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Form:
|
3 quatrains in tetrameter
Last two lines of stanzas in dimeter,
which puts an emphasis on the end of each stanza.
ABBA rhyme scheme in first stanza.
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Language:
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Repetition of ‘By’ enforces the idea that it was due to a range of experiences
on the front that their friendship was formed.
The final line- ‘In dead men, breath.’ Suggests perhaps that although these men
have died, there is still hope for humanity as they have left their memories
behind.
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Structure:
|
First stanza states the strength of their
friendship
Second stanza states the events that
shaped their friendship/ comradeship
Third stanza challenges Sassoon to find a
friendship stronger as theirs has been formed by death.
|
|
Tone :
|
One of optimism, suggesting that there is
still hope for humanity and also rejoicing the fact that something good has
come out of such horror.
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Wednesday, 16 May 2012
Two Fusiliers - Robert Graves
Winter Warfare- Edgell Rickword
Form:
Five quatrains, each a single sentence.
|
Language:
·
Use of vivid imagery to drive
home the unbearable conditions that the soldiers were subjected to.
·
(Talking about ice) ‘Turned
the wire into fleecy wool,/ Iron stakes to sugar sticks/ Snapping at the
pull.’ Poet here suggests that nature is able to easily break something that
can tear men apart. Displaying natures triumph over humanity.
·
Describes how the conditions
were unbearable for both sides: ‘Saw two figures gleaming there;/ Haumptman
Kalte, Colonel Cold’ (Haumptman Kalte being German for Colonel Cold).
|
Structure:
Poet begins by depicting ‘Colonel Cold’,
who is perhaps not a character but symbolic of war, as having an effect on
everything in its path, suggesting nothing can escape the grasps of war.
However ends by depicting nature as triumphing over man, with ‘Those who watched with hoary eyes’ (‘hoary
eyes’ meaning ice and snow on eyelashes). Perhaps suggesting that although
man destroys everything in its path, nature will always reign superior.
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Tone :
Very cold and despondent tone used to
depict the harsh conditions under which these soldiers had to live and
perhaps encourage the reader to feel pity for them.
|
The Deserter- Gilbert Frankau
Form:
· Three quatrains of irregular metre; nevertheless the poem moves at a fast pace.
· The second and forth lines of each stanza rhyme.
· Individual lines have mechanical rhythms, such as: ‘The bolt-heads locked to the cartridge’ perhaps showing the mechanical nature of soldiers that had been removed of emotion and now simply carried out orders.
Language:
· ‘shameless soul of a nameless man´ perhaps shows how the poet had admiration for this man who had the courage to stand up against the horrors of war.
· The only word with any emotion/ energy/ zest is ‘Fire!’ and this is a death command, perhaps suggesting that soldiers had been degraded to a point where all they now knew was death.
Tone:
Tone is almost cold as the poet appears to cynically mock the idea of heroic war stories.
Wider reading
Jessie Pope
·
Jessie
Pope is a World War One poet and is female quiet contradictory to the male
dominant poems in Gardener’s ‘Up the Line to Death’.
·
Her
poem ‘The Call’ depicts the men going off to war in a patriotic manner
suggested by images such as ‘banners and rolling drums’; her poetry may be
regarded as propaganda with its romanticized war and victorious tone further
implied by the repetition of ‘will you’ which encourages the idea that the men
should fight for their country; it is their duty.
·
Who’s for the
trench—
Are you, my laddie?
Who’ll follow French—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’s fretting to begin,
Who’s going out to win?
And who wants to save his skin—
Do you, my laddie?Who’s for the khaki suit—
Are you, my laddie?
Who longs to charge and shoot—
Do you, my laddie?
Who’s keen on getting fit,
Who means to show his grit,
And who’d rather wait a bit—
Would you, my laddie?
Are you, my laddie?
Who’ll follow French—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’s fretting to begin,
Who’s going out to win?
And who wants to save his skin—
Do you, my laddie?Who’s for the khaki suit—
Are you, my laddie?
Who longs to charge and shoot—
Do you, my laddie?
Who’s keen on getting fit,
Who means to show his grit,
And who’d rather wait a bit—
Would you, my laddie?
Who’ll earn the Empire’s thanks—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’ll swell the victor’s ranks—
Will you, my laddie?
When that procession comes,
Banners and rolling drums—
Who’ll stand and bite his thumbs—
Will you, my laddie?
Will you, my laddie?
Who’ll swell the victor’s ranks—
Will you, my laddie?
When that procession comes,
Banners and rolling drums—
Who’ll stand and bite his thumbs—
Will you, my laddie?
·
Her work was often contributed to The Punch and The
Daily Mail which further implies her work is patriotic propaganda. Owen’s poem Dulce Et Decorum Est was aimed at Pope as her reputation had faded
into obscurity as Graves and Sassoon began to play a more prominent role in
World War One Poetry.
All Quiet On the
Western Front
·
It is written from a German perspective.
·
An overview: There are several German boys in a
class and their teacher advices them to go off to war; note these boys are
seventeen to eighteen. They go off to war and the story is of them going off to
war and one by one being wiped out. Poignantly it ends with death of the last
soldier from the class with the report filed as all quiet on the Western Front.
·
Initially the soldiers are presented as patriotic
but as war worsens they become more distant and angry towards war treating it
with contempt.
·
Interestingly, the novel focuses around these seven
characters which adds individualism to the novel and adds a personal level to
the book making the audience all the ore drawn in.
Her Privates We
·
The novel is set on the Western Front which exposes
its audience to much destruction and warfare much like Birdsong. Despite this,
elements of the soldiers being bored in battle are described quite different
from some of the previous portrayals that have been given in other novels.
·
The language throughout is violent which words such
as ‘obliterated’; at times Manning uses bad language to grasp the complete
horrors of war and exploit the situation.
Saturday, 12 May 2012
An unpoetic interlude
Righto I found some quotes which I wrote down from 'All Quiet On The Western Front' so will put them up on here.
- They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.
- I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness;--I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.
- The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and say to him: "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up--take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now."
- His tunic is half open. The pocket-book is easy to find. But I hesitate to open it. In it is the book with his name. So long as I do not know his name perhaps I may still forget him, time will obliterate it, this picture. But his name, it is a nail that will be hammered into me and never come out again. It has the power to recall this for ever, it will always come back and stand before me.
- "After all, war is war."
- Their skin turns pale, their limbs stiffen, at last only their eyes live--stubbornly.
-I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;--it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?
-We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.
- Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead.
-Distinctions, breeding, education are changed, are almost blotted out and hardly recognisable any longer
-It is as though formerly we were coins of different provinces; and now we are melted down, and all bear the same stamp.
-First we are soldiers and afterwards, in a strange and shamefaced fashion, individual men as well.
- Here, on the borders of death, life follows an amazingly simple course, it is limited to what is most necessary, all else lies buried in gloomy sleep;--in that besides our primitiveness and our survival.
- All other expressions lie in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death;--it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct--it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought--it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude--it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness. Thus we live a closed, hard existence of the utmost superficiality, and rarely does an incident strike out a spark. But then unexpectedly a flame of grievous and terrible yearning flares up.
- We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.
- Every day and every hour, every shell and every death cuts into this thin support, and the years waste it rapidly. I see how it is already gradually breaking down around me.
- Our artillery is fired out, it has too few shells and the barrels are so worn that they shoot uncertainly, and scatter so widely as even to fall on ourselves. We have too few horses. Our fresh troops are anaemic boys in need of rest, who cannot carry a pack, but merely know how to die. By thousands.
- It is nothing that regiment after regiment returns again and again to the ever more hopeless struggle, that attack follows attack along the weakening, retreating, crumbling line.
-We do not see the guns that bombard us; the attacking lines of the enemy infantry are men like ourselves; but these tanks are machines, their caterpillars run on as endless as the war, they are annihilation, they roll without feeling into the craters, and climb up again without stopping, a fleet of roaring, smoke-belching armour-clads, invulnerable steel beasts squashing the dead and the wounded--we shrivel up in our thin skin before them, against their colossal weight our arms are sticks of straw, and our hand-grenades matches.
- Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks--shattering, corroding, death.
Dysentery, influenza, typhus--scalding, choking, death.
Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.
- The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the child-like cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence.
- Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we still live.
- Here my thoughts stop and will not go any farther. All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings--greed of life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance. But no aims.
- Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hopeable to find our way any more.
-And men will not understand us--for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten--and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;--the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin.
-I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life
that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.
- They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.
- I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness;--I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.
- The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and say to him: "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up--take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now."
- His tunic is half open. The pocket-book is easy to find. But I hesitate to open it. In it is the book with his name. So long as I do not know his name perhaps I may still forget him, time will obliterate it, this picture. But his name, it is a nail that will be hammered into me and never come out again. It has the power to recall this for ever, it will always come back and stand before me.
- "After all, war is war."
- Their skin turns pale, their limbs stiffen, at last only their eyes live--stubbornly.
-I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;--it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?
-We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.
- Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead.
-Distinctions, breeding, education are changed, are almost blotted out and hardly recognisable any longer
-It is as though formerly we were coins of different provinces; and now we are melted down, and all bear the same stamp.
-First we are soldiers and afterwards, in a strange and shamefaced fashion, individual men as well.
- Here, on the borders of death, life follows an amazingly simple course, it is limited to what is most necessary, all else lies buried in gloomy sleep;--in that besides our primitiveness and our survival.
- All other expressions lie in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death;--it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct--it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought--it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude--it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness. Thus we live a closed, hard existence of the utmost superficiality, and rarely does an incident strike out a spark. But then unexpectedly a flame of grievous and terrible yearning flares up.
- We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.
- Every day and every hour, every shell and every death cuts into this thin support, and the years waste it rapidly. I see how it is already gradually breaking down around me.
- Our artillery is fired out, it has too few shells and the barrels are so worn that they shoot uncertainly, and scatter so widely as even to fall on ourselves. We have too few horses. Our fresh troops are anaemic boys in need of rest, who cannot carry a pack, but merely know how to die. By thousands.
- It is nothing that regiment after regiment returns again and again to the ever more hopeless struggle, that attack follows attack along the weakening, retreating, crumbling line.
-We do not see the guns that bombard us; the attacking lines of the enemy infantry are men like ourselves; but these tanks are machines, their caterpillars run on as endless as the war, they are annihilation, they roll without feeling into the craters, and climb up again without stopping, a fleet of roaring, smoke-belching armour-clads, invulnerable steel beasts squashing the dead and the wounded--we shrivel up in our thin skin before them, against their colossal weight our arms are sticks of straw, and our hand-grenades matches.
- Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks--shattering, corroding, death.
Dysentery, influenza, typhus--scalding, choking, death.
Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.
- The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the child-like cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence.
- Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we still live.
- Here my thoughts stop and will not go any farther. All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings--greed of life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance. But no aims.
- Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hopeable to find our way any more.
-And men will not understand us--for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten--and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;--the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin.
-I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life
that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.
Thursday, 10 May 2012
England to Her Sons - W. N. Hodgson
Form:
3 stanzas of 5 lines with the last longer line revealing the overall message of the stanza
Language:
- 'bore' England personified as a mother - patriotism - fighting for values close to their heart
- 'unto his beloved sleep' euphemism for death
- patriotic and romantic
- 'little' not much death
Structure:
-monosylabic "loss and failure, pain and death" hinting at the horrors of war ingrained in the middle of the poem so the overall message remains positive
Tone:
-romanticised : war is about freedom and justice
-undertones of slight bitterness and resent, "little space to weep"
-jingoist
-propaganda - contemporary support - excitement of war
- modern angered by the persuasive language leading to the death of so many
Links :
- Happy is England Now
- High Wood
Wednesday, 9 May 2012
Breakfast- Wilfred Gibson
Form:
Language:
-Depicts the resilience of soldiers under abnormal conditions- ‘we ate our breakfast lying on our backs’- they have made a slight change but are continuing as normal.
-Three actions happen in one sentence: ‘Ginger raised his head/ And cursed, and took the bet, and dropt back dead.’ This perhaps demonstrates the immediacy of death and highlights how quite how sudden and unexpected a soldier’s death could be.
Structure:
-Iambic pentameter is used to give a conversational and narrative mood to the poem which tells of the thin line between life and death.
-The repetition of ‘We ate our breakfast lying on our backs’ gives the poem a ‘complete’ structure. Perhaps this is the poet showing that for this dead soldier the journey is complete.
-This repetition could also represent how following a death soldiers merely carried on without mourning, maybe because they had become accustomed to death.
Tone has a faintly comical edge helped by the use of the onomatopoeic word ‘screeching’ which may highlight the fact that death was just something that happened in the poets eyes and that soldiers did not mourn they just accepted it.
-May be interpreted as the poet highlighting the inevitability of death and the thin line between it and life.
-However could also be seen in a positive light as, at times, the poet appears to depict the perseverance of soldiers and their resilience in the face of adversity (adverse conditions ect.).
The Rear-Guard by Sassoon. Within this poem Sassoon suggest that those on the front did not care about the dead: ‘Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap.’
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