Vitai Lampada is another example of war poetry that glorifies war, it was written in 1892. The poet Henry Newbolt uses a cricket match as a metaphor for war. If an individual won the match, it shouldn’t be for individual glory, not for the sake of a rib-boned coat, but for the team. In the second verse the Regiment is falling to pieces, the machine gun is blocked, the formation has been broken and the Colonel is dead. However the voice of a “schoolboy rallies the ranks” repeating “Play up! Play up! And play the game!” Today it would be seen as unrealistic that a schoolboy would be able to rally the ranks of an army. But in Newbolts poem its is seriously put forward as a model for schoolboys to aspire to. Again Newbolt says the river of death has brimmed his banks but there is no picture of an individual dying or sense of reality to the poem. This poem was written to encourage young men to join the army to defend the empire. The School has the motto, “Play up! Play up! And play the game!” shows how they should live for others, they should always remember the motto, and pass on the ‘torch’ to the next generation when they die. Newbolt was not a soldier and was not writing from personal experience of war.
There were no soldier poets before the end of the nineteenth Century; Wilfred Owen was one of the first, although there were other literate soldiers who fought in the First World War, notably Siegfried Sassoon who encouraged Owen to write.
The outbreak of World War One was in August 1914, it seemed like an adventure for people in the UK and France so when they enlisted, they thought the war would be over by Christmas and all would be well again. However, they couldn’t have been more wrong. During World War one conditions for the soldiers were very bad. Regiments spent their time in trenches, suffering from trench warfare. On the occasions when they left the trenches and ‘went over the top’ they were usually killed by machine gun fire or severely wounded by barbed wire. There was stalemate between England and France versus Germany. Enemy lines seemed impossible to break. In the Battle of the Somme, millions of soldiers took part and thousands died. Wilfred Owens poems showed the cruelty of the war. And have a great impact on the reader as they do not glorify war and they do show his feelings.
Wilfred Owen is now considered one of the most important First World War poets. He was the son of a Railway worker, born in Shropshire. He couldn’t afford to go to University so he went to teach in France at the outbreak of the war. He trained as an officer, as a volunteer, and was sent to the Somme sector at the end of 1916.
Wilfred Owen broke new ground in the tradition of war poetry because he is one of very few war poets who actually went to war. He could tell people of his first hand experiences, of seeing people killed and the true horror of war. Siegfried Sassoon was an important influence on Owen, as he influenced him to write poetry. They met in Craiglockhart hospital, after having become shell-shocked at war in France and being sent to Scotland to recover part of his process to recover was to write.
After recovering from shell shock he was determined to return to service, he wanted to speak out against the war and felt it hypocritical to if he was to write all these anti-war poems and speak out against the if he was not actually there so he returned to his men in the trenches.
One of his most effective poems is, “Futility.” From first reading through any of Owen’s poems you can tell that he breaks the traditional ways of war poetry. “Futility” tells of am single dead soldier. Where usually he can be woken by being dragged in to the sun, on this morning it will not work. It has snowed and frozen the soldiers body. He uses a very simple rhyme scheme, where generally the last word of each line rhymes. This makes the poem very simple to say aloud and easier to memorise. He personifies the sun, telling that if anyone can wake him now, “The kind old sun will know”.
However, even though it wakes people and wakes the seeds letting them grow, but it won’t wake the soldier anymore, “Think how it wakes the seeds – Woke once the clays of a cold star.” even though it brought life to the clay of earth. Owen questions why was man created at all if it was only to come to this terrible end. He asks
“O what made terrible fatuous sunbeams toil
to break earths sleep at all”
“Dulce et Decorum est” is about the return from Battle when someone smells “Gas! Gas!” and they all “fumble” to put on their gas masks, but one soldier didn’t get his on in time and choked. This leaves a terrible mark on Owen “ In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me guttering, choking, drowning.” This poem for Wilfred Owen was a very personal poem “my dreams” he tells us first hand he was there “I saw him”. This is the contrast with earlier war poets who did not convey this vision of actually being in the battle. Owen says that if the reader has seen the same terrible sight of “his hanging face like devil sick of sin” he would not tell “the old lie: Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori” which means “ it is sweet and fitting to die for your country” this is a direct contrast to the views of Tennyson and Newbolt.
In ‘Anthem for Doomed youth’ he says that the young soldiers slaughtered in the war “die as cattle”. They do not have any of the elaborate funeral rites they would have had if they had died in England there are no “prayers nor Bells” nor “mourning” for them, except for the “shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells”. This poem is a sonnet which was a favourite form of poetry for Owen
Wilfred Owen’s poems were different to earlier war poetry, he was there, which means his poems show realism, and feeling. They give an immediate image of the horror of war, and graphic details of death, and show pity and sorrow. One week before the Armistice on 4 November 1918, trying to take his company across the Sambre Canal, he was helping engineers build a bridge, enemies opened fire and he was killed.
