Two young poets stood out, mostly for their remarkable contrasts, in our readings from British World War I poets, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen.
Brook’s compact and beautifully written sonnet “The Soldier” (1915) inspired a generation of British to heroically march off to war with purpose and a romanticized vision of the value of sacrificing one’s own life for one’s country. The first four lines are the best known:
“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”
Brooke was so revered that his poem The Soldier was read from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on April 23rd, the day in which Shakespeare’s birthday is traditionally celebrated and, upon his (non-combat death) early in the war, Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in the Times.
Owen was an entirely different poet, writing after the war (1920), his poem reflected the crushing disillusionment of so many of that generation who had fought and lived though the “Great War.” His best know poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is full of haunting and horrific images of battle, including the torn bodies of dead and wounded men. Wrenching ironies abound with the contrast of the emotions of love, grace, beauty, and patriotism with brutally realistic images of graphic death and destruction. The irony is compounded by the structural quality of Owen’s poetry, well metered with beautiful rhyme and lyrics. Lines 15 to 28 reads:
“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,”
In reading this poem, one feels the engagement of the narrator by the sight of the horrifying death described. As gruesome and graphic as the poem is, the narrator seems to suggest that we would actually have to experience this for ourselves, or dream it in a “smothering dream,” to truly understand.
Brook’s biographer, Robert Means, compares the two poets by borrowing from the great English romantic Poet William Blake observing that “Brooke wrote Songs of Innocence(if not naïveté), while…Owen (and others) wrote Songs of Experience.” http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/brooke/. Indeed, the line in Blake’s The Shepherd “For he hears the lambs’ innocent call / He is watchful, while they are in peace” carries much the tone and nuance of Brooke’s “Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; / In hearts at peace, under an English heaven” while Blake’s” The Tyger haunting query of “Did he smile his work to see, / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” seems to echo completely the disillusionment in Owen’s work.
