The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
Page 16
Don’t flutter Rose one tittle.
Her maiden ardour cleaves to him
Who’s proved that he is brittle, 20
Whose healing cicatrices show
The colours of a prism,
Whose back is bent into a bow
By Flanders rheumatism.
The lad who troth with Rose would plight,
Nor apprehend rejection,
Must be in shabby khaki dight
To compass her affection.
Who buys her an engagement ring
30 And finds her kind and kissing,
Must have one member in a sling
Or, preferably, missing.
Jessie Pope
The Veteran
We came upon him sitting in the sun,
Blinded by war, and left. And past the fence
There came young soldiers from the Hand and Flower,
Asking advice of his experience.
And he said this, and that, and told them tales,
And all the nightmares of each empty head
Blew into air; then, hearing us beside,
‘Poor chaps, how’d they know what it’s like?’ he said.
We stood there, and watched him as he sat,
10 Turning his sockets where they went away,
Until it came to one of us to ask
‘And you’re – how old?’
‘Nineteen, the third of May.’
Margaret Postgate Cole
Repression of War Experience
Now light the candles; one; two; there’s a moth;
What silly beggars they are to blunder in
And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame –
No, no, not that, – it’s bad to think of war,
When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;
And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.
Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand.
10 Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen,
And you’re as right as rain…
Why won’t it rain?…
I wish there’d be a thunder-storm to-night,
With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,
And make the roses hang their dripping heads.
Books; what a jolly company they are,
Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves,
Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green,
And every kind of colour. Which will you read?
20 Come on; O do read something; they’re so wise.
I tell you all the wisdom of the world
Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet
You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out,
And listen to the silence: on the ceiling
There’s one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters;
And in the breathless air outside the house
The garden waits for something that delays.
There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees, –
Not people killed in battle, – they’re in France, –
30 But horrible shapes in shrouds – old men who died
Slow, natural deaths, – old men with ugly souls,
Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins.
*
You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;
You’d never think there was a bloody war on!…
O yes, you would…why, you can hear the guns.
Hark! Thud, thud, thud, – quite soft…they never cease –
Those whispering guns – O Christ, I want to go out
And screech at them to stop – I’m going crazy;
I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.
Siegfried Sassoon
A Child’s Nightmare
Through long nursery nights he stood
By my bed unwearying,
Loomed gigantic, formless, queer,
Purring in my haunted ear
That same hideous nightmare thing,
Talking, as he lapped my blood,
In a voice cruel and flat,
Saying for ever, ‘Cat!…Cat!…Cat!…’
That one word was all he said,
10 That one word through all my sleep,
In monotonous mock despair.
Nonsense may be light as air,
But there’s Nonsense that can keep
Horror bristling round the head,
When a voice cruel and flat
Says for ever, ‘Cat!…Cat!…Cat!…’
He had faded, he was gone
Years ago with Nursery Land,
When he leapt on me again
20 From the clank of a night train,
Overpowered me foot and head,
Lapped my blood, while on and on
The old voice cruel and flat
Purred for ever, ‘Cat!…Cat!…Cat!…’
Morphia drowsed, again I lay
In a crater by High Wood:
He was there with straddling legs,
Staring eyes as big as eggs,
Purring as he lapped my blood,
30 His black bulk darkening the day,
With a voice cruel and flat,
‘Cat!…Cat!…Cat!…’ he said, ‘Cat!…Cat!…’
When I’m shot through heart and head,
And there’s no choice but to die,
The last word I’ll hear, no doubt,
Won’t be ‘Charge!’ or ‘Bomb them out!’
Nor the stretcher-bearer’s cry,
‘Let that body be, he’s dead!’
But a voice cruel and flat
40 Saying for ever, ‘Cat!…Cat!…Cat!’
Robert Graves
Mental Cases
Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, – but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?
10 – These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
20 Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh
– Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
– Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.
Wilfred Owen
The Death-Bed
He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped
Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;
Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,
Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep, –
Silence and safety; and his mortal shore
Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.
Someone was holding water to his mouth.
He swallowed, unre
sisting; moaned and dropped
Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot
10 The opiate throb and ache that was his wound.
Water – calm, sliding green above the weir;
Water – a sky-lit alley for his boat,
Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers
And shaken hues of summer: drifting down,
He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.
Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,
Blowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.
Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars
Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;
20 Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,
Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes.
Rain; he could hear it rustling through the dark;
Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;
Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers
That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps
Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace
Gently and slowly washing life away.
*
He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain
Leaped like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore
30 His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.
But someone was beside him; soon he lay
Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.
And death, who’d stepped toward him, paused and stared.
Light many lamps and gather round his bed.
Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
He’s young; he hated war; how should he die
When cruel old campaigners win safe through?
But Death replied: ‘I choose him.’ So he went,
40 And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.
Siegfried Sassoon
5 PEACE
Everyone Sang
‘When this bloody war is over’
When this bloody war is over,
No more soldiering for me.
When I get my civvy clothes on,
Oh, how happy I shall be!
No more church parades on Sunday,
No more begging for a pass.
You can tell the Sergeant-Major
To stick his passes up his arse.
When this bloody war is over,
10 No more soldiering for me.
When I get my civvy clothes on,
Oh, how happy I shall be!
No more NCOs to curse me,
No more rotten army stew.
You can tell the old Cook-Sergeant,
To stick his stew right up his flue.
When this bloody war is over,
No more soldiering for me.
When I get my civvy clothes on,
20 Oh, how happy I shall be!
No more sergeants bawling
‘Pick it up’ and ‘Put it down.’
If I meet the ugly bastard
I’ll kick his arse all over town.
Soldiers’ song
Preparations for Victory
My soul, dread not the pestilence that hags
The valley; flinch not you, my body young,
At these great shouting smokes and snarling jags
Of fiery iron; the dice may not be flung
As yet that claims you. Manly move among
These ruins, and what you must do, do well;
Look, here are gardens, there mossed boughs are hung
With apples whose bright cheeks none might excel,
And there’s a house as yet unshattered by a shell.
10 ‘I’ll do my best,’ the soul makes sad reply,
‘And I will mark the yet unmurdered tree,
The relics of dear homes that court the eye,
And yet I see them not as I would see.
Hovering between, a ghostly enemy.
Sickens the light, and poisoned, withered, wan,
The least defiled turns desperate to me.’
The body, poor unpitied Caliban,
Parches and sweats and grunts to win the name of Man.
Hours, days, eternities like swelling waves
20 Pass on, and still we drudge in this dark maze,
The bombs and coils and cans by strings of slaves
Are borne to serve the coming day of days;
Gray sleep in slimy cellars scarce allays
With its brief blank the burden. Look, we lose;
The sky is gone, the lightless, drenching haze
Of rainstorm chills the bone; earth, air are foes,
The black fiend leaps brick-red as life’s last picture goes.
Edmund Blunden
‘Après la guerre finie’
Après la guerre finie,
Soldat anglais parti;
Mam’selle Fransay boko pleuray
Après la guerre finie.
Après la guerre finie,
Soldat anglais parti;
Mademoiselle in the family way,
Après la guerre finie.
Après la guerre finie,
10 Soldat anglais parti;
Mademoiselle can go to hell
Après la guerre finie.
Soldiers’ song
Everyone Sang
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away…O, but Everyone
10 Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
Siegfried Sassoon
Peace Celebration
Now we can say of those who died unsung,
Unwept for, torn, ‘Thank God they were not blind
Or mad! They’ve perished strong and young,
Missing the misery we elders find
In missing them.’ With such a platitude
We try to cheer ourselves. And for each life
Laid down for us, with duty well-imbued,
With song-on-lip, in splendid soldier strife –
For sailors, too, who willingly were sunk –
10 We’ll shout ‘Hooray!’ –
And get a little drunk.
Osbert Sitwell
Paris, November 11, 1918
Down the boulevards the crowds went by,
The shouting and the singing died away,
And in the quiet we rose to drink the toasts,
Our hearts uplifted to the hour, the Day:
The King – the Army – Navy – the Allies –
England – and Victory. –
And then you turned to me and with low voice
(The tables were abuzz with revelry),
‘I have a toast for you and me’, you said,
10 And whispered ‘Absent’, and we drank
Our unforgotten Dead.
But I saw Love go lonely down the years,
And when I drank, the wine was salt with tears.
May Wedderburn Cannan
It Is Near Toussaints
It is near Toussaints, the living and dead will say:
‘Have they ended it? What has happened to Gurney?’
And along the leaf-strewed roads of France many brown shades
Will go, recalling singing, and a comrade for whom also they
Had hoped well. His honour them had happier made.
Curse all that hates good. When I spoke of my breaking
(Not understood) in London, they imagined of the taking
Vengeance, and
seeing things were different in future.
(A musician was a cheap, honourable and nice creature.)
10 Kept sympathetic silence; heard their packs creaking
And burst into song – Hilaire Belloc was all our Master.
On the night of the dead, they will remember me,
Pray Michael, Nicholas, Maries lost in Novembery
River-mist in the old City of our dear love, and batter
At doors about the farms crying ‘Our war poet is lost
Madame – no bon!’ – and cry his two names, warningly, sombrely.
Ivor Gurney
Two Fusiliers
And have we done with War at last?
Well, we’ve been lucky devils both,
And there’s no need of pledge or oath
To bind our lovely friendship fast,
By firmer stuff
Close bound enough.
By wire and wood and stake we’re bound,
By Fricourt and by Festubert,
By whipping rain, by the sun’s glare,
10 By all the misery and loud sound,
By a Spring day,
By Picard clay.
Show me the two so closely bound
As we, by the wet bond of blood,
By friendship, blossoming from mud,
By Death: we faced him, and we found
Beauty in Death,