The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (9 page)

Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass,

Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave's faint light,

That broke to phosphorus out in the night,

Perishing things and strange ghosts – soon to die

To other ghosts – this one, or that, or I.

Rupert Brooke

First Time In

After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line

Anything might have come to us; but the divine

Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony

Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory

Soft foreign things. Then we were taken in

To low huts candle-lit, shaded close by slitten

Oilsheets, and there the boys gave us kind welcome,

So that we looked out as from the edge of home.

Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions

10             To human hopeful things. And the next day's guns

Nor any line-pangs ever quite could blot out

That strangely beautiful entry to war's rout;

Candles they gave us, precious and shared over-rations –

Ulysses found little more in his wanderings without doubt.

‘David of the White Rock', the ‘Slumber Song' so soft, and that

Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys

Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the guns' noise.

Ivor Gurney

Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away –

It is the same old druid Time as ever.

Only a live thing leaps my hand –

A queer sardonic rat –

As I pull the parapet's poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies

(And God knows what antipathies).

10             Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German –

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

20             What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver – what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man's veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe,

Just a little white with the dust.

Isaac Rosenberg

‘
Bombed last night
'

Bombed last night, and bombed the night before.

Going to get bombed tonight if we never get bombed any more.

When we're bombed, we're scared as we can be.

Can't stop the bombing from old Higher Germany.

They're warning us, they're warning us.

One shell hole for just the four of us.

Thank your lucky stars there are no more of us.

So one of us can fill it all alone.

Gassed last night, and gassed the night before.

10             Going to get gassed tonight if we never get gassed any more.

When we're gassed, we're sick as we can be.

For phosgene and mustard gas is much too much for me.

They're killing us, they're killing us.

One respirator for the four of us.

Thank your lucky stars that we can all run fast.

So one of us can take it all alone.

Soldiers' song

Breakfast

We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,

Because the shells were screeching overhead.

I bet a rasher to a loaf of bread

That Hull United would beat Halifax

When Jimmy Stainthorp played full-back instead

Of Billy Bradford. Ginger raised his head

And cursed, and took the bet; and dropt back dead.

We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,

Because the shells were screeching overhead.

Wilfrid Gibson

In the Trenches

I

Not that we are weary,

Not that we fear,

Not that we are lonely

Though never alone –

Not these, not these destroy us;

But that each rush and crash

Of mortar and shell,

Each cruel bitter shriek of bullet

That tears the wind like a blade,

10             Each wound on the breast of earth,

Of Demeter, our Mother,

Wound us also, Sever and rend the fine fabric

Of the wings of our frail souls,

Scatter into dust the bright wings

Of Psyche!

II

Impotent,

How important is all this clamour,

This destruction and contest…

20             Night after night comes the moon

Haughty and perfect;

Night after night the Pleiades sing

And Orion swings his belt across the sky.

Night after night the frost

Crumbles the hard earth.

Soon the spring will drop flowers

And patient creeping stalk and leaf

Along these barren lines

Where the huge rats scuttle

30             And the hawk shrieks to the carrion crow.

Can you stay them with your noise?

Then kill winter with your cannon,

Hold back Orion with your bayonets

And crush the spring leaf with your armies!

Richard Aldington

Winter Warfare

Colonel Cold strode up the Line

     (Tabs of rime and spurs of ice),

Stiffened all where he did glare,

     Horses, men, and lice.

Visited a forward post,

     Left them burning, ear to foot;

Fingers stuck to biting steel,

     Toes to frozen boot.

Stalked on into No Man's Land,

10                  Turned the wire to fleecy wool,

Iron stakes to sugar sticks

     Snapping at a pull.

Those who watched with hoary eyes

     Saw two figures gleaming there;

Hauptman Kälte, Colonel Cold,

     Gaunt, in the grey air.

Stiffly, tinkling spurs they moved

     Glassy eyed, with glinting heel

Stabbing those who lingered there

20                  Torn by screaming steel.

Edgell Rickword

Futility

Move him into the sun –

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields unsown.

Always it awoke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds –

Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

10             Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nerved, – still warm, – too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth's sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen

Exposure

I

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us…

Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent…

Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient…

Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,

         But nothing happens.

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.

Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.

Northward incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,

Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.

10                      What are we doing here?

The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow…

We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.

Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army

Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray,

         But nothing happens.

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.

Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,

With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause and renew,

We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,

20                      But nothing happens.

II

Pale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces –

We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,

Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,

Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.

         Is it that we are dying?

Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires glozed

With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;

For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;

Shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed –

30                      We turn back to our dying.

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;

Now ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.

For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid;

Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,

         For love of God seems dying.

To-night, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,

Shrivelling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.

The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,

Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,

40                      But nothing happens.

Wilfred Owen

‘
We're here because we're here
'

We're here

Because

We're here

Because

We're here

Because we're here.

Soldiers' song

Poem

Abbreviated from the Conversation of Mr. T. E. H.

Over the flat slope of St. Eloi

A wide wall of sandbags.

Night,

In the silence desultory men

Pottering over small fires, cleaning their mess-tins:

To and fro, from the lines,

Men walk as on Piccadilly,

Making paths in the dark,

Through scattered dead horses,

10             Over a dead Belgian's belly.

The Germans have rockets. The English have no rockets.

Behind the lines, cannon, hidden, lying back miles.

Before the line, chaos:

My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors.

Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.

Ezra Pound

Illusions

Trenches in the moonlight, allayed with lulling moonlight

Have had their loveliness; when dancing dewy grasses

Caressed us trampling along their earthy lanes;

When the crucifix hanging over was strangely illumined,

And one imagined music, one even heard the brave bird

In the sighing orchards flute above the weedy well.

There are such moments; forgive me that I throne them,

Nor gloze that there comes soon the nemesis of beauty,

In the fluttering relics that at first glimmer awakened

10             Terror – the no-man's ditch suddenly forking:

There, the enemy's best with bombs and brains and courage!

– Soft, swiftly, at once be animal and angel –

But O no, no, they're Death's malkins dangling in the wire

       For the moon's interpretation.

Edmund Blunden

The Silent One

Who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two –

Who for his hours of life had chattered through

Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent:

Yet faced unbroken wires; stepped over, and went

A noble fool, faithful to his stripes – and ended.

But I weak, hungry, and willing only for the chance

Of line – to fight in the line, lay down under unbroken

Wires, and saw the flashes, and kept unshaken,

Till the politest voice – a finicking accent, said:

10             ‘Do you think you might crawl through, there; there's a hole‘

Darkness, shot at: I smiled, as politely replied –

‘I'm afraid not, Sir.' There was no hole no way to be seen

Nothing but chance of death, after tearing of clothes

Kept flat, and watched the darkness, hearing bullets whizzing –

And thought of music – and swore deep heart's deep oaths

(Polite to God) and retreated and came on again,

Again retreated – and a second time faced the screen.

Ivor Gurney

Moonrise over Battlefield

After the fallen sun the wind was sad

like violins behind immense old walls.

Trees were musicians swaying round the bed

of a woman in gloomy halls.

In privacy of music she made ready

with comb and silver dust and fard;

under her silken vest her little belly

shone like a bladder of sweet lard.

She drifted with the grand air of a punk

10             on Heaven's streets soliciting white saints;

then lay in bright communion on a cloud-bank

as one who near extreme of pleasure faints.

Then I thought, standing in the ruined trench,

(all around, dead Boche white-shirted lay like sheep),

‘Why does this damned entrancing bitch

seek lovers only among them that sleep?‘

Edgell Rickword

The Redeemer

Darkness: the rain sluiced down; the mire was deep;