World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others

by Candace Ward (Editor)

Overview

Ironically, the horrors of World War One produced a splendid flowering of British verse as young poets, many of them combatants, confronted their own morality, the death of dear friends, the loss of innocence, the failure of civilization, and the madness of war itself.
This volume contains a rich selection of poems from that time by Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and others known especially for their war poetry — as well as poems by such major poets as Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Robert Bridges, and Rudyard Kipling.
Included among a wealth of memorable verses are Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier," Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "In the Pink" by Siegfried Sassoon, "In Flanders Fields" by Lieut. Col. McCrae, Robert Bridges' "To the United States of America," Thomas Hardy's "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations,'" as well as works by Walter de la Mare, May Wedderburn Cannan, Ivor Gurney, Alice Meynell, and Edward Thomas.
Moving and powerful, this carefully chosen collection offers today's readers an excellent overview of the brutal range of verse produced as poets responded to the carnage on the fields of Belgium and France.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486113234
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	02/06/2012
Series:	Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	231,611
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

Read an Excerpt

World War One British Poets

Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others

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By CANDACE WARD

Dover Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1997 Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-11323-4

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CHAPTER 1

RUPERT BROOKE (1887—1915)

Rupert Brooke, born in 1887, was educated at Rugby School and later at King's College, Cambridge. Perhaps more than any other of the war poets, Brooke came to represent the magnitude of England's sacrifice for what was popularly believed a just cause. Brooke was young, beautiful and gifted; that he wrote poetry justifying the war effort — and that he was killed in the early years of the war — contributed to his myth.

Because he died so young (he was 28 when he died of blood poisoning shortly before the Gallipoli expedition), Brooke's poetry assumed a greater place in English literature than it might have had he lived longer. Prior to the war, he contributed to Edward Marsh's volumes of Georgian Poetry, celebrating the English countryside and way of life. He had early on been influenced by the decadent Romanticism of the late nineteenth century, and while at Cambridge, he fell under the influence of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. His first volume of poems, Poems, 1911, was well received and in 1914 he published 1914 Sonnets, ensuring his reputation as one of England's rising young poets.

Brooke enlisted shortly after England declared war against Germany on August 4, 1914, and turned his poetic efforts to his experiences as a soldier. The most famous of these was the five-sonnet group comprising The Soldier, and in particular the sonnet of the same name. Not long after Brooke wrote the poem, the Dean of St. Paul's cathedral in London read it on Easter Sunday, 1915. It was reprinted in the London Times and caused an immediate sensation. The poem's initial reception was magnified by Brooke's own death soon after. His words, "If I should die, think only this of me:/ That there's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England," are some of the best remembered of the war's poetry.

    I. PEACE

    Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
     And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
    With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
     To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

    Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
     Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
    And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
     And all the little emptiness of love!

    Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
     Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
      Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
    Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
     But only agony, and that has ending;
       And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.


    II. SAFETY

    Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest
     He who has found our hid security,
    Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,
     And heard our word, 'Who is so safe as we?'
    We have found safety with all things undying,
     The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
    The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,
     And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.
    We have built a house that is not for Time's throwing.
     We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.
    War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,
     Secretly armed against all death's endeavour;
    Safe though all safety's lost; safe where men fall;
    And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.


    III. THE DEAD

    Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
     There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
     But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
    These laid the world away; poured out the red
    Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
     Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
     That men call age; and those who would have been,
    Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

    Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
     Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.

      Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
      And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
      And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
      And we have come into our heritage.


    IV. THE DEAD

    These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
     Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
    The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
     And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
    These had seen movement, and heard music; known
     Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
    Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
     Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.
    There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
    And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
     Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
    And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
     Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
    A width, a shining peace, under the night.


    V. THE SOLDIER

    If I should die, think only this of me:
     That there's some corner of a foreign field
    That is for ever 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.


    THE TREASURE

    When colour goes home into the eyes,
     And lights that shine are shut again
    With dancing girls and sweet birds' cries
     Behind the gateways of the brain;
    And that no-place which gave them birth, shall close
     The rainbow and the rose: —


    Still may Time hold some golden space
     Where I'll unpack that scented store
    Of song and flower and sky and face,
     And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,
    Musing upon them; as a mother, who
    Has watched her children all the rich day through
    Sits, quiet-handed, in the fading light,
    When children sleep, ere night.

CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY (1895—1915)

Another poet writing in the early years of the war was Charles Hamilton Sorley. Sorley, the son of middle-class, intellectual parents, attended Marlborough College at Cambridge. From January to July 1914, Sorley traveled in Germany; he had intended to go to Oxford in the autumn of that year, but on August 6, two days after England declared war, he applied for a commission. Despite his early involvement in the war effort, Sorley's was not an unquestioning patriotism, nor did he experience the intense anti-German sentiment pervading England. Indeed, his letters reveal an early and deep skepticism about the war effort, and he was critical of the kind of attitude expressed in Brooke's sonnets. Writing to a friend about "The Soldier," Sorley criticized the self-important stance he read there:

[Brooke] is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) by the turn of circumstances, where non-compliance with this demand would have made life intolerable. It was not that "they" gave up anything ... but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude.

The attitude that Sorley exhibited in his own poetry was unsentimental and tragically ironic. Killed at the age of twenty at the Battle of Loos, Sorley saw more actual combat than Brooke, and experienced the horror of the first poison-gas attacks.

    TO GERMANY

    You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
    And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
    But gropers both through fields of thought confined
    We stumble and we do not understand.
    You only saw your future bigly planned,
    And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
    And in each other's dearest ways we stand,
    And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.


    When it is peace, then we may view again
    With new-won eyes each other's truer form
    And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
    We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
    When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
    The darkness and the thunder and the rain.


    'WHEN YOU SEE MILLIONS OF THE MOUTHLESS DEAD'

    When you see millions of the mouthless dead
    Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
    Say not soft things as other men have said,
    That you'll remember. For you need not so.
    Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
    It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
    Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
    Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
    Say only this, 'They are dead.' Then add thereto,
    'Yet many a better one has died before.'
    Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
    Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
    It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
    Great death has made all his for evermore.


    ROUTE MARCH

    All the hills and vales along
    Earth is bursting into song,
    And the singers are the chaps
    Who are going to die perhaps.


    O sing, marching men,
    Till the valleys ring again.
    Give your gladness to earth's keeping,
    So be glad, when you are sleeping.


    Cast away regret and rue,
    Think what you are marching to,
    Little live, great pass.


    Jesus Christ and Barabbas
    Were found the same day.
    This died, that, went his way.


    So sing with joyful breath.
    For why, you are going to death.
    Teeming earth will surely store
    All the gladness that you pour.


    Earth that never doubts nor fears
    Earth that knows of death, not tears,
    Earth that bore with joyful ease
    Hemlock for Socrates,
    Earth that blossomed and was glad
    'Neath the cross that Christ had,
    Shall rejoice and blossom too
    When the bullet reaches you.


    Wherefore, men marching
    On the road to death, sing!
    Pour gladness on earth's head,
    So be merry, so be dead.


    From the hills and valleys earth
    Shouts back the sound of mirth,
    Tramp of feet and lilt of song
    Ringing all the road along.
    All the music of their going,
    Ringing swinging glad song-throwing,
    Earth will echo still, when foot
    Lies numb and voice mute.


    On marching men, on
    To the gates of death with song.
    Sow your gladness for earth's reaping,
    So you may be glad though sleeping.
    Strew your gladness on earth's bed,
    So be merry, so be dead.

EDWARD THOMAS (1878—1917)

Edward Thomas wrote about 150 poems during his literary career, all between 1914 and his death on Easter Monday, 1917. Born in south London, Thomas married at an early age and turned to hack writing to support his family. Only after he became friends with the American poet Robert Frost, who lived in England from 1913 to 1915, did Thomas begin writing verse. Ironically, the war provided Thomas with the impetus to concentrate more fully on his poetic endeavors. He enlisted in July 1915 in the Artists' Rifles and though most of his poems do not refer directly to the war, it provides a context within which to read them. The verse itself tends toward a Georgian appreciation of rural England, though Thomas was not a member of that poetic school. The beauty of the English countryside provided the sharp contrast to the trench warfare in France, which becomes a source of tension in Thomas' verse.

    THIS IS NO CASE OF PETTY RIGHT OR WRONG

    This is no case of petty right or wrong
    That politicians or philosophers
    Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
    With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
    Beside my hate for one fat patriot
    My hatred of the Kaiser is love true: —
    A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
    But I have not to choose between the two,
    Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
    With war and argument I read no more
    Than in the storm smoking along the wind
    Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar.
    From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
    Out of the other an England beautiful
    And like her mother that died yesterday.
    Little I know or care if, being dull,
    I shall miss something that historians
    Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
    The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
    But with the best and meanest Englishmen
    I am one in crying, God save England, lest
    We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
    The ages made her that made us from dust:
    She is all we know and live by, and we trust
    She is good and must endure, loving her so:
    And as we love ourselves we hate our foe.


    ADLESTROP

    Yes, I remember Adiestrop —
    The name, because one afternoon
    Of heat the express-train drew up there
    Unwontedly. It was late June.


    The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
    No one left and no one came
    On the bare platform. What I saw
    Was Adiestrop — only the name


    And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
    And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
    No whit less still and lonely fair
    Than the high cloudlets in the sky.


    And for that minute a blackbird sang
    Close by, and round him, mistier,
    Farther and farther, all the birds
    Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


    TEARS

    It seems I have no tears left. They should have fallen —
    Their ghosts, if tears have ghosts, did fall — that day
    When twenty hounds streamed by me, not yet combed out
    But still all equals in their rage of gladness
    Upon the scent, made one, like a great dragon
    In Blooming Meadow that bends towards the sun
    And once bore hops: and on that other day


    When I stepped out from the double-shadowed Tower
    Into an April morning, stirring and sweet
    And warm. Strange solitude was there and silence.
    A mightier charm than any in the Tower
    Possessed the courtyard. They were changing guard,
    Soldiers in line, young English countrymen,
    Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums
    And fifes were playing 'The British Grenadiers.'
    The men, the music piercing that solitude
    And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed,
    And have forgotten since their beauty passed.


    THE OWL

    Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
    Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
    Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
    Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.


    Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
    Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
    All of the night was quite barred out except
    An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry


    Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
    No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
    But one telling me plain what I escaped
    And others could not, that night, as in I went.


    And salted was my food, and my repose,
    Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice
    Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
    Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.


    A PRIVATE

    This plowman dead in battle slept out of doors
    Many a frozen night, and merrily
    Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:
    'At Mrs. Greenland's Hawthorn Bush,' said he,
    'I slept.' None knew which bush. Above the town,
    Beyond 'The Drover,' a hundred spot the down
    In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps
    More sound in France — that, too, he secret keeps.


    AS THE TEAM'S HEAD BRASS

    As the team's head brass flashed out on the turn
    The lovers disappeared into the wood.
    I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
    That strewed an angle of the fallow, and
    Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
    Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
    Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
    Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
    About the weather, next about the war.
    Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
    And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
    Once more.

     The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
    I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
    The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away?'
    'When the war's over.' So the talk began —
    One minute and an interval of ten,
    A minute more and the same interval.
    'Have you been out?' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps?'
    'If I could only come back again, I should.
    I could spare an arm. I shouldn't want to lose
    A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
    I should want nothing more.... Have many gone
    From here?' 'Yes.' 'Many lost?' 'Yes, a good few.
    Only two teams work on the farm this year.
    One of my mates is dead. The second day
    In France they killed him. It was back in March,
    The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
    He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
    'And I should not have sat here. Everything
    Would have been different. For it would have been
    Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
    If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
    The lovers came out of the wood again:
    The horses started and for the last time
    I watched the clods crumble and topple over
    After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from World War One British Poets by CANDACE WARD. Copyright © 1997 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Rupert Brooke
I. Peace
II. Safety
III. The Dead
IV. The Dead
V. The Soldier
The Treasure
Charles Hamilton Sorley
To Germany
When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead'
Route March ('All the Hills and Vales Along')
Edward Thomas
This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong
Adlestrop
Tears
The Owl
A Private
As the Team's Head Brass
John McCrae
In Flanders Fields
Isaac Rosenberg
Break of Day in the Trenches
Louse Hunting
"Returning, We Hear the Larks"
Dead Man's Dump
Wilfred Owen
Arms and the Boy
Greater Love
Insensibility
Dulce et Decorum Est
Mental Cases
Futility
Disabled
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Strange Meeting
Apologia Pro Poemate Meo
Ivor Gurney
The Silent One
To His Love
The Target
Siegfried Sassoon
In the Pink'
A Working Party
Blighters'
They'
The One-Legged Man
Haunted
The Troops
The General
Repression of War Experience
Trench Duty
Picture-Show
Robert Graves
To Lucasta on Going to the War - for the Fouth Time
Goliath and David
The Last Post
When I'm Killed
Letter to S. S. From Mametz Wood
A Dead Boche
The Next war
Escape
The Bough of Nonsense
Not Dead
The Assault Heroic
Alice Meynell
"Summer in England, 1914"
Thomas Hardy
Channel Firing
Song of the Soldiers (Men Who March Away)
Belgium's Destitute
"Before Marching, and After "
In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'
The Pity of It
Then and Now
And There Was a Great Calm'
Robert Bridges
To the United States of America
Trafalgar Square
A. E. Housman
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
Rudyard Kipling
The Mine-Sweepers
For All We Have and Are'
The Choice
Walter de la Mare
The Fool Rings His Bells
How Sleep the Brave'
May Wedderburn Cannan
Rouen