddenly on the Somme

Tied from my heart at home.

O must it loosen now? I wish

20             You were bound with the old old gyves.

Love! you love me – your eyes

Have looked through death at mine.

You have tempted a grave too much.

I let you – I repine.

Isaac Rosenberg

The Pavement

In bitter London's heart of stone,

     Under the lamplight's shielded glare

I saw a soldier's body thrown

     Unto the drabs that traffic there

Pacing the pavements with slow feet:

     Those old pavements whose blown dust

Throttles the hot air of the street,

     And the darkness smells of lust.

The chaste moon, with equal glance,

10                  Looked down on the mad world, astare

At those who conquered in sad France

     And those who perished in Leicester Square.

And in her light his lips were pale:

     Lips that love had moulded well:

Out of the jaws of Passchendaele

     They had sent him to this nether hell.

I had no stone of scorn to fling,

     For I know not how the wrong began –

But I had seen a hateful thing

20                  Masked in the dignity of man:

And hate and sorrow and hopeless anger

     Swept my heart, as the winds that sweep

Angrily through the leafless hanger

     When winter rises from the deep…

                                             *

I would that war were what men dream:

     A crackling fire, a cleansing flame,

That it might leap the space between

     And lap up London and its shame.

Francis Brett Young

Not to Keep

They sent him back to her. The letter came

Saying…And she could have him. And before

She could be sure there was no hidden ill

Under the formal writing, he was in her sight,

Living. They gave him back to her alive –

How else? They are not known to send the dead –

And not disfigured visibly. His face?

His hands? She had to look, to ask,

‘What is it, dear?' And she had given all

10             And still she had all –
they
had – they the lucky!

Wasn't she glad now? Everything seemed won,

And all the rest for them permissible ease.

She had to ask, ‘What was it, dear?'

                                          ‘               Enough,

Yet not enough. A bullet through and through,

High in the breast. Nothing but what good care

And medicine and rest, and you a week,

Can cure me of to go again.' The same

Grim giving to do over for them both.

20             She dared no more than ask him with her eyes

How was it with him for a second trial.

And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.

They had given him back to her, but not to keep.

Robert Frost

Going Back

The night turns slowly round,

Swift trains go by in a rush of light;

Slow trains steal past.

This train beats anxiously, outward bound.

But I am not here.

I am away, beyond the scope of this turning;

There, where the pivot is, the axis

Of all this gear.

I, who sit in tears,

10             I, whose heart is torn with parting;

Who cannot bear to think back to the departure platform;

My spirit hears

Voices of men,

Sound of artillery, aeroplanes, presences,

And more than all, the dead-sure silence,

The pivot again.

There, at the axis

Pain, or love, or grief

Sleep on speed; in dead certainty;

20             Pure relief.

There, at the pivot

Time sleeps again.

No has-been, no here-after, only the perfected

Silence of men.

D. H. Lawrence

‘
I wore a tunic
'

I wore a tunic,

A dirty khaki-tunic,

And you wore civilian clothes.

We fought and bled at Loos

While you were on the booze,

The booze that no one here knows.

Oh, you were with the wenches

While we were in the trenches

Facing the German foe.

10             Oh, you were a-slacking

While we were attacking

Down the Menin Road.

Soldiers' song

‘
Blighters
'

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin

And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks

Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;

‘We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!'

I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, Sweet Home,' –

And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

Siegfried Sassoon

Ragtime

A minx in khaki struts the limelit boards:

With false moustache, set smirk, and ogling eyes

And straddling legs and swinging hips she tries

To swagger it like a soldier, while the chords

Of rampant ragtime jangle, clash and clatter,

And over the brassy blare and drumming din

She strains to squirt her squeaky notes and thin

Spittle of sniggering lascivious patter.

Then out into the jostling Strand I turn,

10             And down a dark lane to the quiet river,

One stream of silver under the full moon,

And think of how cold searchlights flare and burn

Over dank trenches where men crouch and shiver,

Humming, to keep their hearts up, that same tune.

Wilfrid Gibson

Ragtime

The lamps glow here and there, then echo down

The vast deserted vistas of the town –

Each light the echo'd note of some refrain

Repeated in the city's fevered brain.

Yet all is still, save when there wanders past

– Finding the silence of the night too long –

Some tattered wretch, who, from the night outcast,

Sings, with an aching heart, a comic song.

The vapid parrot-words flaunt through the night –

10             Silly and gay, yet terrible. We know

Men sang these words in many a deadly fight,

And threw them – laughing – to a solemn foe;

Sang them where tattered houses stand up tall and stark,

And bullets whistle through the ruined street,

Where live men tread on dead men in the dark,

And skulls are sown in fields once sown with wheat

Across the sea, where night is dark with blood

And rockets flash, and guns roar hoarse and deep,

They struggle through entanglements and mud,

20             They suffer wounds – and die –

                                                 But here they sleep.

From far away the outcast's vacuous song

Re-echoes like the singing of a throng;

His dragging footfalls echo down the street,

And turn into a myriad marching feet.

Osbert Sitwell

The Admonition: To Betsey

Remember, on your knees,

The men who guard your slumbers
–

And guard a house in a still street

Of drifting leaves and drifting feet,

A deep blue window where below

Lies moonlight on the roofs like snow,

A clock that still the quarters tells

To the dove that roosts beneath the bell's

Grave canopy of silent brass

10             Round which the little night winds pass

Yet stir it not in the grey steeple;

And guard all small and drowsy people

Whom gentlest dusk doth disattire,

Undressing by the nursery fire

In unperturbed numbers

On this side of the seas –

Remember, on your knees,

The men who guard your slumbers.

Helen Parry Eden

Air-Raid

Night shatters in mid-heaven: the bark of guns,

The roar of planes, the crash of bombs, and all

The unshackled skiey pandemonium stuns

The senses to indifference, when a fall

Of masonry nearby startles awake,

Tingling, wide-eyed, prick-eared, with bristling hair,

Each sense within the body, crouched aware

Like some sore-hunted creature in the brake.

Yet side by side we lie in the little room

10             Just touching hands, with eyes and ears that strain

Keenly, yet dream-bewildered, through tense gloom,

Listening, in helpless stupor of insane

Cracked nightmare panic, fantastically wild,

To the quiet breathing of our sleeping child.

Wilfrid Gibson

Zeppelins

I saw the people climbing up the street

Maddened with war and strength and thought to kill;

And after followed Death, who held with skill

His torn rags royally, and stamped his feet.

The fires flamed up and burnt the serried town,

Most where the sadder, poorer houses were;

Death followed with proud feet and smiling stare,

And the mad crowds ran madly up and down.

And many died and hid in unfound places

10             In the black ruins of the frenzied night;

And Death still followed in his surplice, white

And streaked in imitation of their faces.

                                             *