The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
Page 6
While you are listening
To the clear horn,
Forget, men, everything
On this earth newborn,
Except that it is lovelier
Than any mysteries.
Open your eyes to the air
That has washed the eyes of the stars
Through all the dewy night:
20 Up with the light,
To the old wars;
Arise, arise!
Edward Thomas
The Call
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 –
10 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 –
20 Will you, my laddie?
When that procession comes,
Banners and rolling drums –
Who’ll stand and bite his thumbs –
Will you, my laddie?
Jessie Pope
Recruiting
‘Lads, you’re wanted, go and help,’
On the railway carriage wall
Stuck the poster, and I thought
Of the hands that penned the call.
Fat civilians wishing they
‘Could go out and fight the Hun.’
Can’t you see them thanking God
That they’re over forty-one?
Girls with feathers, vulgar songs –
10 Washy verse on England’s need –
God – and don’t we damned well know
How the message ought to read.
‘Lads, you’re wanted! over there,’
Shiver in the morning dew,
More poor devils like yourselves
Waiting to be killed by you.
Go and help to swell the names
In the casualty lists.
Help to make a column’s stuff
20 For the blasted journalists.
Help to keep them nice and safe
From the wicked German foe.
Don’t let him come over here!
‘Lads, you’re wanted – out you go.’
*
There’s a better word than that,
Lads, and can’t you hear it come
From a million men that call
You to share their martyrdom.
Leave the harlots still to sing
30 Comic songs about the Hun,
Leave the fat old men to say
Now we’ve got them on the run.
Better twenty honest years
Than their dull three score and ten.
Lads, you’re wanted. Come and learn
To live and die with honest men.
You shall learn what men can do
If you will but pay the price,
Learn the gaiety and strength
40 In the gallant sacrifice.
Take your risk of life and death
Underneath the open sky.
Live clean or go out quick –
Lads, you’re wanted. Come and die.
E. A. Mackintosh
Soldier: Twentieth Century
I love you, great new Titan!
Am I not you?
Napoleon and Caesar
Out of you grew.
Out of unthinkable torture,
Eyes kissed by death,
Won back to the world again,
Lost and won in a breath,
Cruel men are made immortal,
10 Out of your pain born.
They have stolen the sun’s power
With their feet on your shoulders worn.
Let them shrink from your girth,
That has outgrown the pallid days,
When you slept like Circe’s swine,
Or a word in the brain’s ways.
Isaac Rosenberg
Youth in Arms I
Happy boy, happy boy,
David the immortal-willed,
Youth a thousand thousand times
Slain, but not once killed,
Swaggering again to-day
In the old contemptuous way;
Leaning backward from your thigh
Up against the tinselled bar –
Dust and ashes! is it you?
10 Laughing, boasting, there you are!
First we hardly recognised you
In your modern avatar.
Soldier, rifle, brown khaki –
Is your blood as happy so?
Where’s your sling, or painted shield,
Helmet, pike, or bow?
Well, you’re going to the wars –
That is all you need to know.
Greybeards plotted. They were sad.
20 Death was in their wrinkled eyes.
At their tables, with their maps
Plans and calculations, wise
They all seemed; for well they knew
How ungrudgingly Youth dies.
At their green official baize
They debated all the night
Plans for your adventurous days,
Which you followed with delight,
Youth in all your wanderings,
30 David of a thousand slings.
Harold Monro
‘I don’t want to be a soldier’
I don’t want to be a soldier,
I don’t want to go to war.
I’d rather stay at home,
Around the streets to roam,
And live on the earnings of a well-paid whore.
I don’t want a bayonet up my arsehole,
I don’t want my bollocks shot away.
I’d rather stay in England,
In merry, merry England,
10 And fuck my bleeding life away.
Soldiers’ song
The Conscript
Indifferent, flippant, earnest, but all bored,
The doctors sit in the glare of electric light
Watching the endless stream of naked white
Bodies of men for whom their hasty award
Means life or death, maybe, or the living death
Of mangled limbs, blind eyes, or a darkened brain;
And the chairman, as his monocle falls again,
Pronounces each doom with easy indifferent breath.
Then suddenly I shudder as I see
10 A young man stand before them wearily,
Cadaverous as one already dead;
But still they stare, untroubled, as he stands
With arms outstretched and drooping thorn-crowned
head,
The nail-marks glowing in his feet and hands.
Wilfrid Gibson
Rondeau of a Conscientious Objector
The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous
sands
And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West.
I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands;
To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours I
detest.
I force my cart through the sodden filth that is pressed
Into ooze, and the sombre dirt spouts up at my hands
As I make my way in twilight now to rest.
The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous
sands.
A twisted thorn-tree still in the evening stands
10 Defending the memory of leaves and the happy round
nest.
But mud has flooded the homes of these weary lands
And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West.
All day has the clank of iron on iron distressed
The nerve-bare place. Now a little silence expands
And a gasp of relief. But the soul is still compressed:
I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands.
The hours have ceased to fall, and a star commands
Shadows to cover our stricken manhood, and blest
Sleep to make forget: but he understands:
20 To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours I
detest.
D. H. Lawrence
1914: 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.
10 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.
Rupert Brooke
‘Now that you too must shortly go the way’
Now that you too must shortly go the way
Which in these bloodshot years uncounted men
Have gone in vanishing armies day by day,
And in their numbers will not come again:
I must not strain the moments of our meeting
Striving each look, each accent, not to miss,
Or question of our parting and our greeting,
Is this the last of all? is this – or this?
Last sight of all it may be with these eyes,
10 Last touch, last hearing, since eyes, hands, and ears,
Even serving love, are our mortalities,
And cling to what they own in mortal fears: –
But oh, let end what will, I hold you fast
By immortal love, which has no first or last.
Eleanor Farjeon
In Training
The Kiss
To these I turn, in these I trust;
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal;
I guard her beauty clean from rust.
He spins and burns and loves the air,
And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.
Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;
10 That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.
Siegfried Sassoon
Arms and the Boy
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads
Which long to muzzle in the hearts of lads.
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.
For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
10 There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
Wilfred Owen
‘All the hills and vales along’
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,
10 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,
20 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,
30 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
40 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.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
‘We are Fred Karno’s army’
We are Fred Karno’s army, we are the ragtime infantry.
We cannot fight, we cannot shoot, what bleeding use are we?
And when we get to Berlin we’ll hear the Kaiser say,
‘Hoch! Hoch! Mein Gott, what a bloody rotten lot are the ragtime infantry.’
Soldiers’ song
Song of the Dark Ages
We digged our trenches on the down
Beside old barrows, and the wet
White chalk we shovelled from below;
It lay like drifts of thawing snow
On parados and parapet:
Until a pick neither struck flint
Nor split the yielding chalky soil,
But only calcined human bone:
Poor relic of that Age of Stone
10 Whose ossuary was our spoil.
Home we marched singing in the rain,
And all the while, beneath our song,
I mused how many springs should wane
And still our trenches scar the plain:
The monument of an old wrong.
But then, I thought, the fair green sod
Will wholly cover that white stain,
And soften, as it clothes the face
Of those old barrows, every trace
20 Of violence to the patient plain.
And careless people, passing by
Will speak of both in casual tone:
Saying: ‘You see the toil they made:
The age of iron, pick and spade,
Here jostles with the Age of Stone.’
Yet either from that happier race
Will merit but a passing glance;
And they will leave us both alone:
Poor savages who wrought in stone –
30 Poor savages who fought in France.
Francis Brett Young
Sonnets 1917: Servitude
If it were not for England, who would bear
This heavy servitude one moment more?
To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor
Of filthiest hovels were noble to compare
With thi
s brass-cleaning life. Now here, now there
Harried in foolishness, scanned curiously o’er
By fools made brazen by conceit, and store
Of antique witticisms thin and bare.
Only the love of comrades sweetens all,
10 Whose laughing spirit will not be outdone.
As night-watching men wait for the sun
To hearten them, so wait I on such boys
As neither brass nor Hell-fire may appal,
Nor guns, nor sergeant-major’s bluster and noise.
Ivor Gurney
In Barracks
The barrack-square, washed clean with rain,
Shines wet and wintry-grey and cold.
Young Fusiliers, strong-legged and bold,
March and wheel and march again.
The sun looks over the barrack gate,
Warm and white with glaring shine,
To watch the soldiers of the Line
That life has hired to fight with fate.
Fall out: the long parades are done.
10 Up comes the dark; down goes the sun.
The square is walled with windowed light.
Sleep well, you lusty Fusiliers;
Shut your brave eyes on sense and sight,
And banish from your dreamless ears
The bugle’s dying notes that say,
‘Another night; another day.’
Siegfried Sassoon
The Last Post
The bugler sent a call of high romance –