In the poem ‘Fall in’ by Edward Harold Begbie, his approach to war and death was much the same as Pope’s. He concentrated on how war would produce personal gain (most obviously the girls) and only vaguely mentioned death as an outcome. However, in this poem, he aimed to deliver the negative impacts of staying behind, and away from the fighting, ad in doing so promote volunteering to avoid guilt after the war.
“What will you lack …
When the girls line up in the street
… what will you lack when your mate goes by
With a girl that cuts you dead?”
In this extract the focus is heavily targeted in making one feel the benefits of fighting in a negative way. The constant use of rhetorical questions, namely “what will you lack” gives one a good perspective on his options to join up or not. Would he join and be whole, or stay and ‘lack’ the respect of his mates and the girls. At the last two lines, the poem talks about how even your ‘mate’ would just ‘walk by’ without a hello, perhaps out of embarrassment. The next line augments this, where Begbie subtly introduces death in an inverted form: go to war and everything will be fine, or die at home, as the girls and friends “cut you dead”. This line influences one to consider the real priorities of one’s self. In a certain way, one might say that Begbie portrays war as a way to live, while staying would kill you in a social sense. His attitude and definition towards death in this poem is therefore one of not having a good life, rather than being physically deceased.
As the war got under way, soldiers began to contemplate their own thoughts and hopes of the war, and what it might achieve. This style of thought and writing led to the Idealism style of poetry. One such soldier poet, Rupert Brooke depicted WW1 as a holy war, and death as a path to heaven. In his poem, ‘The Soldier”, he describes his death as a patriotic death and a benefit to England.
“If I should die…
… there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England”
Here he states that where he is buried, that plot will remain ‘forever England’, as he, a product of England is there. He describes an Englishman dying as forgiveness for sin, a ‘pay back’ to England AND God, and states that the death of an Englishman is not the death of that piece of England. He illustrates death of an Englishman, not as loosing part of England, but rather preserving that part of England, through being buried. In this poem, he focuses almost explicitly on death, and only brushes on war, but we can see that he saw War as a means to fulfil the duty of an Englishman to “pay back” for all that England has given.
In another of Brook’s poems, “Peace”, he describes war as a way of cleansing man and making them manlier.
“ … swimmers into cleanness leaping
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men with their dirty songs…”
Here, as said before, he describes war as a cleansing. The image of “swimmers into cleanness leaping” gives the idea of man washing away his past in life and starting again. He goes on to describe those that do not fight as “half-men”, and promotes his ideas that men have become too feminine. And acknowledging this, we can suppose that he viewed war as a way to also give masculinity back to men. Where he writes “leave the sick hearts that honour could not move”, he is displaying that he believes, ironically that, some men are just not moulded to uphold honour, and as such were not manly enough for war.
Following the tragic loses and defeats at Verdun and the Somme, poetry and its style of writing underwent another upheaval, as soldiers became more pessimistic and fatigued by the war and it’s horrors. This final style of Realism gripped most poetry after 1917. In the poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Owen, his use of religious imagery demonstrated a very tragic sense of war and death, dehumanizing soldiers.
“…these who die as cattle?”
“… no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;”
His description of the funerals’ only ‘choirs’ as being the ‘wailing shells’ states that he believes that death and respect for the dead and proper funeral has a lessened priority, as further conveyed in the petty funeral service, which was led by mechanized war machines. This has a role in his attitude towards war and death, in which he believes both are being dehumanized. He begins this point of view in the very first sentence, voicing his attitude towards death as tragic. He says that soldiers are dying with such ill respect and in such numbers ‘as cattle’.
Another of Wilfred Owens’s poems, Dulce et Decorum Est, portrayed his and many other soldiers’ experiences of war and death in a much more graphical and descriptive manner, to truly put across the ugliness of both of the aspects.
“Drunk with fatigue…
Of tired outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind
…I saw him drowning.
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”
In this quote, we can see that Owens’s attitude towards death in WW1, and especially in the trenches, was a helpless, horrid one. He described the man as ‘drowning’, suggesting that there was no way to stop it, and no way out, and much like drowning in water if you are stuck. “Guttering,” is a well-used piece of onomatopoeia, which only adds to the previous point, while giving it a more realistic atmosphere. His attitude towards war is just as bad. He portrays the soldiers as ‘drunk with fatigue’. As such, he is suggesting that war has pushed them to the furthest they can stretch. He goes on to call even the shells ‘tired’. These descriptions of the facets of war, all tired, let us assume that his attitude towards war is that of an ongoing, never ending and torturing war, as it tests the limits of the pawns on its board.
More generally, Owen uses Dulce et Decorum Est as a platform to voice his beliefs and opinions of many Propaganda poems, attacking those that did not experience war first hand, and described it as patriotic:
“Knock-kneed, coughing like hags…
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod.”
In this extract, we see the humiliation of the soldiers, moving to their posts ‘like hags’ as opposed to many poems’ descriptions: heroes. The continuing lines augment this, detailing the men as “limp[ing], asleep [and] blood-shod”. As said before, this directly contrasts many descriptions in propaganda style writing. It is supposed that the last lines of the poem,
“The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
, are directly aimed as a response to Jesse Pope’s poem, Who’s for the Game?
By comparing and contrasting the different types of poetry written during the Great War, we can therefore see how attitudes towards war and death changed, as the realities of mechanised warfare became vividly apparent. Whilst poets such as Jessie Pope used euphemism and the visual representation of war as a ‘game’ and refused to mention or acknowledge death as a possibility, idealists such as Brooke included often explicit references to both, but saw them as a positive, noble and justified path, with it’s end in Heaven assured for those who died. In the battles of the Somme and Verdun in 1916 however, soldier-poets such as Wilfred Owen began to produce their own material, which detailed their individual agony war and death on the front line. War and death was never again seen with such gusto and approval after the Great War.
