Selected Poetry of the First World War
Wordsworth Poetry Library Wordsworth Editions
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Today’s young
generation is growing up knowing an unsettled world where war and hatred
feature every day in news bulletins.
Soldiers and civilians are dying daily and bombs and bullets seem to be
the only alternative language for some when the talking stops and battle
commences. On a fairly crass pop
music level comes the question: “War? What is it good for?” The answer:
“Absolutely nothing.” But however
nonsensical and tragic today’s wars and conflicts are, the First and Second
World Wars, in stark comparison, were monumental in scale and devastation.
The First World War,
the subject of this slim but fulfilling volume, is described thus in the
introduction: “The Great War was
senseless; senseless in its outbreak, senseless in its prosecution, senseless
in the slaughter of what became a lost generation.”
If anything good
came out of the First World War, it surely must be poetry, but not just comfortable
observational poetry from a safe distance, some of which is very powerful. The poems written by soldiers in
trenches, in amongst the mud and carnage, on sick beds, on death beds and in
quiet moments when sad and horrible memories came flooding back, are potent,
full of truth and emotion. These
poems are also warnings about the futility of war.
R. H. Beckh’s “No
Man’s Land”:
“Then out we creep
thro’ the gathering gloom/of NO MAN’S LAND, while the big guns boom/right over
our heads, and the rapid crack/of the Lewis guns is answered back/by the German
barking the same refrain/of crack, crack, crack, all over again.”
Rupert Brooke’s “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.”
Leslie Coulson’s
“War”:
“Where war has left
its wake of whitened bone,/soft stems of summer grass shall wave again,/and all
the blood that war has ever strewn/is but a passing stain.”
Julian Grenfell’s
“Prayer for Those on the Staff”:
“Fighting in the mud
we turn to thee,/in these dread times of battle, Lord,/to keep us safe, if so
may be,/from shrapnel, snipers, shell and sword.”
Ivor Gurney’s “Strange
Hells”:
“There are strange
Hells within the Minds War made/not so often, not so humiliatingly afraid/as
one would have expected – the racket and fear guns made.”
The book features much
of Wilfred Owen’s and Siegfried Sassoon’s work, as well as lesser known poets
and some – Anonymous – from poets long forgotten.
I urge young and old
to buy this book, then to find a quiet place to read and reflect on the waste
of money, time, energy, words and, above and beyond all of that, the waste of
life in pursuit of dubious or downright stupid, unnecessary wars.
