Selected Poetry From, The War In Verse and Prose, 1918, Eben B. Norris
I will post a few poems each day from this collection of poems written by combatants in the First World War.
Remember this, these are words written by educated by men(soldiers) that were facing death daily.
Many of these poets did not survive the war.... a great many became famous for the poetic words they birthed amid chaos, turmoil and death..
I trust many of these will give the reader a much greater insight into the grim reality of war and the desperation in men's souls when they faced death daily ,hourly , by the minute... ....-Tyr
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1.
The Soldier
Rupert Brooke, 1887 - 1915
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
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2.
Leslie Coulson’s output consists of one slim volume published posthumously in 1917, but one poem, Who Made the Law, has become familiar to readers of First World War poetry since its appearance in the Hibberd and Onions anthology of 1986.
Coulson’s father worked his way out of poverty in the East End of London to become a columnist on The Sunday Chronicle. He sent his two sons to a modest but progressive Norfolk boarding school which fostered imagination, love of nature and the principles of gentleness and justice. Leslie became a reporter on The Evening News. In 1914 he moved to The Standard as an assistant foreign editor but, when war broke out, enlisted as a private in the 2/2nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers.
The poetry he was writing at that time employed conventional literary notions and forms: pastoral motifs, archaic diction and the metre, imagery and refrains of the English ballad.
He left England on Christmas Eve 1914. The battalion went first to Malta but in October 1915, after a months training in Egypt, was shipped to Helles on the Gallipoli Peninsula. After twelve weeks in and out of the lines came the evacuation to Egypt. Coulson was taken to hospital, suffering from a fever. Rejoining his unit, he wrote The Call of the Sea, a poem which continues to take the natural world as its subject but reveals a new sense of the malevolence of nature.
In April 1916 the battalion went to France, where it was disbanded; Coulson, now a sergeant, was sent to the 1/12th Battalion (the Rangers) who on 1 July were in the diversionary attack on the Gommecourt salient north of the main Somme offensive. The Rangers lost 17 of their 23 officers and 498 of the 780 other ranks that day.
Two poems show a change taking place in Coulson’s writing. In But a Short Time to Live his treatment of war is grimly realistic, while The Rainbow shows him employing the familiar pastoral tradition for ironic purposes; but what is startling in the latter poem is the poets implication of himself and his companions as agents of the forces of darkness:
When night falls dark we creep
In silence to our dead.
We dig a few feet deep
And leave them there to sleep
But blood at night is red,
Yea, even at night,
And a dead mans face is white. And I dry my hands, that are also trained to kill,
And I look at the stars for the stars are beautiful still.
On 7 October the Rangers took part in the battle for the Transloy Ridges. Coulson, in the first wave of the attack, was shot in the chest. He died the next day at Grove Town casualty clearing station. The manuscript of Who Made the Law? was discovered amongst his possessions.
Until its close this poem might be read as a political statement, but the final stanza reveals it as a spiritual outcry. It is God who has betrayed the human race. Perhaps, like Owen or Rosenberg, Coulson would have moved on to a more complex view of religion or a more politicised perception of the war, but the poem is a poignant and compelling conclusion to his life and his career as a poet. It is an attempt to break into new forms, with its insistent hexameters and the way in which the familiar rural images are yoked terribly to images of death. But it is principally about the waste of human life. It is remarkable for its anger, its humanity, its foresight – and its form. And it was written in September 1916, barely half-way through the war.
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But A Short Time to Live
by Leslie Coulson
Our little hour, — how swift it flies
When poppies flare and lilies smile;
How soon the fleeting minute dies,
Leaving us but a little while
To dream our dream, to sing our song,
To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower,
The Gods — They do not give us long, —
One little hour.
Our little hour, — how short it is
When Love with dew-eyed loveliness
Raises her lips for ours to kiss
And dies within our first caress.
Youth flickers out like wind-blown flame,
Sweets of to-day to-morrow sour,
For Time and Death, relentless, claim
Our little hour.
Our little hour, — how short a time
To wage our wars, to fan our hates,
To take our fill of armoured crime,
To troop our banners, storm the gates.
Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red,
Blind in our puny reign of power,
Do we forget how soon is sped
Our little hour?
Our little hour, — how soon it dies:
How short a time to tell our beads,
To chant our feeble Litanies,
To think sweet thoughts, to do good deeds.
The altar lights grow pale and dim,
The bells hang silent in the tower —
So passes with the dying hymn
Our little hour.
18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.