Professor Langdon Hammer: Let's turn to page
527 in your anthology where you find a famous poem by Wilfred
Owen called "Dulce et Decorum Est."
And your footnote explains that that phrase is the beginning of
a line from Horace, completed at the end of the
poem – that is, in the last lines of the poem
– "pro patria mori": translated as,
"It is sweet and proper"; sweet and right,
decorous – "to die for one's country."
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags,
we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we
turned our backs And towards our distant rest
began to trudge. Men marched asleep.
Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod.
All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas!
Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking,
drowning. If in some smothering dreams
you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung
him in, And watch the white eyes
writhing in his face, His hanging face,
like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear,
at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Paul Fussell, a literary critic who wrote a
brilliant book about the literature and culture of the
First World War, speaks of irony as the
essential trope or rhetorical figure of this body of
literature, World War One poetry.
Here is, in this poem, an example of irony,
of a really comparatively simple kind.
What are schoolboy lines from Horace, lines that Owen and many
others would have learned in school to recite,
to have memorized--that poetry is here held up as propaganda,
as a kind of murderous lie: "it is sweet and right to die
for one's country."
You can feel it in the marvelous texture of this
poetry. Against Horace's decorous and
elegant Latin, there is placed Owen's
Anglo-Saxon alliterative, inflected, strongly stressed
language with its rough and actual vernacular diction.
The power and authority, too, of Owen's writing is,
well, certified, we feel,
by that first person that speaks to us,
that "I" who speaks as a witness to war,
as a describer, as someone telling a reader
elsewhere what he has seen and speaking specifically for one
fallen soldier. The reception of Owen's poetry
has always been attached to a sense of Owen as a soldier and
witness to war, and indeed as a victim of war,
who died a week before the Armistice.
These poems that you see the cover for here,
Poems by Wilfred Owen, originally appeared
posthumously after Owen's death, introduced by Siegfried Sassoon
– a comrade, fellow poet,
fellow soldier. And as you can see,
in addition to the introduction,
the cover advertises also a portrait of the author.
And there is Owen, in uniform, a handsome young
man. This is all,
as I say, very much part of the transmission of Owen's poetry.
"Dulce et Decorum Est" is a great poem but the kind of irony
that it puts forward is, I think, a simple one.
It is, well, it's a great poem.
There are lots of them that when I first started teaching
this course I decided I wouldn't teach.
And for a number of reasons including the sense that,
gee, Yeats, Stevens, Eliot – these are hard poets
and we need as much time on them as we can in order to read their
work. And this poem seemed like one
you might find and be able to read yourself,
without me there to explain it.
It also is the case that probably many of you have
already read it and possibly studied it in school and talked
about it. So, at any rate,
this seemed to me to be, when I started teaching this
course, reasons not to teach it.
Besides, well, I think the first time I taught
this course was a few years after the Gulf War,
the first Gulf War; and it seemed to me,
in my historical innocence, that the irony that Owen is
playing upon here, that he's putting forward to
us, was not one that I would need to talk about in a
classroom. It seemed to me as though no
one would ever quote Horace again, as anything but a lie.
Of course that's not the case.
You know, as our present war has gone on, how many times have
we heard people in many different forms speaking of
justifications for the deaths of young men and women,
on behalf of the nation?
Well, as we watch our President's approval ratings for
his conduct of the war drop, one wonders:
could any of us really be surprised by this?
And certainly Wilfred Owen would not have been,
and it seemed to me as though in fact it was important to read
Wilfred Owen and to go on thinking and talking about his
poetry. And not only Owen,
of course, but really the extraordinary rich body of
British World War One poetry as a whole,
writing that is not by any means all about battle,
though much of it is, like that poem I just read.
Today what I want to do is give you some sense of this body of
writing. And unlike the last few
lectures where I've concentrated on a single poet and tried to
make arguments about that poet and have a thesis,
today what I want to do is really just show you different
poems and different poets, a range of brilliant writing.
In addition to an opportunity to think about poetry and war,
it's also a good opportunity to start to fill out a little bit
our sense of what modern poetry is or was,
what it is or was; also, what it did not become.
World War One destroyed an English generation.
Modern poetry, as we study it in this class
and, I think, as you see it in this
anthology, is an international phenomenon.
It's not--Well, we don't have a lot of English
poets on this syllabus.
There's T.S. Eliot, the only great English
poet born in America.
There's W.H. Auden, an English-born poet who
moved to America.
Most of the figures that we study are in fact Americans.
There's Yeats, too.
All of them are in a sense internationals.
And there's a range of important cultural reasons for
this. But there's also the simple
fact of the war. Arguably, the great modern
English poets died in the teens, in France in 1915 or 1917,
or they survived – like Ivor Gurney, whom you have some
samples from – in a wounded and injured state.
I also think it's important for us to think about the war as an
important context when we go on to read Pound and Eliot,
when we encounter in their poetry a sense of apocalyptic
change, of civilization in crisis,
which can seem pretty vague sometimes.
Well, and this is true for the Yeats poems that we've been
talking about as well.
Yeats is obviously writing in the context of an Irish civil
war, but it's also the case that he's writing in the shadow of
the First World War as well.
On July 1,1916, more than 57,000 English troops
were wounded or dead.
I think almost 20,000 on that day died, and in the Battle of
the Somme, as it unfolded, there were a million
casualties. This is a scale of human
suffering and a kind of, well, a scale of human
suffering that is enormous and hard to comprehend,
and leaves its shadow across the writing that we will be
reading. All the poets we will be
talking about today are men; not quite all soldiers,
but most of them.
I've given you some quotes from Virginia Woolf,
partly to remind us that the war did not only exist for men,
or soldiers, and that it existed in England
as much as it existed on the continent.
Well, with all that said by preparation, let me show you
some more poems, beginning with Thomas Hardy,
on page 51.
This is a little pamphlet of war poems Hardy published in
1917 and that you can find in the Beinecke.
Hardy, arguably the greatest English poet,
modern English poet, is a figure we don't study in
this course otherwise.
He is a poet from another century.
He's born, in fact, twenty years before the
American Civil War.
When World War One began he was seventy-four.
He wrote his poems from the perspective of rural England.
It was the setting for almost all of his novels,
almost all of his poetry.
And "Channel Firing," on the bottom of 51,
is also set in the west of England,
Hardy's home country, and is set right on the verge
of the First World War.
It's a poem about gunnery practice.
Yes, it's a dramatic monologue spoken by one of the dead,
in a graveyard: That night your great
guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day
And sat upright.
[Hardy has various gothic and supernatural fancies that
he asks us to imagine in vivid, homely terms.]
While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened
hounds: [This is all this wonderful, observed detail of
rural life.] The mouse let fall the
altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the
mounds, The glebe cow drooled.
Till God called, 'No; It's gunnery practice out at
sea. Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be: [This is not "The Second
Coming." Kind of a reply to Yeats,
although Yeats has written his poem yet.]
'All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder.
Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés
sake Than you who are helpless in
such matters. 'That this is not the
judgment-hour For some of them's a blessed
thing, For if it were they'd have to
scour Hell's floor for so much
threatening…. 'Ha, ha.
[Hardy's God laughs like that.
Frost would have understood it.]
It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).'
[This is God, so cruel that he will not
deliver the Second Coming, the Day of Judgment.]
So down we lay again.
'I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,'
Said one, 'than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!'
And many a skeleton shook his head.
'Instead of preaching forty year,'
My neighbor Parson Thirdly said, 'I wish I had stuck to pipes
and beer.' Again the guns disturbed the
hour, Roaring their readiness to
avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
Gunnery practice disturbs the dead, disrupts the ground.
Here, war refuses to let the dead lie in peace,
with the notion that not even the dead are safe from it,
unaffected by it.
The church windows shatter.
Well, in some sense this is exactly what modernity might be
seen to be doing to traditional English culture.
Hardy is full of all those quaint gothic,
archaic dictions and fancies.
The dead are raising their objections here to guns that
will be used very shortly in the Great War.
God reassures them, though, of course,
what he says here is not reassuring.
He says that although "red war" is getting redder,
it's really as it always has been.
This is not the end of the world that it appears to be.
He's not about to let mankind off the hook with Judgment Day.
The speaker-narrator lies back and wonders if the world will
ever be saner. His neighbor says,
"Well, I don't think so.
I wish I had pleasured myself rather than serving that wicked
God." In the last stanza then there
is that extraordinary shift of perspective.
The sound of the guns carries inland, into the heart of
England, and as it does it carries back also in time to
Camelot and to "starlit Stonehenge."
What happens when that happens?
What is the meaning of this – the power of the sound of the
guns to echo back in time?
As Hardy evokes Camelot and Stonehenge, you might read this,
understand this as, what?
As dignifying and legitimating the present firing,
the present conflict?
Or in some sense does it do just the opposite?
Does it suggest that England's history and its heritage and its
honor are in jeopardy?
Does it in some sense demythologize the past,
demystify it, make us see Camelot and
Stonehenge as part of a barbaric history such as is about to
unfold in 1914? There are a couple of other
Hardy poems in your anthology, memorable and powerful,
that are war poems, including on page 59,
"In The Time of 'the Breaking of Nations,'"
and then on the next page, "I Looked Up From My Writing."
Interesting to look at these together.
In this first poem Hardy affirms the endurance of rural
life and its cycles: I
Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
II Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
III Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by: War's annals will fade into
night Ere their story die.
Rural life, including rituals of love and courtship,
here are represented as poetry's truest subject and as a
kind of enduring source of social life and meaning.
You could compare this poem to the poem placed last in Yeats's
last poems called "Politics" that might seem to say something
similar. In Hardy here,
and in other poems, there's this sort of
wonderfully, self-consciously archaic language.
Hardy wants to use really old dialect words,
when he can, and there's power in that.
And this is a poem composed in 1915.
When we read "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock," when we read Pound's first Canto,
remember that those poems are written and published at just
the same time this poem's being written;
poems with very different ways of proceeding and different
kinds of language.
In the second poem here, "I Looked Up From My Writing,"
the poet, the first person, is being interrupted at his
desk at night. He is startled to see:
…The moon's full gaze on me.
Her meditative misty head Was spectral in its air,
And I involuntarily said, 'What are you doing there?'
[Hardy works in these song forms that, well,
they sound like popular ballads, and he wants you to
hear them as part of almost a kind of folk
literature, which he draws on.
The moon says to him:] 'Oh, I've been scanning pond
and hole And waterway hereabout
For the body of one with a sunken soul
Who has put his life-light out.
'Did you hear his frenzied tattle?
It was sorrow for his son Who is slain in brutish battle,
Though he has injured none.
'And now [the moon says] I am curious to look
Into the blinkered mind [the poet's]
Of one who wants to write a book In a world of such a kind.'
Her temper [the poet then says] overwrought me,
And I edged to shun her view [to get out of the moonlight]
For I felt assured she thought me
One who should drown him too.
Here, a neighbor father, crazed with grief at the death
of his son, has drowned himself, killed himself,
and the moon implies in its gaze that the poet should do so,
too. In such a world it seems
writing poems is a kind of--well, even surviving is a
kind of guilty privilege.
You could compare with this poem Kipling's poem;
Kipling, one of the great apologists of empire,
saying on page 153 of your book in the voice of a soldier,
"If any question why we died, / tell them,
because our fathers lied" – a statement that is poignant,
poignant and powerful in part because Kipling's own son died
in the war .
This is a volume of poems published in 1917 by Edward
Thomas and a portrait of Thomas, another soldier poet,
not represented however as a soldier here:
represented rather as an English citizen in tweed,
a man out in and of nature.
Thomas was born in 1878, so he was thirty-six when the
war began. He began, almost at the same
time as the war began, to write poems.
He begins writing under the influence of his friend,
Robert Frost. Frost and Thomas have a
fascinating relationship, an important transatlantic
exchange. Frost's famous poem,
"The Road Not Taken," he sometimes described as being
about Thomas and Thomas's own sense of regret and hesitation
and indirection, to which Frost contrasted
himself. Frost became in England a poet
of New England whom Thomas was reading at that moment in such a
way as to help enable him, Thomas, to become a great poet
of England and of England's landscape and countryside and
nature. There's a good selection from
Thomas in your anthology.
I will read my favorite poem by Thomas, which is the first one,
called "Adlestrop," on page 231:
Yes, I remember Adlestrop--
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 Adlestrop--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.
It's a wonderful poem in its simplicity, modesty,
directness, and reticence which yet provides the most expansive
and exhilarating sense of the English landscape and of the
power of a moment in time to enlarge and be pregnant with
meaning. Notice Thomas's really superb
nonchalance and offhandedness and simplicity.
"It was late June."
"The steam hissed."
There's a kind of colloquial clarity and confidence,
quite different from the vernacular language in the Hardy
poems I was just reading, which are also poems of the
countryside. Here the name,
the odd name "Adlestrop," prompts a memory,
prompts a memory in such a way that a moment in time stands
out, separated from other moments;
just as the odd, unpoetic, unbeautiful name
"Adlestrop" seems to stand out.
There's a kind of poignant tension between the
unbeautifulness of the name, the awkwardness,
and yet the dignity of the name, and the sense of natural
beauty that the poem will unfold.
Here, the stopping of the train is like the interruption by
memory of normal consciousness that's the basis of the poem.
There's a sense that in this memory the poet somehow saw the
name--presumably, I suppose, saw it on a
signboard in the station, as you roll into the station
and you see where you are.
But there's more suggestion in it than that.
It's as if this moment were one in which the name and the place,
the word and the thing, fully coincided,
fully coincided in an experience of presence and
immediacy where the world is all there and named,
located, placed. The figure, the metaphor for
this semiotic unity of word and thing is bird-song.
Here bird-song is a kind of natural language,
a language in which nature speaks,
and speaks in such a way that the particular voice carries the
import and authority of the general,
just as the one bird seems to sing with many bird-songs by the
end of the poem. And so Adlestrop itself
suddenly seems to signify more, calling to mind in kind of
rippling and radiating circles Oxfordshire,
Gloucestershire, England – all of it,
the poet's home. At the same time it's also
clear that this epiphany is a remembered experience.
It's recalled. The poet's first word,
"yes" – a wonderful affirmation – situates the
poem in a dialogue as if someone had just said,
"Have you ever been to Adlestrop?"
Whether this dialogue is actual or internal, it doesn't really
matter. Part of the poem's force
derives from the status of this moment as something remembered,
and remembered within the context of a nation at war.
Although I believe Thomas wrote the poem the year he enlisted
but, I think, before his enlistment,
you might feel as though Thomas is already on the train for
France. There's a way in which the
context of the war, too, shadows the poem and
remains present in it.
Don't you feel it in certain details: the eerie lack of
people in this place?
"No one left and no one came."
In a sense it is an image of the English countryside at a
moment in which it is being emptied out,
its young men sent to France to die, a kind of no man's land
already.
This is Siegfried Sassoon in uniform in 1916.
Sassoon's poetry centers on hallucinatory overlays of
home-front and battle-front.
Let's look at "'Blighters'" on page 389, a wonderfully angry
poem; a poem that is situated in a
music hall, presumably a London music hall:
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.
Here, there's an analogy between the music hall and the
theater of war. It's as if the English populace
were spectators only, consuming as entertainment war
propaganda, which makes the poet hate them.
He imagines here the eruption of the real into this
representational space, and imagines it as a kind of
attack on the working and middle class audiences of the music
hall. The soldier becomes,
in fantasy here, the spectator,
as the war turns around and comes back, reversed by a kind
of evil charm or spell, coming home.
And "home" is here made to rhyme with "Bapaume," bringing
battlefront and home front together as a rhyme.
There's an aggression towards the urban crowd here that
recalls and exaggerates Yeats's attitude at the same time,
really in the same years, in poems like "A Coat" or "The
Fisherman." In other Sassoon poems,
the war comes home in other ways.
For example, in "The Rear-Guard," just down
the page here; or "Repression of War
Experience," which is about traumatic repetition of battle;
or in "Dreamers," where there is, again, a kind of juxtaposing
of life in the trenches and life in the city.
Rather than dwell longer on them though, and to make sure I
get time for a couple more poems,
I want to move on and consider--Here is a collection
of Sassoon's poems, Counter-Attack,
and this is The Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg.
Here's a frontispiece with Rosenberg in a military coat.
Rosenberg, besides a poet, was also an artist and created
these self-portraits.
"Self-Portrait in France, 1915."
Rosenberg, in contrast to Sassoon, was poor,
Jewish, and writes a rather different kind of poem from
those we have been looking at today.
One of the most famous and extraordinary is "Louse
Hunting," on page 506; a little bit further on in your
book:
Nudes--stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee.
Grinning faces And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy Yon soldier tore from his
throat, with oaths Godhead might shrink at,
but not the lice.
And soon the shirt was aflare Over the candle he'd lit while
we lay. Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
[Here the soldiers are stripping their
clothes off and attacking the lice that are attacking them.]
Soon like a demons' pantomime The place was raging.
[It's nighttime and the candles and flares are throwing
shadows.] See the silhouettes agape,
See the gibbering shadows Mixed with the battled arms on
the wall. See gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh To smutch supreme littleness.
See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin Charmed from the quiet this
revel When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music Blown from Sleep's
trumpet. A strange place for this poem
to end. "Nudes," the poem begins.
It's shocking and comic and pleasurable to see the armored
men, uniformed men suddenly exposed – just naked bodies
– to see them here bedeviled not by a gas attack or machine
guns but lice, fleas.
Rosenberg is writing not in those little crafted stanzas of
Hardy or, for that matter, of Thomas.
He's writing in a kind of strongly stressed free verse
with variable line lengths, lots of--well there's a sense
in which the poetry itself is exuberant and naked and full of
life and vital; and naturalistic,
you could say, in its representation.
Rosenberg is giving us an anecdote from the trenches,
and yet it slips very quickly into a sense of fable.
The louse hunting, where these big men hunt these
little things, these fleas:
it becomes – when it's thrown by shadow as a kind of
flickering image on the tent or trench wall,
when it becomes represented, so to speak – it becomes a
battle scene where gigantic forces "smutch supreme
littleness." We are put in mind of how men
are to the Gods as flies to men.
This is an analogy as old as, and found in,
Homer. We are also put in mind of how
the war is, in fact, anything but a revel,
though it, too, may have been provoked by
a cause as insignificant and hard to trace as "some wizard
vermin." Those last lines,
then, are so ominous and strange.
Though these men have been brought to life from sleep,
there's a sense that the trumpet will sound for them
again and they will enter a dark sleep from which they won't
wake, which is just the point of the
next poem, "Returning, We Hear the Larks."
I won't take time to read it, though, or talk about it,
but instead I'd like to conclude--This is another great
poet of the war who survived, though in, as I say,
a wounded condition mentally, Ivor Gurney.
I want to conclude with a poem by Owen.
Let's see, this is page 528, just following "Dulce et
Decorum Est," "Strange Meeting."
This is a poem that--well, if the first poem demystifies
one crucial thread of war ideology,
that it is right and good to die for the country,
this poem takes on another crucial element of war ideology
that the enemy is an "other": the enemy is unlike me.
Like Rosenberg, like Rosenberg's poem,
this one comes out of and returns eventually to sleep.
It is a kind of dream vision, Dantesque in its mode,
and full of powerful iambic pentameter:
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up,
and stared With piteous recognition in
fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands,
as if to bless. And by his smile,
I knew that sullen hall,-- By his dead smile I knew we
stood in Hell. With a thousand pains that
vision's face was grained; Yet no blood reached there from
the upper ground, And no guns thumped,
or down the flues made moan.
'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said the other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness.
Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also;
I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the
world, Which lies not calm in eyes,
or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of
the hour, And if it grieves,
grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now.
I mean the truth untold, The pity of war,
the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody,
and be spilled. They will be swift with
swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, tough nations trek from
progress. Courage was mine,
and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine,
and I had mastery: To miss the march of this
retreating world Into vain citadels that are not
walled. Then, when much blood had
clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them
from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too
deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit
without stint But not through wounds;
not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
'I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and
cold. Let us sleep now….'
So, we'll stop now and move on to poems written during the same
period and associated with Imagism on Monday.