The Volunteer by Herbert Asquith (1852-1928) is the second poem I am going to look at for this essay. The poet tells the story of a man who works as a desk clerk in ‘a city grey’ office. The clerk feels that he is discontent in not fulfilling his dreams for life and wants to leave his job to fight as a valiant soldier and die for his country. His dreams become reality in the second stanza when he says goodbye to his repetitive, endless work and goes to fight at war. The clerk later gets killed, but feels no need for a funeral nor wants people to grieve for him because he has died happy and is noble like the men who fought at ‘Agincourt’. This poem has a very positive view on war. It shows that a man will never be content with life unless he has the honour of fighting at War. To die on the battlefield like men of many years before is enough to make this man feel that his duties on earth are done. ‘His lance is broken; but he lies content’ is an example of how although the man has died, he has died a happy death. For this man, dying for his country is better than working and having a long life in a city. This must mean that he definitely wants honour and nobility and shows dying for his country to be a very gallant occurrence. Some of the lines in this poem rhyme to give it a sense of rhythm. This poem can also be linked to ‘Ode’ because it too has a very positive view towards fighting. In both pieces it is seen as dignified to fight and die. The quotation ‘How sleep the brave, who sink to rest’.
In contrast to the two positive poems ‘To Lucasta, Going to the Wars’ and ‘The Volunteer’, the next two pieces portray war as negative and unnecessary. ‘The Wound-Dresser’ by Walt Whitman illustrates the pointlessness of the death and destruction which occurs at war from the point of view of a wound dresser who was once a soldier himself. The man is telling his stories and sharing his horrific memories with young faces that are willing to listen. The poem takes us into the narrator’s mind like opening hospital doors and exploring all of the injured soldiers as memories in his mind. The man used to be a solider before a medic and which is ironically from killing to healing. The memories which best remain in his mind are those of wound dressing because he has seen the destruction and waste which comes as a result of war. His recollections of the deaths don’t prove to be noble and painless, but slow, agonising and painful. If he were given the opportunity, the Wound-Dresser would die for the young soldiers if it enabled them to live on: ‘I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if it would save you’ is the phrase which shows this. In a stanza half way through the poem, he is wishing death to come quickly to young people and free them from pain. Young people usually have their whole lives ahead of them, but because of war, death is being wished upon them. These young men dare not to look at their wounds but the dresser has to look at them and see the destructive side to war. He must also try to keep his composure although he has to look at the destruction and loss of young, innocent life.
This poem can be likened to ‘The Hyaenas’ because it too shows how war causes death and prevents the soldiers from finding peace once dead; they are buried with a thin layer of the surface of earth and easily dug up by scavengers such as the carnivorous Hyaenas. The dead are reduced from being thought of as noble soldiers to nothing better than meat. The Hyaenas have no conscience and are soulless. This can be likened to man, because once the soldiers are dead, no one thinks about them or cares what has happened to their bodies. If man really cared about the soldiers, they would never have sent them out to fight and die at war.
The final poem I am going to look at in detail is ‘The Drum’ by John Scott (1783-1821). This too has a negative view on fighting and dying in pointless wars. The poet has taken the position of an onlooker into what ‘The Drum’ is doing. The drum is a metaphor for the insidious lair of war sucking young men into its clutches with the promise of cheap glory. The poem has a dramatic opening with the words ‘I hate’ which are very extreme and strong minded. The repetition of ‘round and round’ shows ‘The Drum’ to be relentless and unforgiving towards its victims. It falsely tells its victims that war is full of glory and nobility to lure them off to fight. The young men are charmed by the drum’s lies. Towards the end of the first stanza, the young men are said to ‘sell their liberty for charms of tawdry lace, and glittering arms’ which uncovers the fact that they will receive cheap glory and not what the idealistic views on war show. The final line uses alliteration in the words ‘and fight, and fall, in foreign lands’ to stress that the soldiers will inevitably die at war. At the beginning of the second stanza, ‘I hate’ is repeated again to stress the onlooker’s dislike of what ‘The Drum’ is doing. The three lines in the middle of the second verse use a list to re-iterate all of the destruction, showing how war affects more than just the people fighting and is not contained like a tournament which is the view taken in the poem ‘The Volunteer’. The final line of this poem says that these acts will just add to the ‘catalogue of human woes’ which the poet feels is already large and will continue to grow. Throughout the whole poem the lines are in rhyming couplets like a drum beat. Similarities can be drawn between this poem and ‘A Christmas ghost story’ which also shows belief in cheap glory for the price paid at war.
Although there are only two main views on war, positive and negative, there are still many varieties within those categories. This coursework only illustrates 4, but there are still many more.
