[issybird]

I'll quote and respond first, and then try to find something interesting left to say of my own!

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

I found one of the most powerful of the poems to be the one called "Reconciliation":

<snip>

I find it interesting, the contrast between the rabid anti-German feeling that seemed to be so common among the civilian population during WW1 (here in Australia too by all accounts) and the fellow-feeling felt by many of the British and allied soldiers for their German counterparts. They were all suffering together in a hell created by their respective leaders.

I can't resist quoting a very popular American anti-war song from 1915:

"I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother's darling boy?"

But when the US entered the way in 1917, the lyricist followed up with another ditty:

"It’s time for ev’ry boy to be a soldier
To put his strength and courage to the test
It's time to place a musket on his shoulder
And wrap the Stars and Stripes around his breast"

Sigh.

Originally Posted by fantasyfan

I share your feelings about the war poetry of Owen. Personally, I think that Owen's poetry is generally more moving because his very real anger is modulated by a sense of deep pity.

Originally Posted by paola

shame on me, I've never read Owen, so I can't compare, but I do agree with the rawness of Sassoon's poems, which I quite like. One aspect of his writing that struck me considerably is the fact that his verses rhyme, and at least to my ear this increased considerably the dramatic effect, in the sense that the strident contrast between the "singsong" and the content of the verse adds to their grimness.

I see Sassoon as both harking back to the pastoral poetry that just preceded the war while helping invent a new form of poetry: in your face and sarcastic, not at all subtle, invoking both pastoral scenes and glory, and raw anger. Thus he's between Rupert Brooke and his "Thanked be God who has matched up with this hour" and "swimmers into cleanness leaping" (I'm quoting these bits from memory, so a word or two may be off) and the more polished Owen. The crudeness works for me. Here's just two lines that got me, from "Counter-Attack": "And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud, Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled." It would have been interesting to see how Brooke's poetry evolved (or not) if he had survived the war longer and experienced the Western Front.

I also wonder if Sassoon's struggles with his homosexuality contributed to the tinge of bitterness; certainly the death of a man he loved which is referenced in his poem to Robert Graves is part of it. Just as an aside, I think even if I didn't know he was gay I'd be able to infer it from his poems. References to wives at home seem perfunctory; it's the relationships with other men that engage his emotions. This was true of all the servicemen to an extent, not only did shared experiences (which were hidden from those at home) bind them, it was also an age that admitted closer, quasi-romantic attachments to other men (especially for those who had been to public school). However, with Sassoon it seems like more than lingering schoolboy emotions. Owen presumably also was gay, we don't know how much angst it caused him as his family destroyed all his personal papers relating to his sexuality.

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Yes, that poem by John Magee is beautiful - I remember reading it at school. Of course it was a very different experience from that of Sassoon, Owen and Graves, as he was in the air force in WW2 I believe.

Magee is more in the Brooke tradition and I remember Reagan's quoting that poem in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster. For WWII air force poetry I think Jarrell's incomparable Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is both more real and the true heir to Sassoon:

"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. "

Originally Posted by crich70

advances were made in embalming so that rather than being buried on the field where they fell they might have a chance of being returned home for burial.

Largely for that reason, the policy of the British government in the Great War (I don't know about others) was that soldiers be buried where they fell. I contrast this both to the American experience in Vietnam, where the last shot of the evening news was the corpses being offloaded at Andrews Air Force Base, and how during subsequent engagements in the Gulf the government prohibited such images being broadcast.


So many wrenching poems have been quoted already that I'm going to limit myself to one, "Before the Battle":


"MUSIC of whispering trees
Hushed by a broad-winged breeze
Where shaken water gleams;
And evening radiance falling
With reedy bird-notes calling.
O bear me safe through dark, you low-voiced streams.

I have no need to pray
That fear may pass away;
I scorn the growl and rumble of the fight
That summons me from cool
Silence of marsh and pool
And yellow lilies is landed in light
O river of stars and shadows, lead me through the night.


June 25th, 1916."

Solidly in the pastoral tradition, but the date tells it all. His evocation of country quiet was written during the week-long, 24-hour a day bombardment of the German position before the start of the Battle of the Somme; the noise could be heard as far away as London. Knowing that, to me it reads less of the standard glory and why we're doing this and more of a man hanging on with his last nerve.