“But only agony and that has ending,”
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.”
This convinces himself and the readers that he has nothing to fear apart from that of Death, which can also be a friend.
Moving on to the other side of the argument, Arthur Graeme West not only expresses his opinion against the war, but also against all the poets who express their pro-war opinions, in his poem “God How I Hate You”. It starts abruptly with the title repeated and he gives the reader a quote from one of the poets that the poem was against,
‘Oh happy to have lived these epic days.’
To make his point clear he repeats it as if shouting it in disgust and he says why it is wrong,
‘Smashed like an eggshell and the warm grey brain,
All bloody on the parados.’
This is an example of the vivid imagery that was used in the poem to explain the horror in the trenches. He also notes that the poet in question had been to France himself, ‘and seen the trenches, glimpsed the huddled dead.’
Another way poets express their negative feelings towards the war is through a narrative poem such as “Comrades: An Episode” written by Robert Nichols. This poem is telling the sad tale of a soldier being shot in No-Mans Land. It is full of despair:
“Then with a slow vane smile,”
“He’d never se home again.”
This poem also uses figures of speech to give a more dramatic effect for example the personification in, ‘Dawn blinked.’ The poet also graphically explains every detail of the event and the soldier’s desperate attempt to return to the rest of the troops even though his body ‘lay bereaved.’
The poem is mainly in rhyming couplets to allow easier reading and understanding of the poem and it has the mains themes: comradeship, death, and the sacrifice of the men who tried to save the soldier. The poem has a sad ending with the man that was saved to the cost of two of his saviours, dies but in a way it is a happy ending because he dies surrounded by his men, so it is very emotional.
In Wilfred Owen’s poem “Exposure” he focuses on the winter weather experienced by the soldiers.
He writes his poem as if he is involved by starting with
‘Our brains ache’
Then he adds some hostile personification of the,
‘Merciless iced winds of the east that knive us’
It gives explicit details on the effects of the winds on the soldiers, how it turns them into ghosts of their former selves. They question themselves,
‘What are we doing here?’
This is a rhetorical question only because it has no answer any more.
There is repetition of the line: ‘But nothing happens’ and this is also the line used to complete the poem after the men in the poem have expired, frozen, pale, and forgotten for ever with their ‘half known faces.’
Wilfred Owen also wrote “Disabled” which depicts an injured soldier returning home and reminisces all the things that he can no longer do and the old times when the ‘Town used to swing so gay.’ It is a very melancholy poem and it makes u feel sorry for the other wounded soldiers like him.
Siegfried Sasson wrote a very simple to the point poem called ‘Suicide in the Trenches.’ It is made up of 3 quatrains but in a way it is two separate poems. The first two stanzas explain the ‘Simple soldier boy’ suggesting he’s very low ranking. It explains how he was someone,
‘Who grinned at life in empty joy.’
This thought of happiness changes when the poem moves on to the ‘winter trenches cowed and glum,’ and the suicide is committed quickly and abruptly.
Then there is a break, after which the “second” poem comes in. It is Siegfried declaring his hatred of the people who go back to their cosy homes and prey that they won’t have to got to the ‘place where youth and laughter go.’
This is the end of my interpretation of the poets of World War I and their methods of writing their poems and I would like to conclude with a poem I wrote myself:
Voices
Follow our voices,
Experience war,
In an unknown land,
Where birds once soared,
A land, turned to hell,
Where dying cries were not heard.
Follow our voices,
To a place of ten thousand deaths,
The cost for 100 yards,
Courage flows faster than blood,
Out of those bodies,
Torn on the ground.
Follow our voices,
As we go over the top,
The baker, the postman, the cook,
The guns asked questions,
Death the only answer,
As it raked the ranks.
Follow our voices,
Watch comrades die,
See men as never before,
As they lie in blood filled shell holes,
Their hearts opened,
Pouring the contents into the earth,
Follow our voices,
And ask the question,
Why are we dead?
