Rosenburg's Break of Day: Rat Superiority
“Inwardly grin” sardonic humour.
“Haughty athletes” “whim” death by chance.
“Sprawled in the bowels of the earth” hell, motherland damaged and suffering- by symbolic transference it’s a ref. The soft flesh cut by shrapnel
“Still heavens”- man violating God, will take no part in man made destruction
“Iron and flame” only reference to war
Rat naive symbol of judgement
“Drop” dead bodies fall, souls rise to heaven while men in hell
5/9/1914
Rhythm- marching
1st stanza ends with question “men who March away?” Last answers it “Men who March away”
Patriotic, rousing poem- encourages sign up
Narrator recruiter or “friend with the musing eye?”
“Hoodwink” soldiers being tricked, prank sending them to war, inappropriate?
“Nay. We well see…” Soldiers justifying they’re doing the right thing
“Her distress…” GB personified
“Victory crowns the just” biblical/Shakespearean
Political controversy: ironic/ realistic/ poet mixed feelings about war
01/1916
Lay out like a hymn
Each describes a scene
Stanzas quatrain
1st pastoral rural life
2nd unchanging nature, war is far away and time will pass
3rd two lovers the legacy
“Ere their story die” repeats sound- assonance
Timeless rural life
1915
Glorifies war
Death treated as a last ‘hurrah!’ War is exciting
Pathetic fallacy- good weather to bad symbolises brutal battle
“Joy of battle” unironic
“Blindness” blind passion(link2 Sassoon rearguard)
“That it be not the Destined Will” Fatalistic- living in the moment: GOD- if he thinks it’s time then okay, traditional
“Death (personified) moans and sings”
3/05/1915
Discusses process of war not protest
Voice of the dead “We are the dead” emotive, humanises them- their acceptance of fate
3rd stanza propaganda.
“Take up our quarrel with the foe” the living continue the battle.
“we throw/ The torch” like brooks torch image
“Break faith with us who die” must keep fighting, War of attrition
“Willing to die for the dear England, whose beauty and majesty he knew”- Churchill Obituary, the Times
01/1915
“If I..” First person, modern.
Sonnet form, love song for England.
“corner of some foreign field…for ever England.” Pathos & patriotic imagery, elevates sacrifice. Caesar ending the statement adding emphasis.
“Her flowers to love” England’s gift is beauty.
A holy land.
2nd Stanza
Gives meaning to death: a social exchange
“Eternal mind” immortality in death of cause
Repetition of England- patriotic
1912
Unnamed applicable to all
Sad subject but gloriously written
“Toiling” life portrayed as boring and uninteresting as he isn’t risking his life for his country
“Grey” repetitive, boring, purposeless
“Drift” no effort, minimal resistance
“No lance broken in life’s tournament” metaphor
“Eagles of the legions” Roman warfare
Hasn’t proved himself to be a man.
“Content” second stanza is sonnet like expect each are 8/8 showing fulfilment in life by sacrificing himself on the battlefield.
“Join the men of Agincourt” famous French battle, war made him memorable?
was killed 1915
1914
Nature is positive and permanent
ABABABAB
2nd stanza: addresses reader as soldier “you”
Religious connotations “Jesus Christ and Barabbas” the former being released & other crucified
No fear in death, apart of nature “teeming earth” full of things that are growing
3rd stanza: observes/musing why men are happy for going to their deaths
“Hemlock for Socrates” what are we fighting for?
“On the road to death, sing!//…So be merry, so be dead.” Overtly positive about death, believes soldiers to be deranged
4th stanza: ambivalent- not being completely clear on views; ironic, profound
Dramatic irony- grim reaper death
“So be merry, so be dead.”
Killed 1915 shrapnel to head
Doesn’t praise nor pity dead; they haunt us
“Say not soft things” speak the truth
“Curses heaped on each gashed head?” Mortal wound that killed? Brutal imagery
“Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.” Gas, horrific
Nihilistic- rejection of all religious & moral principles
Iambic pentameter
“‘Yet many a better one has died before.'” Mourn the ones you love
“Great Death” personified, unreligious
A sonnet, ironic use; rejects love
•poem found on his dead body, irony
1914
“Heaven was falling”
“Earth’s foundations fled”
“Shoulders held the sky” nature has abandoned
“God abandoned” them
WAR IS CATACLYSMIC(heaven is falling)
*nationalist- would’ve preferred nazi’s to invade Scotland to being ruled by English bourgeoise*
1935
Poet a communist, explicitly political.
“Impious risks” unholy- disconnected from their faith
Written 1918
unfeeling tone, deaths in vain
“Austerlitz and Waterloo.” Wide ranges of war, grass covers all.
Grass- human view of war obscured, unsympathetic, belittles man- petty and violent, undeserving.
“I cover all” butts the horrors of war in time
Soliloquy
“I am the grass.// Let me work.” Hides the desolation, a reluctant servant. Nature keeps going, persevering, resilient, indifferent.
War is universal- universality of war- reoccurring occurance
1916
“Cut a flower” imagery of war distrusting nature.
“Stained a single human breast” a beautiful death?
“Still the bird…” Nature continues in mans war
“Butterfly” contrasts to horrific war
“Wheel of thread” beautiful harmless spider, Greek fate?
Spider “ran to greet the fly,// But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.” Fooled, inhuman actions occur in war.
“Autumn//solider falls” falling like leaves, sorrowful poem
“Without memorial” no one mourns long, anti war poem.
“Death is absolute” death is a cycle, fleeting nature of life.
STAR⭐️ sees beauty despite surroundings
Cannon? comparing nature to war
1936
“Little song” all sweet juxtaposes “maimed” true horrors of war.
“Lend me your arm// to replace my leg” needs support, direct address.
“at verdun// at verdun” repetitive, lyrical. Emphasis
“A wooden leg” reality of war
1915
“Please a young girl//…an old man” poetry is meant to please.
1918
Nihilistic
“Those I guard I do not love” no feelings of hate and devotion- resentful?
“Loss” nothing to gain, it isn’t Ireland’s war.
“Lonely impulse” alone, excitement of flying, wonder. Does it for the thrills.
“The years to come seemed waste of breath,// A waste of breath the years behind.”
1918
“Good death” died for a noble cause
“Exciting years” thrill of battle
“Half-drunk of whole-mad soldiery// Are murdering your tenants there” you’re fighting for the enemy, your people are being shot- who protects them there? We need you here
Incident- story of a women shot when pregnant. Irish propaganda and nationalism. *implies that fighting for imperialists made him turn his back on ireland*
1917
STRUCTURE: ‘They’ is comprised of two stanzas of equal length: six lines of iambic pentameter each, with rhyme scheme ABABCC. The second stanza subverts the message of the first. ‘They’ has a clever rhythmical structure, intended to create a particular tone to the poem. Sassoon subtly subverts the Bishop’s strident sermon in the first stanza by his use of colons and semi-colons as caesuras or pauses in the middle of each line. These give the first stanza a deliberately halting rhythm that, along with the rhetorical confidence of the Bishop’s sermon, gives his speech a subtle staginess that suggests an insincere performance. By contrast, the strong rhythm given to the answers of the men in the second stanza reinforces the ugly truth that they tell. The soldiers’ reply tends to pause more ‘naturally’ at the end of lines, ‘end-stopping’ each statement, giving a sense of complete meaning.
They: ‘They’ are the idealised British soldiers of whom the bishop speaks. ‘They’ are quite unlike the real soldiers who go to war.
“The Bishop tells us:”: The figure of religious authority in the poem— a Bishop of the Church of England— speaks with confidence about a situation of which he has no knowledge. He represents a brand of religious cant and hypocrisy that was deeply unpopular amongst many men at the front.
“When the boys come back / They will not be the same;”: The meaning of the poem turns on this observation— that the war changes the men who fought in it. Note the easy familiarity, even patronizing tone of the reference to ‘the boys’, and the use of alliteration in this first line, as throughout the poem.
“for they’ll have fought / In a just cause;”: alliteration (‘f’) is again used to give a rhythmic force to the Bishop’s leading statements. The mention of a “just cause” reinforces the sense that the Bishop is dealing in popular platitudes about the justification for war— that it is “just”, or ‘right’.
“their comrades blood has bought…”: the soldiers are explicitly compared to Christ, who ‘bought’ man eternal life by dying for their sins.
“New right to breed an honourable race,”: what follows from this Christ-like redemption is more unpleasant however. The Bishop uses pseudo-scientific language, popular around the turn of the century. In Social Darwinist terms, the ‘right to breed’ is claimed through the sacrifice of soldiers. This ‘survival of the fittest’ (here, the fittest are the most “honourable”) is an idea that underlay much elitist thinking about society and often had, as here, a racist dimension. Compare and contrast this line with those found in Rupert Brooke’s ‘Peace’ and ‘The Dead’.
“they have challenged Death and dared him face to face”: the Bishop’s heroic and clichéd rhetoric unwittingly recalls the line in Corinthians 13:12, that declares “now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face”. This Biblical line declares that before death we have necessarily imperfect knowledge, only attaining real enlightenment when we meet God. In many ways, the Bishop embodies this cosmic ignorance.
“‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply”: The anguished agreement echoes— along with the use of the phrase “the boys” – the first line, only to subvert the Bishop’s prediction.
“For George lost both his legs…”: A grim litany of injuries follows, spelling out the true consequences of war for “the boys”. Note that the soldiers are named, rather than idealized and anonymous in the Bishop’s sermon. The description is explicit and pitiful: “Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die”.
“‘And Bert’s gone syphilitic:”: Bert has contracted syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. Soldiers on leave would commonly visit prostitutes in the local towns and villages; brothels were even graded in some areas for use by officers (signed by blue lamps) and privates (red lamps). Venereal infection was endemic, as prostitutes could sleep with over a hundred men a day. Note the deeply ironic contrast, then, between this and the Bishop’s claim that “their comrades blood has bought / New right to breed an honourable race”.
“…that hasn’t found some change.”: the irony of this statement illustrates Sassoon’s satirical point, that a massive change has indeed come to the men, but quite different to that which the Bishop predicts.
“And the Bishop said; ‘the ways of God are strange!”: The Bishop resorts to idiotic cliché to explain the real change witnessed, essentially pronouncing that ‘God works in mysterious ways’.
1917
The Hero: the ‘Hero’ of the poem is, of course, ironically termed so: Jack is the kind of malingering coward who earned the contempt of his comrades on the battlefield, especially in a well-disciplined regiment like the Royal Welch, in which Sassoon (and Graves) served.
“Jack fell as he would have wished / The mother said”: the stock figure of the grieving mother opens this poem: a familiar, emotive image of loss in war. Here, the mother uses an everyday euphemism for dying in war— “Jack fell”— that implies an honourable soldier’s death, falling in action.
“‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something broke…”: Colonels, those responsible for a regiment of soldiers, wrote letters of condolence to the bereaved on behalf of the regiment. As Graves relates in ‘Goodbye to All That’, these letters were often a duty.
“‘We mothers are so proud / Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face bowed.”: The mother speaks as if for all British soldiers: perhaps the consolation that she finds in doing so is in subsuming herself in the collective loss of all the mothers of the nation. At any rate, these words do seem more sentimental than authentic: their clichéd expression helping to repress, perhaps, the great grief of the woman.
“Quietly the Brother Officer went out”: ‘Brother Officer’ is an unusual term— an example of military language being used in a way that is jarring at the beginning of the stanza. The camaraderie of the army, the special fellowship of men in service is introduced into the poem here.
“…poor old dear …gallant lies”: these words imply a distance that the first stanza’s heartfelt scene did not hint at.
“While he coughed and mumbled…”: the officer’s awkwardness in passing on condolences is understandable. The reason for the officer’s embarrassment only later becomes obvious.
“brimmed with joy, / Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.”: the alliteration in these lines, expressing the devastation of the mother, is clever. The effect of the repeated ‘b’s is to convey her restrained tears and give a suggestion of tremulously spoken words— of repressing the need to cry, of blubbering.
“He thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine, / Had panicked”: it is interesting to note the recurrence of the name ‘Jack’ in Sassoon’s poems. Sassoon was known as ‘Mad Jack’ by his men because of his almost suicidal bravery in battle. To name the coward and object of contempt in this poem ‘Jack’, then, is an interesting turn. Perhaps this ‘Jack’ is a kind of alter-ego for Sassoon, as, in a sense, was ‘Mad Jack’; a guilty idea of another self against whom Sassoon opposed himself (as a poet-warrior, with some success).
“How he’d tried / To get sent home”: Jack has attempted to get a ‘Blighty’ wound— an injury that would get him sent home to ‘Blighty’, or Britain, in the slang of the time. This act of desperation— shooting oneself in the foot through sandbags, holding a hand above the parapet in a sniper zone, and so on— was not an uncommon recourse to those desperate to escape the Western front.
“…and how, at last, he died, / Blown to small bits.”: the grisly contrast of the soldier’s death to the heroism supposed in the poem’s title is clear. ‘Jack’ is “blown to bits” by a shell or a mine: the plosive sound, ‘b’ echoing the sound of the explosive and its effect on the unfortunate soldier. The halting rhythm of the line, with pauses following each stressed word (“how”, “last”, “died”), lends a sense of inevitability to Jack’s end.
“And no-one seemed to care / Except that lonely woman with the white hair.”: The final couplet is explicit, objective and powerful. The illusion of the opening stanza is replaced two related scenes of devastation: the fragmented body of the dead soldier, Jack, and the tragic image of the “lonely woman with the white hair”.
1917
“Groping along the tunnel, step by step”: The poem begins with a sense of struggle as the reader is thrust directly into the action, beginning with the verb, “groping”. With this the reader is made immediately aware of the sense of touch on which the soldier is dependent, and how difficult it is to negotiate the tunnel, “step by step”.
“He winked his prying torch with patching glare”: The darkness in the tunnel is absolute, save for the inadequate light from the soldier’s torch, which acts as a searching eye— winking, prying and glaring. The torch only illuminates in patches, however: the soldier cannot see all around him, adding to the sense of threat.
“sniffed the unwholesome air.”: Denied vision, the sense of smell becomes acute. The lack of vision in this poem becomes symbolic of a lack of rationality that becomes more acute as the poem goes on: the soldier must rely on more direct and possibly irrational senses, like smell and touch. Note the sibilance of “side to side, and sniffed”: suggesting sniffing itself, perhaps, or the serpentine sway of the torch. The air is “unwholesome” perhaps because of lingering gas— or death.
“Tins, boxes, bottles… the mattress from a bed”: The first stanza effectively establishes a subterranean world without light. The second stanza surprises, therefore, with a shift to more familiar and homely objects. The effect here, however, is to create a sense of weird uneasiness, of the familiar appearing strangely. Sigmund Freud called this effect unheimlich (literally, German for ‘unhomely’) and we translate it as the ‘uncanny’: its psychological effect is disconcerting.
“exploring fifty feet below / The rosy gloom of battle overhead”: the extreme depth in which the soldier moves implies an almost absolute removal from the world of the surface and the fighting above, imagined as a “rosy gloom”. Fire lights the smoke of battle, perhaps: but the “rosy gloom” also voices an almost attractive quality to the grim scene above, highlighting the sense of isolation of the soldier. There is a sense that the soldier is exploring a completely ‘other’ realm. The assonance here may also suggest the muffled resonance of the bombs above.
“Tripping, he grabbed the wall”: A return to the use of a verb to begin the line, highlighting a loss of control and again, the desperate dependency of the soldier on touch.
“saw someone lie / Humped at his feet, half hidden…”: The soldier discovers what he takes to be a sleeping man.
“‘God blast your neck!’ (For days he’d had no sleep,)”: the tension that the soldier feels leads to a frustrated outburst: the parenthesis here explains the intense impatience and envy that the soldier feels for the “sleeper” he has discovered. Note, as ever, Sassoon’s assured use of colloquial language.
“Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap…”: The gradual shedding of layers of humanity in the poem so far culminates in the word ‘Savage’: summing up the sense of atavistic disorder the soldier finds himself in. ‘The Rear-Guard’ is in many ways about human beings reverting to a less developed, animalistic, inhuman state: perhaps this is why the poem at times is reminiscent of HG Wells’ The Time Machine, with the time traveler exploring the realm of the degenerate subterranean Morlocks. Loss of vision, rationality, co-ordination and disorder in an underworld hell represent the violent intellectual and moral collapse of the Western world.
“…the livid face / Terribly glaring up…”: a double meaning. ‘Livid’ of course means ‘angry’ but also originally and literally here, ‘black-and-blue’— the colour of bruises. The use of the present continuous— “glaring”— again gives the disconcerting sense that the dead man is dead, yet somehow alive.
“Agony dying hard… And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound”: The man’s face is frozen in a death-mask of horror and agony. “Fists of fingers” returns us again to a repulsive and frightening world of touch, here clutching the festering wound.
“Alone he staggered on…”: This line begins with a state and then moves to the verb, unlike those previous lines already commented on. The prime impression here is then of the soldiers loneliness in the tunnel and his sense of isolation as he stands next to the ten-day old corpse.
“Dawn’s ghost…”: the weak light of dawn is evoked in this supernatural metaphor. It is interesting to note that although this poem stages a classical descent into the underworld or journey into hell, metaphorically speaking the world above is a realm of the supernatural. Part of the bleakness of the poem is that neither upper nor lower realm has any sense of peace or consolation; unrest dominates both spaces, and the world of light, while a relief from darkness, remains troubling.
“…the dazed, muttering creatures underground”: the world below is not populated by human beings but by those reduced to inhuman ‘creatures’; demons, perhaps, or creatures from myth.
“Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.”: again, the use of onomatopoeia here (“boom”, “muffled”) gives a sense of the continuous din coming from the world above.
“…with sweat of horror in his hair,”: a last description that reprises the grim sensuality of the poem, especially that of touch: the soldier is in a cold, fearful sweat and feels this creep over the crown of his head in the stairway draught. The use of alliteration (“horror…hair”) suggests the heavy breath of the soldier.
“He climbed through darkness to the twilight air…”: the gathering purpose of the soldier is emphasised by the second line of the couplet, as the soldier escapes the tunnels and the dark— into the half-light of the world above.
“Unloading hell behind him step by step.”: the final line makes explicit the meaning of the narrative, as a journey into and return from the underworld— like Orpheus in Greek myth, or the Harrowing of Hell in the Christian apocrypha. Hell takes on something of its original religious power here. ‘Hell’ in everyday language or conversation is an abstract idea, a metaphor: “I’ve been through hell”, we say, but this is ultimately a figure of speech. However hell in the world of belief is not a figure of speech but a literal thing, an actual space. In this poem, the soldier makes a journey not into a metaphorical hell, but to a literal, twentieth century hell. “Unloading” conveys the physical relief that climbing out of the tunnel, and so climbing out of that underworld hell, brings. Yet the poem ends, bleakly, where it began: in ponderous movement, ‘step by step’.
1917
“‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said'”: the breeziness of the General and his pleasant demeanor is used as a powerful contrast to the consequences of his actions. Sassoon’s satirical representation of the General is clever: it suggests (perhaps unfairly) that his upbeat nature somehow reflects a lack of seriousness with which he takes his charge.
“on our way to the line.”: the soldiers are making their way to the front.
“most of ’em dead”: the inverted comma signifies the lower-class accent of the speaker and dropping of the ‘th’ sound. This class voice gives the poem a more subversive tone. The consequences of the cheery General’s actions are devastating.
“And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine”: the representatives of the General staff— those soldiers working administratively at the General’s command— were often intensely disliked by the average soldier. Here, their incompetence disgusts the soldiers.
“‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack”: the soldiers see the General as a ‘card’, or ‘character’. Their tone is generous, given the physical effort they are making (“grunted”). The names of the soldiers are common and denote that they are ‘typical’ Tommies. This is, obviously, an emotive move: the irony of the men’s appreciative statement shortly becomes clear.
“slogged up to Arras”: The Battle of Arras, April-May 1917 (see above).
“But he did for them both by his plan of attack.”: the single, end-stopped line at the end of the poem is dramatic, and is the pointed lesson of this poem: that the General and his staff are responsible for the death of the men.
1917
Glory of Women: ‘Glory’ is a religious word; a divine light that shines from the sacred. Something glorious is something worthy of honour, or praise— here, this poem purports to write about the honour or praiseworthiness of women. In this poem, therefore, the ‘Glory of Women’ is considered ironically.
STRUCTURE: ‘Glory of Women’ is a sonnet. The choice of a sonnet is again ironic— sonnets, of course, being traditionally associated with love. The poem is not necessarily a traditionally structured sonnet, however. The ‘volta’, or ‘turn’ of meaning or focus in the poem occurs before the sextet, as is traditional. There is a turn from detailing what Sassoon takes to be British women’s attitudes towards soldiering and war to a more savage imagery that shows the women to be deluded. There is also, unconventionally, an even more pronounced turn that occurs in the final three lines, as the shocking ending turns from British women to the German mother.
“You love us when we’re heroes…”: from the first, this poem has a confrontational, accusatory tone, with the direct address of ‘you’ from a notional ‘us’; the voice of a male soldier. The idea of conditional love here— “when we’re heroes”— is the first sign of an accusation of hypocrisy leveled at women.
“Or wounded in a mentionable place”: the suggestion is that female loyalty depends on the wound that a soldier sustains, and that it must not be socially embarrassing for women to relate.
“You worship decorations”: the essential superficiality of the feminine viewpoint is suggested by the idea of worshipping “decorations”— another name for medals.
“you believe / That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.”: Sassoon suggests that women romanticise the war, focusing on “chivalry” and honour. The war, meanwhile, is described as being precisely dishonorable: it is a “disgrace”.
“You make us shells.”: women, Sassoon suggests, are complicit in the violence, because they are involved in the manufacture of weapons.
“You listen with delight, / By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.”: the strong rhythm imparted by the alliteration here— “delight”, “dirt”, “danger”— gives a sense of a compelling parlour narrative.
“You crown our distant ardours…And mourn our laurelled memories…”: the most sarcastic lines in the poem, employing commonplace, romantic phrases and suggesting this is the limit of women’s understanding of war. To “crown… distant ardours” means to be the focus of the men’s desires; the “laurelled memories” talked of are the thoughts of the men killed and victorious (thus presented with laurel wreaths) in battle. Note the repetition of ‘our’ here; the opposition of men and women is particularly strongly sustained in these lines.
“You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire'”: The beginning of the ‘sextet’ or final six lines of a sonnet. The poem turns from romantic images of men prevalent at home to the true actions of men in war. To ‘retire’, here, is a euphemism for retreat.
“Hell’s last horror… Trampling the terrible corpses— blind with blood”: The alliteration here accentuates the vicious and desperate retreat of the men. The aspirate ‘h’ sounds recall the heavy breath of the running men, the harsher ‘t’ sounds the crushing of bones underfoot, while the plosive ‘b’s almost mimics the projection of blood itself.
“O German mother dreaming by the fire…”: the sudden turn to the presentation of a German mother at home is surprising for the reader, after the focus on the insensitivities and moral complicity of British women in the war. In some ways she is presented more sympathetically than British women: her “dreaming”, because not elaborated on, doesn’t seem as immediately corrupt as that of British women.
“While you are knitting socks… His face is trodden deeper in the mud.”: The final couplet is deliberately shocking. The contrast between the thoughtful domestic scene and the utter savagery of a human head being stood on is horrifying, and meant as a corrective to the illusion that dominates the poem. The brutal truth, Sassoon insists, is a factual corrective to delusion.
April 1919
“Everyone suddenly burst out singing;”: the “Everyone” of this poem refers to a group of men singing and celebrating. The emphatic description of ‘everyone’ singing captures the broader tone of celebration of the human spirit that this poem contains.
“I was filled with such delight / As prisoned birds must find in freedom”: the conventional symbolism— that of a freed, flying bird embodying the human spirit— nonetheless captures the sense of release that the singing brings.
“Winging wildly across the white / Orchards and dark-green fields;”: the alliteration introduces a wheeling rhythm to the end of the stanza, until we gain the perspective of the freed bird, looking down on the countryside below. There is a real sense of the expanding horizons that the singing- and coming of peace- brings.
“on— on— and out of sight.”: a ponderous and deliberately slowed passage that reintroduces the listener as one gazing out at the freed bird as it flies away.
“Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;”: Repeating the literal phrasing of the poem’s first line, the beginning of the second verse is both literal and metaphorical. The voices sing higher and louder, but the ‘lifting’ of the voices here also suggests elevation here— a transcendental tone. This metaphor of “lifted” voices logically follows on from the prior image of flight.
“beauty came like the setting sun:”: Sassoon again uses conventional imagery, here that of the beautiful, setting sun. Sassoon uses a language here that in other hands might seem hackneyed or clichéd, but manages to convey a purity of experience. The simpler and more archetypal the imagery, perhaps, the better to evoke the emotional power of the singing men. The “setting sun” here suggests death, sublime beauty- and an end.
“My heart was shaken with tears: and horror drifted away…”: the emotional and spiritual power of the song moves the listener so that their worst thoughts and memories of the war “drifted away”. Through the singing they escape the war and rediscover their common humanity. This lifting of horror, like mist or fog, is captured in the pause denoted by the ellipses.
“O, but Everyone / Was a bird;”: the suggestive capitalisation of “Everyone” here seems to suggest that ‘everyone’ in the poem have for a short while have assumed the freedom of transcendence, of becoming more than themselves. Note the building intensity in this verse, as sub-clause follows sub-clause, leading to the cry of ‘O’, and sense of profound emotional release in the last two lines.
“and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.”: The sense that the listeners experience is sublime and timeless is profound; moving beyond words, to suggest here a religious image of the eternal singing of men.
1916
STRUCTURE: ‘Rain’ is written in blank verse— Iambic Pentameter without rhyme. This is one of the most common verse forms in English, but Thomas experiments with it very effectively. He plays with the rhythm and intensity of each line through a number of different means, each intended to give a sense of the increasing and decreasing intensity of the rain on the sounding walls of the hut, and the poet’s response to this. To create this effect, Thomas uses repetition, clever internal rhyming and also uses the spondee— a metre where two syllables within a foot have equal weight. Another feature of the poem is that it is a monologue, giving us entry into Thomas’ thoughts in solitude, in which the reader is an implied listener— ‘hearing’ the immediate fears and thoughts of the poet.
“Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain…”: The poem opens describing a rainstorm at night in the kind of plain, conversational language that is a feature of the poem. In lyric poetry the use of rain to suggest sadness and melancholy might ordinarily be thought clichéd: Thomas is careful, then, to convey his thought and sensations in deliberately pared-down, simple terms. The poem’s tone is as a consequence disarmingly open, even confessional. This line introduces two important technical features of the poem. The first is the repetition of words— “rain” here, but also “solitude”, and “love”— that becomes a feature of the poem. “Rain” alone is repeated throughout the poem seven times, and in this first line as later, the repetition conveys not only the insistent force of the rainstorm outside but the also heightened consciousness of the listener. The second feature is the rhythmical variation in this and other lines. The regularity of the iambic pentameter is often challenged by the use of repeated stresses. Here Thomas uses spondee, that is, stressing two syllables in a row, and in poetry the effect of this is often to slow down the pace of a line. Along with the pauses denoted by the commas in the opening line, this gives the effect of a quickening and slowing of pace— the sort of rhythm you might hear as you listen to sheets of rain against your roof or window in a blustery storm. So the line scans something like this: “RAIN, MIDnight RAIN, NOTHing BUT the WILD RAIN…”. Thomas connects this insistent and slow spondee rhythm with the word “rain”: as with “wild rain” here (repeated again at the end of the poem).
“On this bleak hut, and solitude…”: the poem begins with a melancholic, contemplative tone. “Rain”, “nothing”, “bleak”, “solitude”, “me”: these words suggest the introspective, lonely and rather depressed nature of Thomas’ thoughts. As critic Bernard Bergonzi points out in ‘Heroes Twilight’, Thomas talked of his “elaborate self consciousness” which one perceptive doctor recognized led him to depression and illness (p. 79). Note, indeed, the complicated elaboration on his thoughts and feelings over these first six lines: Thomas using enjambement to convey the flow of his conscious mind.
“…and me / Remembering again that I shall die…”: Thomas’ solitude, with a heightened consciousness of his surroundings and himself, brings about what is known as an epiphany— a sudden realisation of profound meaning— in Thomas’ recollection of his own mortality.
“And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks…”: the oblivion of death is contrasted to the gift of life. Thomas’ awareness of the falling rain leads to a heightened perception of the world beyond himself.
“For washing me cleaner than I have been / Since I was born into this solitude.”: The image used here is one of ritual cleansing, or ablution. Ablutions— cleaning oneself with intent to purify the self or honour a god— are common rituals in the world’s religions. In this sense the rain comes as a blessing to Thomas; it first awakens him to a consciousness of death, but then provides consolation as a sign of life. Thomas’ deepening sense of a life-long loneliness, however, is emphasised by his second reference to “solitude”.
“Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:”: Thomas pursues the idea of rain being an ablution with the image of rain blessing the dead, and thus cleansing them of sin. Note the spondee here, “rain rains”: conveying the weight of the rain through a repetition of sense and slowing of rhythm.
“But here I pray that none whom once I loved”: Thomas reverts in this line to regular iambic pentameter. The effect is to move from the heightened consciousness of the rain against the roof of the hut— the thrumming that is outside Thomas’ control while the “rain rains”— to a more measured prayer, thus conveying Thomas’ effort of self-control.
“Is dying tonight or lying still awake”: the internal rhyming here— “dying” with “lying”— subtly suggests the rhythmic sheets of rain on the roof, while Thomas’s mind is drawn to those caught outside in the deluge. Thomas is, of course, thinking of those soldiers serving abroad. The rain first led Thomas into isolated self-examination and thoughts of death: his spirit however rebelled, embracing the rain and the living world beyond. This feeling does not last long, however. He is forced into sympathy with those like him: awake in the rainstorm, and conscious of death.
“Solitary, listening to the rain, / Either in pain or thus in sympathy”: Thomas’ own isolation— “solitary” is repeated for a third time here— draws him into agonized kinship with soldiers whom he has known (“whom once I loved”) and the possibility that they are exposed to the rain, whether injured or alone on duty. Thomas again uses internal rhyming here— “rain” and “pain”— to create an echo of the sounding rhythm of the rain. The rhyme also perhaps signifies the growing linkage of the two ideas in Thomas’ mind.
“Helpless among the living and the dead,”: Thomas’s pity here, his reaching out to the exposed and the injured, contains a sense of self-consciousness too, of his own helplessness.
“Like a cold water among broken reeds… all still and stiff / Like me…”: a key simile here, where Thomas pictures those exposed in the rain on the battlefield as being “like a cold water”. This conceit develops the central figure of rain. Rain has brought Thomas to a consciousness of isolation and death, but it has also signified life, and his consciousness of it has encouraged his connection with the wider world. Yet opposed to its vital energy— with which Thomas has carefully suffused the poem and its rhythms— is this image of those whom the rain falls upon. They are imagined as water at rest, cold and without life, “among broken reeds”. These countless broken reeds (“myriads”) are themselves images of broken men (the image is biblical: from Isaiah 36:6). This is an image of abjection, that is, of having fallen to the lowest possible state, of being cast down into suffering. Thomas’ imagination encompasses both the dead and these dying men caught in the rain— he too shares this feeling of abjection. Note the alliteration and assonance Thomas uses— “all still and stiff”— to maintain the strong rhythms of this poem.
“Like me who have no love which this wild rain / Has not dissolved…”: Thomas expresses his kinship with the suffering (“like me”). Previously in the poem Thomas has dwelt on solitude and the rain that has awakened him to a consciousness of both life and death. At the end of the poem, Thomas becomes interested in the role of “love”, the word repeated twice in the lines following. Thomas asserts that the rain has “dissolved” his love: note the continuing use of watery metaphors, as the rain seem to lead to a dissolution of Thomas’ sense of self, of his capacity for love. In literary terms, this is an interesting turn: the rain at the end of the poem is not a clichéd Romantic symbol: it is a kind of solvent for the soul, dissolving the self.
“…except the love of death, / If love it be towards what is perfect…”: the idea that only a “love of death” remains after the self has been stripped away is disturbing, even doubtful (“if love it be”), but Thomas seems to accept oblivion with a cold appreciation of his emotional circumstances. The “love of death” would later, in fact, gain a place in psychological theory. After studying the trauma victims of the Great War, Freud became interested in this drive towards self-oblivion, which he called Thanatos, the death-drive. Freud later developed the idea that this secret drive within the self, opposed to the preserving instinct for life, sought the peace of non-being. Something like a wish for this “perfect” consolation of complete oblivion seems to be conclusion of Thomas at the end of the poem. This is not to say that this poem contains a suicidal wish at the end: rather a wish for non-being, for being out of the world— out of the rain.
“…and / Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.”: the rainstorm, or “tempest”, has brought Thomas a vision of the nature of both life and death— it has spoken to him (“tells me”) and given a glimpse of death that is at once bleak (because like “cold water” it is inert and without life and energy) and yet consoling (because it has “dissolved” conflict).
As the Team’s Head Brass: the ‘team’ are a pair of horses led by the farmer, pulling a plough. The farmer is preparing his land for the sowing of crops; in some ways, this seems to be a timeless agricultural scene. The “head brass” are the metal bridles around the horses’ heads that allow the horses to be led.
STRUCTURE: This is a narrative poem— it tells a short story. It is written in Iambic Pentameter, and has, I think, a Shakespearian feel to it: everyday events and dialogue are elevated to high poetry by Thomas’ feel for the significance of small things.
“As the team’s head brass flashed out on the turn”: time is important in this poem. The poem throws us into events immediately occurring. The flash of the brass in the sunlight as the horses turn at near end of the field punctuates the poem.
“The lovers disappeared into the wood.”: Lovers appear again as key figures in a Thomas poem. We only see them at the beginning and the end of the poem, but they are important symbols of love and life. In ‘In Memorium (Easter 1916)’ and ‘The Cherry Trees’ the absence of lovers is a terrible loss; in ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’ their fleeting presence is a cause for optimism and hope.
“I sat… and watched”: the peaceful watching of the narrator as time passes by gives this poem a thoughtful, ponderous tone.
“the fallen elm / That strewed the angle of a fallow”: the narrator sits on a fallen tree that lies on unploughed (“fallow”) land. The narrator views the farmer working the field just as he views the war in this poem; from the side, at an angle to events.
“Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square of charlock”: charlock, or wild mustard, is a weed that must be cleared on arable land for farming. Thomas’ description of the “yellow square” of weed is precise and vivid. This poem utilises pastoral conventions— for example, suggesting at first the peace of the country as opposed to the war beyond— but only does so to subvert those conventions through a realistic depiction of the effects of the war. English agriculture had been in a long, steep decline since the mid-Victorian age. The countryside was a difficult place to live in 1916: this fact, rather than an idealization of the country life, comes through in Thomas’ poem.
“the ploughman leaned… About the weather, next about the war.”: the farmer turns his horses to work back up the field when he reaches the narrator. They exchange pleasantries, and talk about the war.
“Scraping the share… till the brass flashed / Once more.”: the “share” is the ploughshare, or blade that turns over the ground. He turns over the earth as he ploughs his lines along the field, ‘screwing’ “along the furrow”. When the farmer begins to return towards the narrator, the horses’ bridle flashes as it catches the sun. This flashing punctuates the poem, giving a sense of the slowness of rural rhythms.
“The blizzard felled the elm…”: Thomas preserves the iambic pentameter here as he moves forward in his narrative, beginning a new line below. There is a sense of time having passed, but also of continuity. With the blizzard and the fallen tree, Thomas introduces an image of a mishap caused by natural forces.
“‘When will they take it away?’ / ‘When the war’s over.'”: the dialogue between the farmer and narrator introduces the war for the first time. War and good husbandry seem to be contrasted.
“One minute and an interval of ten…”: the rhythm of the encounter is slow, punctuated by work. The repetition emphasises this.
“Have you been out?’…”: an interesting and wryly humorous conversation begins between the two. The narrator’s answer that he would join up “If I could only come back again…” shows the easiness of the two’s conversation. There is no pretence here, no mock-heroism. There is an almost documentary feeling here, and the absurd, self-deprecating humour of the watching narrator belies the seriousness of the following conversation.
“Only two teams work on the farm this year…”: the significance of the single farmer working this large field is made clear by the manpower shortage caused by the war. This practical aspect is made immediately personal by the farmer’s dead friend.
“The second day / In France they killed him”: this swift killing of new recruits was sadly common; new soldiers often made mistakes that exposed them to enemy fire. Sadly, Edward Thomas himself was one of these unlucky recruits, dying very soon after seeing action.
“The very night of the blizzard, too”: as in ‘In Memoriam (Easter 1915)’ and ‘The Cherry Trees’, Thomas is again effective in making the presence of certain things in nature (a fallen tree) represent the absence of human beings (the man who was killed on the same night that it fell). Similarly, the blizzard here becomes linked in its devastating power to the effects of the fighting on the front.
“Now if he had stayed here we should have moved the tree.”: this irony is really at the heart of the poem’s narrative. The tragedy of the farmer’s friend’s death is relayed in an unsentimental, factual way. A sense of the unremitting pressures of the farmer’s life comes through, perhaps, in his resigned attitude.
“And I should not have sat here… it would have been another world”: Thomas cleverly uses this tree to emphasise the tragedy of lost possibilities that the war has brought. There is a philosophical air to this reflection on change and loss. As we have seen in ‘In Memorium (Easter 1916)’ and ‘The Cherry Trees’, this sense that the world has changed for the worse is insisted on through the small details of life that have been affected by the war.
“Ay, and a better, though if we could see all all might seem good'”: a better world has been lost, agrees the farmer; though he proposes optimistically, as a form of consolation, that in the broader view the loss of his friend might be explained for the good. This comforting faith is the last thing said between the farmer and the narrator.
“Then the lovers came out of the wood again:”: the reappearance of the lovers seems to reinforce this sense of hope near the poems end, yet the final three lines work to subtly undermine this.
“…for the last time / I watched the clods crumble and topple over”: the absorption of the narrator in the action of the plough now seems linked to change, and by extension, the war. The crumbling clods of earth and their toppling as they fall from the plough suggest the change in the world wrought by humans; perhaps also suggesting the falling of men to earth in fields abroad.
“…the stumbling team.”: the “stumbling” of the team suggest the difficulty the farmer continues to face, but also of course the loose footing of life itself
STRUCTURE NOTE: Four stanzas of five lines, comprising three lines of free verse (ABC) and a rhyming couplet (DD). One of the most interesting things about this poem, however, is its exemplary use of alliteration (repetition of consonants for effect) and assonance (repetition of vowel sounds for effect). It is a musical poem, structured by soft sound, throughout using the ‘oh’, ‘oo’, ‘uh’ sounds denoted by the letter ‘O’, but also using ‘I’ and ‘E’ sounds to create different effects. For example, the effect of the varied ‘O’ sounds is mournful; the drawn-out vowels of ‘Ee’ slow the pace of the poem down. Alliteration, found in all four stanzas, also provides an elusive rhythm to the poem. In the first verse, for example, sibilance gives the opening a sound of susurration, of whispering.
To His Love: The poem addresses the lover of the soldier who has died.
“He’s gone… useless indeed”: A blunt and mournful statement of loss; a sense that all earlier plans have been destroyed.
“We’ll walk no more on Cotswold / Where the sheep feed / Quietly…”: the Cotswolds are a famously beautiful part of the English countryside, near where Gurney grew up. Like many of the WWI poets, nature and the countryside provided consoling memories and inspiration, when contrasted to the horrors of war.
“so quick”: quick here takes its older meaning, ‘full of life’.
“His body… is not as you knew it”: The sinister connotations of this euphemism— that the soldier’s body has been maimed or blown apart— provides a grisly hint of what has happened to the soldier at the hands of mechanized weapons, probably shelling.
“on Severn river / Under the blue…”: A powerful contrast between this peaceful image and the horror of what has happened to the soldier. Peaceful and horrific memories struggle with each other here (the Severn is the river that runs through Gloucestershire. Gurney contrasted two rivers in the title of his first poetry collection, Severn and Somme, with broadly the same meaning).
“You would not know him now…”: The ellipsis here seems to suggest that the speaker doesn’t want to pursue that description of the soldier’s body when talking to his lover. Note the subdued tone the varying ‘O’ sounds give the line; and the way the the ‘n’s give the line a stuttering rhythm. This ingenious use of alliteration and assonance can be traced throughout the poem.
“he died / Nobly”: the speaker quickly turns from thinking of the dead body to the noble manner of his death- doing his duty with chivalry.
“cover him over / With violets of pride / Purple”: The flowers will cover him like a shroud. The purple of the violets, like the soldier “from Severn side”, symbolise pride as purple is a colour associated with kingship.
“Cover him, cover him soon!”: The exclaimed repetition of ‘cover him’ shows the desperation and revulsion of the speaker.
“with thick-set / Masses of memoried flowers—” The flowers must cover him ‘thickly’ to hide the horror of the body underneath. Memories of the man fight against the traumatic image of the maimed body: the flowers symbolising happier times on the Severn. This is also, in psychological terms, an account of what Freud termed repression: to turn away from, censor or bury a memory.
“Hide that red wet / Thing”: The imprecision of description of the ‘red wet Thing’— his friend’s bloody and maimed body— suggests the unspeakable violence done to it.
“I must somehow forget”: The last word demonstrates the tension between remembrance and forgetting that the poem says is necessary for all soldiers who have seen the consequences of bloody combat.
STRUCTURE NOTE: The poem has a traditional ballad or song structure. It consists of an alternating rhyme scheme ABAB in quatrain form, simple and to the purpose of telling a supernatural tale, a common subject for ballads.
Ballad of the Three Spectres: While superficially lighter in tone than ‘To His Lover’, this is a poem that confronts the typical soldier’s anxiety about his unseen future and his fear of death. Gurney adapts traditional figures from literature and myth in his ballad, presenting three ghosts who prophesy or determine a man’s future. In Greek myth the Moirae, or Fates, were three terrifying goddesses who spun, measured and cut the threads of every mortal’s life— determining their fate. The witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth are similarly fatal prophesiers: as, ultimately, are the warning spirits in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
“As I went up by Ovilliers / In mud and water cold to the knee” : the poem begins with a realistic scene in France, as a soldier tramps through the flooded British trenches. The realism of the scene ‘grounds’ the fantastical element, making it more believable.
“three jeering, fleering spectres”: three laughing, mocking ghosts.
“That walked abreast”: The spectres march three in a line- they are the ghosts of soldiers. This martial discipline adds to the strange drama of the encounter.
“Here’s a right brave soldier”: the first ghost speaks sarcastically and insultingly about the speaker’s bravery.
“he’ll come back on a fine stretcher, / Laughing for a nice Blighty”: the ghost suggests that the soldier will manage to get a ‘Blighty wound’— a minor wound that will nonetheless have him sent him home to Britain (‘Blighty’ in slang) for the rest of the war. He is insinuating that soldier is a clever coward.
“No kind of lucky chance I see…he’ll freeze into mud to the marrow”: another note of grim realism. The ghost suggests that the soldier will end up dying of hypothermia— possibly stuck in one of the pond-sized craters in no-man’s-land, unable to scramble up the loose earth out of the freezing water.
“Picardie”: a French town.
“Curses the third spat venomously”: the last of the spectres is the most malevolent, and curses the soldier.
“He’ll stay untouched…then live one hour of agony”: this ghost predicts a soldier’s common and dreaded fear: that he will be forced to live through the hell of the war in its entirety, only to be killed in “agony” at its very end.
“at sloping arms by one- two- three”: the soldier is drilling. “Sloping arms” was one way of ‘presenting arms’ or holding his rifle. “By one- two- three” describes the action of moving the rifle during drill.
“Waiting the time…Whether the third spoke verity”: ‘Verity’ here means ‘truthfully’. The fate of the soldier is to wait until the last day of the war to see whether the third spectre’s prophesy will come true or not. All three options are unpleasant to some degree, but the first two spectre’s predictions have been proved false. The third prophesy is chilling, and sums up the uncertainty and anxiety the soldier must live with in war. The soldier must be resigned to his fate.
“The plunging limbers over the shattered track / Racketed”: In his novel ‘Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four!’ RH Mottram writes of “a string of square boxes on wheels, known as limbers… being drawn with a springless rattle”. In the events described in ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, the limbers are pulled by mules led by the soldier. Here the limbers similarly rattle noisily (note the onomatopoeia of the word “racketed”) as they bump along, “plunging” on the broken track that runs through the battlefield. Rosenberg begins this poem with a detailed, descriptive realism.
“rusty freight”: the limbers contain long spools or coils of rusty barbed wire, for use in defence against German attack.
“Stuck out like many crowns of thorns”: The barbed wire overspills the top of the limbers, their coils resembling the crown placed on Jesus’ head before his crucifixion. The simile recalls this torment, and with a conventional symbolism suggests the suffering inflicted on the common soldier in battle.
“the rusty stakes like sceptres old”: The limbers also carry the metal stakes which are rammed or, corkscrew-like, twisted into the ground to support the barbed wire: these, perhaps, have nub-like heads that remind the poet of “sceptres” (ceremonial staffs held by royalty as a symbol of authority). The contrast implied by the comparing a rusty metal pole with such a prestigious object ironically attributes to the fence-stakes a magical power or authority on the front line, demonstrating their power over men.
“To stay the flood of brutish men / Upon our brothers dear.”: To “stay” here means to stop. Bergonzi interestingly suggests that the image of an old sceptre holding back a flood recalls the “fruitless” actions of the legendary British King Canute (who tried to command the tides of the sea)— suggesting the wire may similarly also fail to hold the tide ( or “flood”) of the dehumanised enemy (“brutish men”) back.
“The wheels lurched over sprawled dead / But pained them not,”: The wheels of the limbers roll over the insensible bodies of the dead in No-Man’s Land. This horrible task, described by Rosenberg unflinchingly (“their bones crunched”), is the horrifying inspiration for the poem.
“They lie there huddled, friend and foeman…”: There is an equality or “kinship” (brotherhood) in death on the battlefield for all these “men born of women”.
“Shells go crying over them / From night till night and now.”: The shrieking sound of the shells that go “crying” over the dead men ironically recall the terrible cries of those who will mourn the dead. The repetition of “night” draws out and slows the following line: the unburied bodies continue to be exposed to the violence of battle.
“Earth has waited for them…”: Earth is personified here as a kind of monstrous goddess, famished and anxious (“fretting”) for the death of the men, “all the time of their growth”. This is a bleak vision of life as a brief time of vigour before inevitable death and decay— before being reclaimed by the dust.
“Now she has them at last!”: the earth has caught the fighting men at the height of their youth and strength (“in the strength of their strength”). Her power is greater than theirs, however, and they are “stopped and held”. Rosenberg also perhaps here suggests the frozen pose of men’s bodies half caught on the wire where they died— “suspended”.
“What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?”: Another typical Rosenberg question, much like the poet’s question to the rat—”What do you see in our eyes?”— in ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’. The phrasing of this question is difficult: It seems to speculate on Earth’s nightmarish obsession with reclaiming or consuming the dead men’s now “dark souls”.
“Earth! Have they gone into you?”: With urgency, the poet addresses Earth herself, desperate to know where the men’s souls have gone.
“…flung on your hard back / Is their soul’s sack”: the men’s bodies are compared to sacks lying on the “hard back” of the ground, “emptied of God-ancestralled essences”. This metaphor suggests that the men’s souls— their “God-ancestralled”, or God-created essences— have left the cheap and heavy material of their bodies.
“Who hurled them out? Who hurled?”: Rosenberg voices the essential horror of this casting out (“hurled”) of the precious soul from the body in the moment of death. Again, Rosenberg is not afraid of reminding us of the terrible lack of meaning that seems to be presented to man by the horror and death of the Western front.
“None saw their spirits’ shadows shake the grass…”: There is almost a sense of wonder at the easy passing of the insubstantial soul, and an easing of the hysteria of the previous lines. Note the softening sibilance of these lines.
“When the swift iron burning bee / Drained the wild honey of their youth”: The pastoral imagery here— of a bee drinking honey— suggests the draining of blood from young men by the “swift iron” of bullets. To compare a bullet to a bee works aurally: both ‘buzz’ or ‘zip’ as they fly. The alliteration found in the phrase “burning bee” might also be intended to recall, at some distance, the sound of guns firing.
“What of us, who flung on the shrieking pyre…”: The poem turns its attention to the survivors who, bemused and guilty, continue living. A pyre is a pile of wood, burnt during ritual cremations, or as in ancient Celtic ceremonies, to sacrifice the living: here Rosenberg seem to be subverting the notion of sacrifice, transforming its transcendental Christian connotations into horrific images of the burning the living (continuing the metaphor of “burning” from the prior stanza).
“Our lucky limbs on ichor fed, / Immortal seeming ever?”: Ichor was the golden blood of the ancient Greek gods (compare the earlier image of “wild honey” running through the veins of the youthful soldiers). This classical reference recalls Homer and verse composed in praise of heroes; though the questioning and irony here— that the surviving soldiers are far from immortal— conveys a sense of bemusement at the men’s survival.
“Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, / A fear may choke in our veins…”: The poet anticipates the burning of the survivors in the conflagration of battle, and this causing death through sheer fear.
“The air is loud with death, / The dark air spurts with fire…”: the verse becomes regular at the start of this stanza, using iambic trimeter (“the AIR / is LOUD / with DEATH”). Rosenberg depicts an immediate, apocalyptic scene with an insistent, strident rhythm aided by strong alliteration and assonance: it is the relentlessness of the war that he seeks to convey.
“Timelessly now, some minutes past, / These dead strode time with vigorous life…”: the stanza now changes rhythm, the lines lengthening. Time also becomes problematic here: the near past, only “minutes past”, when the men marched ‘in time’, is now gone forever, ended by the shrapnel of shells.
“Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home…”: almost a stab at sentimentality here- the dying men dream of distant home.
“A man’s brains splattered on / a stretcher bearer’s face…”: the open affection of the previous line (“dear things”) is immediately undercut by the grisly realism of a stretcher bearer, his face smeared with gore, attempting to lift the body of a dying man from the battlefield.
“His shook shoulders slipped their load,”: the revulsion the stretcher bearer feels as he realises that the man’s brains are on his face leads to an instinctive, horrified shrug- so that the injured soldier’s body slips from his grasp. The clever sibilance in this line seems to suggest both the bearer’s difficulty with the slick body (which falls from his grasp), and the dying man’s loose hold on life.
“The drowning soul was sunk too deep / For human tenderness”: the man dies. What remains becomes a lifeless thing, pitiful but inert. Note that Rosenberg uses images of drowning in this poem to suggest the moment of death.
“They left this dead with the older dead, / Stretched at the cross roads.”: the stretcher bearers leave the man with a pile of older corpses. The image of leaving the body “at the cross roads” here is haunting, recalling myth— the crossroads are a place for travellers on a journey, and here that journey marks the movement of the men’s spirits to another world. The act of leaving sacrifices at crossroads is especially associated with ancient and pagan myth; Hecate, a powerful Greek goddess of magic, death and rebirth, received dedications there. Rosenberg therefore uses what is known as a ‘liminal’ image, suggesting here an uncertain road from one state to another. In a sense this poem seeks to show that No-Man’s Land is a terrifying ‘liminal’ place, a strip of land where the living and the dead meet: a crossroads between life and death.
“Burnt black by strange decay, / Their sinister faces lie;”: in this hellish image the decomposing bodies— “burnt black” with their “sinister faces”— seem to threaten the living, though they remain inert and motionless, “joined to the great sunken silences” of the non-living.
“Here is one not long dead;”: the soldier’s roving eye alights on a body fresher than the rest. He imagines or recounts the dead man’s last living moments as he hears the “far wheels” of the limber-truck moving towards him. These moments are defined by a grasping confusion as the man clings to life, which Rosenberg suggests by using contradictory, paradoxical phrases and images that subtly undermine their own claim to meaning. So, for example, there is the dying man’s “dark hearing”, which uses colour to describe an aural process of diminishing hearing; a “choked soul”, describing the soul in terms of a strangulated body, reaching out; the wheels of the limber-truck speak “living words”; the dying man’s intelligence is “blood-dazed”; and so on. Cutting through this confusion is the pitiful terror of the man as he waits to be found, “crying through the suspense of the far-torturing wheels”.
“Swift for the end to break, / Or the wheels to break,”: the phrasing here continues to suggest confusion and a desperation to live (what will ultimately “break”? – “the end” or “the wheels”? If “the end” breaks, does that uncertain phrasing mean he shall live or die? Similarly, if “the wheels” break, does that mean an end to the torture of waiting, alone, for death?). This uncertainty is ended by quickly advancing death itself. Rosenberg describes this through an image of drowning beneath a tsunami-like diluvian flood, “the tide of the world”: it is this which finally ‘breaks’ “over his sight”.
“Will they come? Will they ever come?”: the desperation of the dying man reaches its greatest height as he waits for a fellow human being to find him.
“Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules…”: the poem moves towards its grim conclusion; the mules pulling the limber trucks draw close by. The visual perspective of the dying man, lying on the ground looking upwards, “with his tortured upturned sight”, is emphasised in these lines; he sees the mule’s hooves and their twitching (“quivering”) bellies, and the “rushing wheels” of the limbers. The repetition of the words “mixed… mules… mules… mixed” seems significant too, perhaps intended by Rosenberg to suggest the sound of the turning (perhaps squeaking) wheels that greet the soldier as they ride over the ground.
“So we crashed around the bend”: the sense of perspective suddenly shifts back again to the soldier who is out wiring. The adjective “crashed” suggests a clumsiness to the wiring team that is quite removed from the quietly tortured personal drama related just prior.
“We heard his weak scream, / We heard his very last sound…”: the anaphora (that is, the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of a line) of “We heard his… We heard his…” seems to relate something of the mechanical response of the wiring soldiers to the horror around them as they work, their necessary desensitisation to the carts’ “wheels” grazing a “dead face”. The reader feels immediately the terrible pathos and irony of the moment, Rosenberg having effectively organised the narrative of the poem so that a response of horror or shame is unavoidable. On the other hand, it also seems that it is only by reconstructing and then reflecting on such a grim battlefield scene that the dehumanised battlefield can be made human once more. ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ attempts to reclaim the thousands of anonymous deaths that took place in No-Man’s Land back to the world of memory and the living- reclaiming them from the insensible wheels of war that turn throughout the poem.
Mans in humanity to man
Exhaustion and suffering
The – hyphens emphasises the difference “joy-joy-strange joy”
“Her kisses where a serpent hides” unaware beauty hides danger. Moments of beauty distract from real dangers
Petrarchan sonnet with a Shakespearean rhyme scheme and is an elegy or lament for the dead. Owen’s meter is mostly iambic pentameter with some small derivations that keep the reader on his or her toes as they read. The meter reinforces the juxtapositions in the poem and the sense of instability caused by war and death
Volta shifts poem from trenches to home front
Owen begins with a bitter tone as he asks rhetorically what “passing-bells” of mourning will sound for those soldiers who die like cattle in an undignified mass. They are not granted the rituals and rites of good Christian civilians back home. They do not get real prayers, only rifle fire. Their only “choirs” are of shells and bugles. This first set of imagery is violent, featuring weapons and harsh noises of war. It is set in contrast to images of the church; Owen is suggesting organized religion cannot offer much consolation to those dying on the front. Kenneth Simcox writes, “These religious images…symbolize the sanctity of life – and death – while suggesting also the inadequacy, the futility, even meaninglessness, of organized religion measured against such a cataclysm as war. To ‘patter out’ is to intone mindlessly, an irrelevance. ‘Hasty’ orisons are an irreverence. Prayers, bells, mockeries only.”
In the second stanza the poem slows down and becomes more dolorous, less enraged. The poet muses that the young men will not have candles – the only light they will get will be the reflections in their fellow soldiers’ eyes. They must have substitutions for their coffin covers (“palls”), their flowers, and their “slow dusk”. The poem has a note of finality, of lingering sadness and an inability to avoid the reality of death and grief.
Deconstructs images of glory and heroism- deglamourises
Tone- eternal doom, bleak, utterly hopeless. Lacks sentiment, lets immagery speak for itself
“Guttering, choking, drowning” verbs ending in ing are present participles- he’s still living it
Not about pity but lack of humanity.
Naive soldiers own pity’s
“A lamp winked to the guard” sinister plot to withhold truth from naive idealistic recruits, lamp personified.
The opening line beginning “It seemed that……” ushers into a dream-like world in which a meeting for the two protagonists is for us a meeting with ambiguity. “I knew we stood in hell,” says the first speaker. A strange meeting in an even stranger meeting place for what will become an act of grace. A strange meeting and an even stranger fate for ones who are war’s innocent victims.
Who is the first speaker? We might assume it is Owen himself, the first-person narrator, yet the second speaker is one who delivers the message-Owen’s message. There will be further ambiguities yet.
Structurally the poem comprises 44 lines of iambic pentameter divided into three irregular stanzas which do not correspond exactly with the poem’s natural constituents. The pararhymed couplets, as with the metre, are subject to minor variations.
In lines 1 – 3 Owen sets the scene. Holes, caverns, tunnels – these form a recurring image in his mind and find their way into the poems. “Titanic Wars” imply not just Owen’s war but conflicts throughout history on a gigantic scale. At the outset we are made to realise that past and present interfuse as, later in the poem, will the future also. This is Owen reaching out to an altogether new dimension.
Lines 4 – 10. “Encumbered” by their uniform and kit but also they carry with them the burden of suffering. “Sleepers”. More ambiguity here, for although one man springs up and lifts his hands his smile is dead while others are “fast in thought or death…..” So often in this poem we find ourselves on the edge of certainty. The two men had already shared one terrible, intimate moment – the moment of killing. Now comes recognition. “Piteous” – not pitying of course but calling for pity which explains why ambiguity attaches to why the distressful hands are lifted.
Lines 11 – 13. Those “thousand pains” are the legacy of war inflicted in life not after-life. In this hell there is relief, “no blood”, “no guns thumped or….made moan”. War – hell. In what relation to each other do they stand?
Line 14. The narrator introduces their one-sided dialogue with a paradox – “strange friend”.
Lines 15 -29. Whereupon there ensues a homily on the true purpose of poetry. Whatever hopelessness of the “undone years” it is a purpose they both share.
Whatever hope is yours Was my life also; A shared purpose. A shared identity also? Is the doppelganger theory valid here? Yes or no the “hunting wild after the wildest beauty in the world” corresponds to Owen’s high-sounding quest for beauty and truth which in former days he believed he had inherited from Keats and Shelley but which was really a substitute for thought and experiences he had not yet undergone. A continuation along these lines might have achieved something but not what was to be the core of his short life’s work: The pity of war, the pity distilled.
Distilled. The pure essence. Pity without any emotional by-products. Meanwhile the poet-prophet faces a probable future when a world shattered by war is accepted as the norm and endures a further regression into “this retreating world” – a frightening, and accurate, prediction of events.
Lines 30-39. Here the two strands – the aim and rationale of poetry and the predicted course of events come together in a movingly expressed blueprint for the cleansing of the human spirit. As poetry’s disciple Owen is able to claim the courage, mystery, wisdom, mastery to combat the march from progress and finally when the retreat can go no further, “when much blood had clogged their chariot wheels”, to bring life-giving water from “sweet wells” and reveal “truths that lie too deep for taint”. To this end, says Owen, I would have poured my spirit without stint.
Line 40 – 44. “My friend”. Such a contrast to the former bitterly ironic “my friend” of “Dulce et decorum est”. The conjunction of “enemy” and “friend” is another paradox but without a sense of jarring. This final section brings a change of tone with nothing high-flown but plain, mostly one-syllable language, the simplicity of fulfilment. Paradoxically again, blindness is lifted in the tunnel’s dark.
“I parried”, says the man killed. “As if to bless”, had said previously the man who killed him. STRANGE MEETING brings with it many entanglements that make a final judgement improbable, perhaps inappropriate.
Does “Let us sleep now…..” suggest a work unfinished? Maybe. At least the important message is clear, that mankind must seek reconciliation and “the truth untold” embrace pity and the greater love.
Rosenburg's Break of Day: Rat Superiority. (2017, Dec 16). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/paper-on-ww1-poetry/
