The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry

by Various Contributors

Gone for five days then any sign of life glow,

  As the notched stumps or the gray clouds then we stood;

  Dead past death from first hour and the needed mood

  Of level pain shifting continually to and fro,

  Saskatchewan, Ontario, Jack London ran in

  My own mind; what in others? these men who finely

  Perhaps had chosen danger for reckless and fine chance,

  Fate had sent for suffering and dwelling obscenely

  Vermin eaten, fed beastly, in vile ditches meanly.

  Ivor Gurney

  Banishment

  I am banished from the patient men who fight

  They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.

  Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,

  They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light.

  Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight

  They went arrayed in honour. But they died, –

  Not one by one: and mutinous I cried

  To those who sent them out into the night.

  The darkness tells how vainly I have striven

  10 To free them from the pit where they must dwell

  In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven

  By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.

  Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;

  And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.

  Siegfried Sassoon

  Woodbine Willie

  They gave me this name like their nature,

  Compacted of laughter and tears,

  A sweet that was born of the bitter,

  A joke that was torn from the years.

  Of their travail and torture, Christ’s fools,

  Atoning my sins with their blood,

  Who grinned in their agony sharing

  The glorious madness of God.

  Their name! Let me hear it – the symbol

  10 Of unpaid-unpayable debt,

  For the men to whom I owed God’s peace,

  I put off with a cigarette.

  G. A. Studdert Kennedy

  Apologia pro Poemate Meo

  I, too, saw God through mud –

  The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.

  War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,

  And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

  Merry it was to laugh there –

  Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.

  For power was on us as we slashed bones bare

  Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

  I, too, have dropped off fear –

  10 Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,

  And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear

  Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn;

  And witnessed exultation –

  Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,

  Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,

  Seraphic for an hour; though they were foul.

  I have made fellowships –

  Untold of happy lovers in old song.

  For love is not the binding of fair lips

  20 With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,

  By Joy, whose ribbon slips, –

  But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;

  Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;

  Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong.

  I have perceived much beauty

  In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;

  Heard music in the silentness of duty;

  Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

  Nevertheless, except you share

  30 With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,

  Whose world is but the trembling of a flare,

  And heaven but as the highway for a shell,

  You shall not hear their mirth:

  You shall not come to think them well content

  By any jest of mine. These men are worth

  Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.

  Wilfred Owen

  My Company

  Foule! Ton âme entière est debout dans mon corps.

  Jules Romains

  I

  You became

  In many acts and quiet observances

  A body and a soul, entire…

  I cannot tell

  What time your life became mine:

  Perhaps when one summer night

  We halted on the roadside

  In the starlight only,

  And you sang your sad home-songs,

  10 Dirges which I standing outside your soul

  Coldly condemned.

  Perhaps, one night, descending cold,

  When rum was mighty acceptable,

  And my doling gave birth to sensual gratitude.

  And then our fights: we’ve fought together

  Compact, unanimous;

  And I have felt the pride of leadership.

  In many acts and quiet observances

  You absorbed me:

  20 Until one day I stood eminent

  And I saw you gathered round me,

  Uplooking,

  And about you a radiance that seemed to beat

  With variant glow and to give

  Grace to our unity.

  But, God! I know that I’ll stand

  Someday in the loneliest wilderness,

  Someday my heart will cry

  For the soul that has been, but that now

  30 Is scattered with the winds,

  Deceased and devoid.

  I know that I’ll wander with a cry:

  ‘O beautiful men, O men I loved,

  O whither are you gone, my company?’

  This is a hell

  Immortal while I live.

  II

  My men go wearily

  With their monstrous burdens.

  They bear wooden planks

  40 And iron sheeting

  Through the area of death.

  When flare curves through the sky

  They rest immobile.

  Then on again,

  Sweating and blaspheming –

  ‘Oh, bloody Christ!’

  My men, my modern Christs,

  Your bloody agony confronts the world.

  III

  50 A man of mine lies on the wire.

  It is death to fetch his soulless corpse.

  A man of mine lies on the wire;

  And he will rot

  And first his lips

  The worms will eat.

  It is not thus I would have him kissed

  But with the warm passionate lips

  Of his comrade here.

  IV – 1

  60 Kenneth Farrar is typical of many:

  He smokes his pipe with a glad heart

  And makes his days serene; He fights hard,

  And in his speech he hates the Boche: –

  But really he doesn’t care a damn.

  His sexual experience is wide and various

  And his curses are rather original.

  But I’ve seen him kiss a dying man;

  And if he comes thro’ all right

  70 (So he says)

  He’ll settle down and marry.

  IV – 2

  But Malyon says this:

  ‘Old Ken’s a wandering fool;

  If we come thro‘

  Our souls will never settle in suburban hearths;

  We’ll linger our remaining days

  Unsettled, haunted by the wrong that’s done us;

  The best among us will ferment

  A better world;

  80 The rest will gradually subside,

  Unknown,

  In unknown lands.’

  And Ken will jeer:

  ‘The natives of Samoa

  Are suitably naïve.‘

  V

  I can assume

  A giant attitude and godlike mood,


  And then detachedly regard

  All riots, conflicts and collisions.

  90 The men I’ve lived with

  Lurch suddenly into a far perspective;

  They distantly gather like a dark cloud of birds

  In the autumn sky.

  Urged by some unanimous

  Volition or fate,

  Clouds clash in opposition;

  The sky quivers, the dead descend;

  Earth yawns.

  They are all of one species.

  100 From my giant attitude,

  In godlike mood,

  I laugh till space is filled

  with hellish merriment.

  Then again I assume

  My human docility,

  Bow my head,

  And share their doom.

  Herbert Read

  Before the Battle

  Here on the blind verge of infinity

  We live and move like moles. Our crumbling trench

  Gapes like a long wound in the sodden clay.

  The land is dead. No voice, no living thing,

  No happy green of leaves tells that the spring

  Wakes in the world behind us. Empty gloom

  Fills the cold interspace of earth and sky.

  The sky is waterlogged and the drenched earth

  Rots, and the whining sorrow of slow shells

  10 Flies overhead. But memory like the rose

  Wakes and puts forth her bright and odorous blooms

  And builds green hanging gardens in the heart.

  Once, in another life in other places,

  Where a slow river coiled through broad green spaces

  And sunlight filled the long grass of the meadows

  And moving water flashed from shine to shadows

  Of old green-feathered willows, bent in ranks

  Along sun-speckled banks, –

  Lovely remembered things now gone forever;

  20 I saw young men run naked by the river,

  Thirty young soliders. Where the field-path goes,

  Their boots and shirts and khaki lay in rows.

  With feet among the long warm grass stood one

  Like ivory in the sun,

  And in the water, white upon the shade

  That hung beneath the shore,

  His long reflection like a slow flag swayed

  And at a trembling of the water frayed

  Into a hundred shreds, then joined once more.

  30 One, where the river, when the willows end,

  Breaks from its calm to swirl about a bend,

  Strong swimmer he, wrestled against the race

  Of the full stream. I saw his laughing face

  Framed by his upcurved arm. Another, slim,

  Hands above head, stood braced upon the brim,

  Then dived, a brother of the curved new moon,

  And came up streaming soon

  Ten feet beyond, brown shoulders shining wet

  And comic face and hair washed sleet as jet.

  40 Out on the further bank another fellow

  Climbed stealthily into a leaning willow,

  And perched leaf-shrouded, crooning like a dove,

  Till from the pool below a voice was heard:

  ‘‘Ere, Bert! Where’s Bert?’ And Bert sang out above:

  ‘Up ‘ere, old son, changed to a bloody bird!‘

  And dived through leaves and shattered through the cool

  Clear watery mirror; and all across the pool

  Slow winking circles opened wide, till he

  Rose and in rising broke their symmetry.

  50 Laughter and shouting filled the sparkling air.

  Bright flakes of scattered water everywhere

  Leapt from their diving. Hosts of little billows

  Beat the shores, and hanging boughs of willows

  Glittered with glassy drops. Then, bright as fire,

  A bugle sounded, and their happy din

  Stopped, and the boys, with that swift discipline

  By which keen life answers the soul’s desire,

  Rushed for the bank. And soon the bank was bright

  With bodies swarming up out of the stream.

  60 From the water and the boughs they came in sight:

  Across the leaves I saw their quick limbs gleam.

  Then brandished towels flashed whitely here and there.

  They dried their ears and scrubbed their towzled hair.

  One, stepping to the water, carefully

  Stretched a bare leg to rinse a muddy foot:

  One sat with updrawn knee,

  Bent head, and both hands tugging on a boot.

  And gradually the bright and flashing crowd

  Dimmed into sober khaki. Then the loud

  70 Laughter and shouts and songs died at a word.

  The ranks fell in: No sound, no movement stirred.

  The willow-boughs were still: the blue sky burned:

  The party numbered down, formed fours, right turned,

  Marched. And their shadows faded from the stream

  And the dark pool swayed back into its dream:

  Only the trodden meadow-grass reported

  Where all that gay humanity had sported.

  So the dream fades. I wake, remembering how

  Many of those smart boys no longer now

  80 Cast running shadows on the grass or make

  White tents with laughter shake,

  But lie in narrow chambers underground,

  Eyes void of sunlight, ears unthrilled by sound

  Of laughter. Round my post on every hand

  Stretches this grim, charred skeleton of land

  Where ruined homes and shell-ploughed fields are lost

  In one great sea of clay, clay seared by fire,

  Battered by rainstorms, jagged and scarred and crossed

  By gaping trench-lines hedged with rusted wire.

  90 The rainy evening fades. A rainy night

  Sags down upon us. Wastes of sodden clay

  Fade into mist, and fade all sound and sight,

  All broken sounds and movements of the day,

  To emptiness and listlessness, a grey

  Unhappy silence tremulous with the poise

  Of hearts intent with fearful expectation

  And secret preparation,

  Silence that is not peace but bated breath,

  A listening for death,

  100 The quivering prelude to tremendous noise.

  O give us one more day of sun and leaves,

  The laughing soldiers and the laughing stream,

  And when at dawn the loud destruction cleaves

  The silence, and (like men that walk in dream,

  Knowing the stern ordeal has begun)

  We climb the trench, and cross the wire and start,

  We’ll stumble through the shell-bursts with good heart

  Like boys who race through meadows in the sun.

  Martin Armstrong

  Nameless Men

  Around me, when I wake or sleep,

  Men strange to me their vigils keep;

  And some were boys but yesterday,

  Upon the village green at play.

  Their faces I shall never know;

  Like sentinels they come and go.

  In grateful love I bow the knee

  For nameless men who die for me.

  There is in earth or heaven no room

  10 Where I may flee this dreadful doom.

  For ever it is understood

  I am a man redeemed by blood.

  I must walk softly all my days

  Down on my redeemed and solemn ways.

  Christ, take the men I bring to Thee,

  The men who watch and die for me.

  Edward Shillito

  Greater Love

  Red lips are not so red

  As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

  Kindness of wooed and wooer

  Seems shame to their love pur
e.

  O Love, your eyes lose lure

  When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

  Your slender attitude

  Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,

  Rolling and rolling there

  10 Where God seems not to care;

  Till the fierce Love they bear

  Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.

  Your voice sings not so soft, –

  Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft, –

  Your dear voice is not dear, Gentle, and evening clear,

  As theirs whom none now hear

  Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

  Heart, you were never hot,

  20 Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;

  And though your hand be pale,

  Paler are all which trail

  Your cross through flame and hail:

  Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

  Wilfred Owen

  In Memoriam Private D. Sutherland killed in Action in the German Trench, May 16, 1916, and the Others who Died

  So you were David’s father,

  And he was your only son,

  And the new-cut peats are rotting

  And the work is left undone,

  Because of an old man weeping,

  Just an old man in pain,

  For David, his son David,

  That will not come again.

  Oh, the letters he wrote you,

  10 And I can see them still,

  Not a word of the fighting

  But just the sheep on the hill

  And how you should get the crops in