poetry lamenting war #1

[truepenny]

yonmei did it first.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
 Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
 Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers or bells,
 Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
 And bugles calling for them from sad shrines.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
 Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
 The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

--Wilfred Owen (KIA November 4, 1918), Poems, 1920

The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed., Introd., Notes C. Day Lewis. New York: New Directions, 1964.

Links:
WOMDA (the Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive)
The Wilfred Owen Association
Short biography of Wilfred Owen, plus the text of "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum Est"

Comments

[pameladean]

Thank you.

If I were a poet, I would take lines like "the pallor of girls' brows" and other lines honoring the fact, or at least the belief, that men fight and women stay home, and write about how that's not what is happening now in the desert, one of the bitterest of victories, why look, now anybody can choose to be put in a position where they will be sent to fight an unjust war. But I'm not a poet.

Pamela

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Irrelevantly, your icon is beautiful.

That would be a really excellent poem to write. I'm not a poet--that's why I'm posting Wilfred Owen instead of anything I've written myself--but I would do it if I could.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Two women are known to have died in disguise in the trenches in the Great War, one woman is known to have fought and survived (in Serbia, of all places, a British woman, who went as a nurse and found that her experience as an upper-class British woman who rode and shot made her a better officer than a nurse, and so did the Serbians) how many fought and survived and we don't know about, or fought and are buried under their male names, or fought and are buried as unknowns, we don't know. (Amazons and Military Maids and Women at War)

Women have always been fighting, it's a myth that they all stayed at home.

However, the pallor of the people who stayed behind and mourned also deserves a mention, girls and boys.