For Friday: World War One British Poets

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Rosenberg: “Break of Day in the Trenches,” “Louse Hunting,” “Returning, We Hear the Larks,” “Dead Man’s Dump” (pp.13-17)

Owen: “Arms and the Boy,” “Greater Love,” “Insensibility,” “Dulce et Decorum Est” (18-22)

Only ONE question this time:


Q1: Choose one of the poems above, and pick a few important lines or metaphors to discuss. As we do in class, help us appreciate how the poem is saying what it says through it’s choice of language and syntax: why this word, why this image. Pick the parts of the poem that most interested, excited, confused, or disturbed you, and explain why it does this. You don’t have to discuss the entire poem, but discuss enough so that we can understand the poem in a new light (or explain how you learned to read it in a new light). 

Comments

  1. Kenia StarryMarch 23, 2017 at 1:25 PM

    I'm not going to lie, i was sort of falling asleep for most of these poems. Right up until "Dulce Et Decorum Est" when they were getting gassed and one soldier was too slow in putting on his helmet. That woke me up.

    There's a certain bitter quality to this poem. Though i'm not sure where exactly i get that feeling from. "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 for or lime..." There's nothing that says the author is bitter over this 'noble death for kingdom and country' stuff, except for how he mentions the soldier dying and how the sentiment seems pale in the face of his lifeless body. He seems to very much disagree with the notion and implores people to not encourage such a thing, particularly for children.

    Emotionally, this poem isn't explicit. Nah, Owen lets the imagery do that for him, taking quite a bit of delight in describing the soldier's dead body. If i hadn't been jolted awake so suddenly, i'd feel nauseous. "...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". Horrific and disturbing, to say the least.

    There's really no 'new light' to see this poem in. I never had an old light to begin with. Just uncomfortable unease and a faintly whispered 'Jesus Christ on a Popsicle stick... dude don't fuck around'.

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  2. UnknownMarch 24, 2017 at 9:18 AM

    Wilfren Owen is definitely my favorite of the war poets. Second only to “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, his poem “Greater Love”. It seems to address the after effects of war, as many of his pieces seem to. This is all the more interesting when we remember that Owen died before the armistice. It’s poignant that he was trying to picture life after the fighting, and aware that he wouldn’t be able to find peace even when peace became the national policy.
    In “Greater Love” the narrator is holding the subject, his loved one, against his memories of the war. But the intensity of the first can never match the second. The second stanza compares sex to a fight to the death: “Your slender attitude/Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed, /Rolling and rolling there/Where God seems not to care/Till the fierce love they bear/Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.” The last line could refer both to the moment of climax and the moment where one fighter succeeds in killing the other—“the little death.” It’d be erotic if it weren’t so sad.

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  3. AnonymousMarch 24, 2017 at 2:22 PM

    Isaac Rosenberg's poem " Dead Man's Dump" is one of the few poems I've enjoyed reading. Poetry is used to symbolize whatever the writer wants it to. In "Dead Man's Dump" the last stanza stood out more to me then the rest.
    "Will they come?/Will they ever come?/Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,/The quivering-bellied mules,/And the rushing wheels all mixed/With his tortured upturned sight./So we crashed round the bend,/We heard his weak scream,/We heard his very last sound,/And our wheels grazed his dead face."
    This stanza is quite disturbing to me by how they show and heard the solider die and take his last breathe. How their wheels grazed his dead face gives us the readers such a image that's hard to forget, but being there and seeing it in person would be with you for the rest of your life. But that's what the soldiers had to go through, they saw brothers, friends, family, being killed everyday and there was nothing they could do about any of it.

    Bailey Copeland

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