Lovedeath
Page 37
All these have been my loves. And these shall pass.
Whatever passes not, in the great hour,
Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power
To hold them with me through the gate of Death.
They’ll play deserter, turn with traitor breath,
Break the high bond we made, and sell Love’s trust
And sacramented covenant to the dust.
—Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
And give what’s left of love again, and make
New friends, new strangers… But the best I’ve known,
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies. Nothing remains.
O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed
Praise you, ‘All these were lovely’: say, ‘He loved.’16
{Ed. note—James Edwin Rooke died of cancer in July of 1971. He was 83 years old.}
Notes
About the real poets:
1. Siegfried Sassoon, “And clink of shovels…”
Born in 1886, educated at Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge, Sassoon served with the Sussex Yeomanry and Welch Fusiliers. He was known as an incredibly brave officer and had been seriously wounded and awarded the Military Cross even before he saw action at the Battle of the Somme.
Sassoon was the first major poet to be critical of the lack of progress in the war, and his brutal, realistic verse became the archetype for an entire generation of wartime poets. His antiwar poetry and protests were at first diagnosed as shell shock and he was committed to a sanatorium where he met Wilfred Owen, another brilliant young antiwar poet. Owen wrote of Sassoon—“I hold you as Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father confessor + Amenophis IV in profile.”
Unlike most of the younger poets, Sassoon survived the war and became the literary editor for the Daily Herald. Throughout his writing career, Sassoon was obsessed with his wartime experiences and his fictional autobiography, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, may be the best-known memoir of that war. Sassoon died in 1967.
2. A. G. West, “The Night Patrol”
3. A. G. West, “We had no light…”
4. Images adapted from “The Great Lover” by Rupert Brooke.
Rupert Brooke was the quintessential romantic war poet. Born in 1887, educated at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge, Brooke was given a commission in the Royal Naval Division by his admirer—the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill—saw some action at Antwerp in 1914, wrote patriotic verse about his willingness (almost eagerness) to die for his country, and died of blood poisoning while being transported to Gallipoli in 1915. He was buried on the Greek island of Scyros and his life, verse, death, and burial instantly became the stuff of legend.
Rupert Brooke’s brilliant but romanticized view of the war differs wildly from the bitter verse of his contemporaries who survived to see the horrors of later battles and the high-level stupidity of the long war of attrition.
5. Wilfred Owen, “…the white eyes writhing in his face”
Born in 1893, educated at Birkenhead Institute and University of London, Owen enlisted in the Artist’s Rifles in 1915 and fought in France from January 1917 to June 1917, when he was invalided out. Suffering from nervous collapse, Owen was sent to the sanatorium where he met Siegfried Sassoon, who soon became his mentor. Sassoon introduced Owen to the poets Robert Graves and Robert Nichols, both of whom had been at the Somme.
Although bitter about the mishandling of the war and converted to pacifism, Owen returned to the Front and became a Company Commander dedicated to keeping his men alive. “My senses are charred” he wrote shortly before he died. “I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters.”
Wilfred Owen was awarded the Military Cross for exceptional bravery in October 1918, and was killed by machine-gun fire at the Sambre Canal on November 4, 1918. Many consider him the finest poet of the war.
6. From an Official Medical History of the War (HMSO).
7. Marching song of the 13th (S) Btn, The Rifle Brigade.
8. Siegfried Sassoon, “The Glory of Women”
9. Charles Sorley, “On, marching men, on…”
10. Charles Sorley, “When you see the millions of the mouthless dead…”
Born in 1895, educated at Marlborough, Sorley won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, but enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment in August 1914. Within a year he had obtained the rank of captain. He was killed in action at Loos on October 13, 1915. Although Sorley was only twenty at the time of his death, John Masefield and others considered him the most promising of the war poets. His Marlborough and Other Poems was published in 1916 and proved extremely popular. His “Song of the Ungirt Runners” is his most famous poem and has been recited by generations of schoolchildren.
In a letter home in which he had included some poetry, Sorley once wrote: “You will notice that most of what I have written is as hurried and angular as the handwriting: written out at different times and dirty with my pocket: but I have had no time for the final touch nor seem likely to have for some time.”
11. Soldiers’ doggerel, “The world wasn’t made in a day”
12. Andrew Marvell, “The Definition of Love”
This was quoted by Guy Chapman in A Passionate Prodigality, published in 1933. This memoir is an excellent introduction to an officer’s view of the war and the Battle of the Somme. Chapman dedicates the book to “certain soldiers who have now become a small quantity of Christian dust.” Born in 1889, Guy Patterson Chapman served with the 13th Battalion and the Royal Fusiliers from 1914 to 1920. Chapman is one of the few writers who reenlisted after the war. Later becoming a barrister, writer, publisher, historian, and Professor of Modern History at Leeds University, Chapman died in 1972.
The poet Andrew Marvell lived from 1621 to 1678.
13. A. P. Herbert, “The General inspecting his trenches…”
An officer in the Royal Naval Division, Alan (A. P.) Herbert was present when General Shute dressed down the 63rd Division for their filthy trenches. The division had just gone into the line formerly held by the Portugese, and the men resented Shute’s comments. Herbert’s “poem” became a song sung to the tune of “Wrap Me Up in My Tarpaulin Jacket” and soon spread throughout the division, and then through the entire army.
The irony of the situation was that although General Shute was renowned as a spit-and-polish man and a bit of a martinet, he was admired by many of his men for his tremendous courage and willingness to crawl into No Man’s Land with scout patrols. Thanks to Herbert’s limerick, what tends to be remembered now about Shute is “The General inspecting his trenches…”
14. Byron (George Gordon, Lord), “The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems of 1816”
15. Wilfred Owen, “Who are these?…”
16. Rupert Brooke, “The Great Lover”