The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
Page 5
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 judgement-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
20 Hell’s floor for so much threatening…
‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).’
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.
30 ‘Instead of preaching forty year,’
My neighbour 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.
Thomas Hardy
The Eve of War
The night falls over London. City and sky
Blend slowly. All the crowded plain grows dark.
The last few loiterers leave the glooming park
To swell that mighty tide which still sweeps by,
Heedless save of its own humanity,
Down to the Circus, where the staring arc
Winks through the night, and every face shows stark
And every cheek betrays its painted lie.
But here through bending trees blows a great wind;
10 Through torn cloud-gaps the angry stars
look down.
Here have I heard this night the wings of War,
His dark and frowning countenance I saw.
What dreadful menace hangs above our town?
Let all the great cities pray; for they have sinned.
Geoffrey Faber
On Receiving the First News of the War
Snow is a strange white word;
No ice or frost
Has asked of bud or bird
For Winter’s cost.
Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know;
No man knows why.
In all men’s hearts it is:
10 Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.
Red fangs have torn His face,
God’s blood is shed:
He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.
O ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume;
Give back this universe
20 Its pristine bloom.
Isaac Rosenberg
The Marionettes
Let the foul Scene proceed:
There’s laughter in the wings;
’Tis sawdust that they bleed,
But a box Death brings.
How rare a skill is theirs
These extreme pangs to show,
How real a frenzy wears
Each feigner of woe!
Gigantic dins uprise!
10 Even the gods must feel
A smarting of the eyes
As these fumes upsweal.
Strange, such a Piece is free,
While we Spectators sit,
Aghast at its agony,
Yet absorbed in it!
Dark is the outer air,
Coldly the night draughts blow,
Mutely we stare, and stare
20 At the frenzied Show.
Yet heaven hath its quiet shroud
Of deep, immutable blue –
We cried ‘An end!’ We are bowed
By the dread, ‘’Tis true!’
While the Shape who hoofs applause
Behind our deafened ear,
Hoots – angel-wise – ‘the Cause!’
And affrights ev’n fear.
Walter de la Mare
August, 1914
How still this quiet cornfield is to-night!
By an intenser glow the evening falls,
Bringing, not darkness, but a deeper light;
Among the stooks a partridge covey calls.
The windows glitter on the distant hill;
Beyond the hedge the sheep-bells in the fold
Stumble on sudden music and are still;
The forlorn pinewoods droop above the wold.
An endless quiet valley reaches out
10 Past the blue hills into the evening sky;
Over the stubble, cawing, goes a rout
Of rooks from harvest, flagging as they fly.
So beautiful it is, I never saw
So great a beauty on these English fields
Touched by the twilight’s coming into awe,
Ripe to the soul and rich with summer’s yields.
*
These homes, this valley spread below me here,
The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen,
Have been the heartfelt things, past-speaking dear
20 To unknown generations of dead men,
Who, century after century, held these farms,
And, looking out to watch the changing sky,
Heard, as we hear, the rumours and alarms
Of war at hand and danger pressing nigh.
And knew, as we know, that the message meant
The breaking-off of ties, the loss of friends,
Death like a miser getting in his rent,
And no new stones laid where the trackway ends.
The harvest not yet won, the empty bin,
30 The friendly horses taken from the stalls,
The fallow on the hill not yet brought in,
The cracks unplastered in the leaking walls.
Yet heard the news, and went discouraged home,
And brooded by the fire with heavy mind,
With such dumb loving of the Berkshire loam
As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind,
Then sadly rose and left the well-loved Downs,
And so, by ship to sea, and knew no more
The fields of home, the byres, the market towns,
40 Nor the dear outline of the English shore,
But knew the misery of the soaking trench,
The freezing in the rigging, the despair
In the revolting second of the wrench
When the blind soul is flung upon the air,
And died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands
For some idea but dimly understood
Of an English city never built by hands
Which love of England prompted and made good.
*
If there be any life beyond the grave,
50 It must be near the men and things we love,
Some power of quick suggestion how to save,
Touching the living soul as from above.
An influence from the Earth from those dead hearts
So passionate once, so deep, so truly kind,
That in the living child the spirit starts,
Feeling companioned still, not left behind.
Surely above these fields a spirit broods
A sense of many watchers muttering near
Of the lone Downland with the forlorn woods
60 Loved to the death, inestimably dear.
A muttering from beyond the veils of Death
From long dead men, to whom this quiet scene
Came among blinding tears with the last breath,
The dying soldier’s vision of his queen.
All the unspoken worship of those lives
Spent in forgotten wars at other calls
Glimmers upon these fields where evening drives
Beauty like breath, so gently darkness falls.
Darkness that makes the meadows holier still,
&
nbsp; 70 The elm trees sadden in the hedge, a sigh
Moves in the beech-clump on the haunted hill,
The rising planets deepen in the sky,
And silence broods like spirit on the brae,
A glimmering moon begins, the moonlight runs
Over the grasses of the ancient way
Rutted this morning by the passing guns.
John Masefield
1914: 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,
10 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.
Rupert Brooke
Happy is England Now
There is not anything more wonderful
Than a great people moving towards the deep
Of an unguessed and unfeared future; nor
Is aught so dear of all held dear before
As the new passion stirring in their veins
When the destroying Dragon wakes from sleep.
Happy is England now, as never yet!
And though the sorrows of the slow days fret
Her faithfullest children, grief itself is proud.
10 Ev’n the warm beauty of this spring and summer
That turns to bitterness turns then to gladness
Since for this England the beloved ones died.
Happy is England in the brave that die
For wrongs not hers and wrongs so sternly hers;
Happy in those that give, give, and endure
The pain that never the new years may cure;
Happy in all her dark woods, green fields, towns,
Her hills and rivers and her chafing sea.
What’er was dear before is dearer now.
20 There’s not a bird singing upon his bough
But sings the sweeter in our English ears:
There’s not a nobleness of heart, hand, brain
But shines the purer; happy is England now
In those that fight, and watch with pride and tears.
John Freeman
‘For All We Have and Are’ 1914
For all we have and are,
For all our children’s fate,
Stand up and take the war,
The Hun is at the gate!
Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o’erthrown.
There is nothing left to-day
But steel and fire and stone!
Though all we knew depart,
10 The old Commandments stand: –
‘In courage keep your heart,
In strength lift up your hand.‘
Once more we hear the word
That sickened earth of old: –
‘No law except the Sword
Unsheathed and uncontrolled.’
Once more it knits mankind,
Once more the nations go
To meet and break and bind
20 A crazed and driven foe.
Comfort, content, delight,
The ages’ slow-bought gain,
They shrivelled in a night.
Only ourselves remain
To face the naked days
In silent fortitude,
Through perils and dismays
Renewed and re-renewed.
Though all we made depart,
30 The old Commandments stand: –
‘In patience keep your heart,
In strength lift up your hand.‘
No easy hope or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,
But iron sacrifice
Of body, will, and soul.
There is but one task for all –
One life for each to give.
Who stands if Freedom fall?
40 Who dies if England live?
Rudyard Kipling
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
10 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.
20 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 her foe.
Edward Thomas
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
10 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.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
The Poets are Waiting
To what God
Shall we chant
Our songs of Battle?
The professional poets
Are measuring their thoughts
For felicitous sonnets;
They try them and fit them
Like honest tailors
Cutting materials
10 For fashion-plate suits.
The unprofessional
Little singers,
Most intellectual,
Merry with gossip,
Heavy with cunning,
Whose tedious brains are draped
In sultry palls of hair,
Reclining as usual
On armchairs and sofas,
20 Are grinning and gossiping,
Cake at their elbows –
They will not write us verses for the time;
Their storms are brewed in teacups and their wars
Are fought in sneers or little blots of ink.
To what God
Shall we chant
Our songs of Battle?
Hefty barbarians,
Roaring for war,
30 Are breaking upon us;
Clouds of their cavalry,
Waves of their infantry,
Mountains of guns.
Winged they are coming,
Plated and mailed,
Snorting their jargon.
Oh to whom shall a song of battle be chanted?
Not to our lord of the hosts on his ancient throne,
Drowsing the ages out in Heaven
40 The celestial choirs are mute, the angels have fled:
Word is gone forth abroad that our lord is dead.
To what God shall we chant
Our songs
Of battle?
Harold Monro
The Dilemma
God heard the embattled nations sing and shout
‘Gott strafe England!’ and ‘God save the King!’
God this, God that, and God the other thing –
‘Good God!’ said God ‘I’ve got my work cut out.’
J. C. Squire
‘Who’s for the khaki suit’
The Trumpet
Rise up, rise up,
And, as the trumpet blowing
Chases the dreams of men,
As the dawn glowing
The stars that left unlit
The land and water,
Rise up and scatter
The dew that covers
The print of last night’s lovers –
10 Scatter it, scatter it!