http://www.rjgeib.com/heroes/owen/owen-poetry.html
There is, in my view, no better war poem than Dulce et decorum est.
I prefer a little known work by Pte Sodoff Baldrick who was killed in 1917.
Boom Boom Boom Boom
Boom Boom Boom Boom
Boom Boom Boom Boom
The brutal simplicity of his poem about the guns firing on the front sums up the misery of the Front Line Trenches.
The poem was “The German Guns.”
And the final scenes in that series capture the pointlessness of the whole exercise of WWI brilliantly, not least when he asks Capt. Blackadder
“Why can’t we just stop sir? Why can’t we just say ‘no more killing, let’s all go home’? Why would it be stupid just to pack it in, sir? Why”
Which evokes Tennyson:
“Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die…”
Watched a good BBC programme on Owen today, very poignant. Poor guy was killed 7 days before the war ended and his mum got her telegram while the rest of the country was celebrating the Armistice on 11 Nov. Life truly is a bugger.
His most famous, and perhaps rightly fitting poem.
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
8 October 1917 - March, 1918
DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean “It is sweet and right.” The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country