Poetry Analysis: “Rouge Bouquet” by Joyce Kilmer

I post this poem in honor of Memorial Day.  I don’t think I have ever heard of the poet Joyce Kilmer.  But I stumbled across this poem and thought it fitting for a Memorial Day commemoration. 

According to Wikipedia, Kilmer was born in New Jersey, published several books of poetry, volunteered for World War I in the United States Army, and was killed by a sniper in France in July of 1918, some three and a half months before the war would end.  Though relatively forgotten today, he was a poet of some distinction in his day.  He wrote on his Catholic faith and was compared to his contemporary in England, G.K. Chesterton.  The one poem he is remembered for today is a poem called “Trees,” but frankly I thought “Rouge Bouquet” to be much better poem. 

 

Rouge Bouquet

By Joyce Kilmer

 

In a wood they call the Rouge Bouquet

There is a new-made grave to-day,

Build by never a spade nor pick

Yet covered with earth ten metres thick.

There lie many fighting men,

    Dead in their youthful prime,

Never to laugh nor love again

    Nor taste the Summertime.

For Death came flying through the air

And stopped his flight at the dugout stair,

Touched his prey and left them there,

    Clay to clay.

He hid their bodies stealthily

In the soil of the land they fought to free

    And fled away.

Now over the grave abrupt and clear

    Three volleys ring;

And perhaps their brave young spirits hear

    The bugle sing:

“Go to sleep!

Go to sleep!

Slumber well where the shell screamed and fell.

Let your rifles rest on the muddy floor,

You will not need them any more.

Danger’s past;

Now at last,

Go to sleep!”

 

There is on earth no worthier grave

To hold the bodies of the brave

Than this place of pain and pride

Where they nobly fought and nobly died.

Never fear but in the skies

Saints and angels stand

Smiling with their holy eyes

    On this new-come band.

St. Michael’s sword darts through the air

And touches the aureole on his hair

As he sees them stand saluting there,

    His stalwart sons;

And Patrick, Brigid, Columkill

Rejoice that in veins of warriors still

    The Gael’s blood runs.

And up to Heaven’s doorway floats,

    From the wood called Rouge Bouquet,

A delicate cloud of buglenotes

    That softly say:

“Farewell!

Farewell!

Comrades true, born anew, peace to you!

And your memory shine like the morning-star.

Brave and dear,

Shield us here.

Farewell!”

The poem is wonderfully set to music in this video,  I really enjoyed this, and highlights the musicality of the poem.

The poem is divided into two halves.  The first half identifies the woods called Rouge Bouquet where a number of soldiers lost their lives in a battle.  The second half commemorates their sacrifice from the viewpoint of those in heaven.  Both halves end with a stream of bugle notes, endowing the melody with song lyrics.

The meter is roughly iambic, but the length of each line varies.  It has a ballad sense, coming I think from the alternating four and three feet lines.  I suspect the poem was written while Kilmer was a soldier and perhaps published posthumously without editing.  But I’m only speculating.  The poem is fine in its improvisational style.

The central image I think is the name given to the woods, Rouge Bouquet.  Rouge alludes to the red blood that is spilled, and bouquet imagines the trees of the woods as a bouquet of flowers, a bouquet that would be placed on grave sites.  So the woods become the cemetery of which the soldiers are buried.

The bugle plays two songs, one for each half of the poem.  Both are melancholic.  The first song coaxes the dead to eternal rest.

 

“Go to sleep!

Go to sleep!

Slumber well where the shell screamed and fell.

Let your rifles rest on the muddy floor,

You will not need them any more.

Danger’s past;

Now at last,

Go to sleep!”

The second song bids the fallen adieu and will be honored in our collective memory.

 

“Farewell!

Farewell!

Comrades true, born anew, peace to you!

And your memory shine like the morning-star.

Brave and dear,

Shield us here.

Farewell!”

Kilmer in the second half has St. Michael, the archangel, a sort of military angel himself, welcome the dead souls into heaven. 

I also loved this quatrain from the first half for its elegance:

 

For Death came flying through the air

And stopped his flight at the dugout stair,

Touched his prey and left them there,

    Clay to clay.

That is a nice, poetic way of saying unto dust you returned, the clay of flesh to the clay of earth. 

Perhaps the poem was apocryphal.  Joyce Kilmer himself would shortly be killed and returned to clay.

May we remember all those who have died for our country.

Poetry: “Shiloh: A Requiem,” By Herman Melville

In honor of Memorial Day, I wanted to present a poem which captured the ultimate sacrifice of our military, and this poem by Herman Melville was intriguing and fit the bill.  Yes, this is the famous Herman Melville, author of the great—and to some—greatest American novel, Moby Dick.  Melville, after early success with his romanticized sailing adventures—which were a comingling of biography and tall tale—turned to serious fiction, and though in retrospect he has been revised to be consider one of the great American novelists, in his day was met with both critical and financial rejection.  It was not until almost thirty years after his death that he was reassessed to receive the stature he deserves.

After about a decade of writing novels, and being rejected, Melville turned to poetry.  That too was met with critical and financial rejection.  He is not as widely known as a poet, but some of his poetry is impressive.  In some ways Melville’s poetry is the opposite of his prose.  Melville’s prose is mellifluous, rhythmic, and at times reaches the heights of Shakespearean poetry.  His poetry is noticeably the opposite: hard, minimalist, and bare.  In the 1860s, with the country torn apart by the Civil War, Melville decided to visit some of the battlefields and capture something of the war in poetry.  Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War was the book that came out from it, a collection of 72 poems. 

“Shiloh: A Requiem” is one such poem, capturing the something of the Battle of Shiloh.   This was one Ulysses S. Grant’s first victories in April of 1862, prior to being the appointed Commanding General of the Union Army.  What’s important in understanding the poem is that the battle centered on a church building in Shiloh, Tennessee, and had 24,000 casualties, a truly bloody affair.  The Union won this battle but actually lost more men than the South. 

First I am going to present the poem in the way it was published, devoid of stanzas.  Then I am going to represent the poem separated into what I think are its natural divisions of five sections.  I represent it this way because it seems easier to read and digest.  Here is the published format.

 

Shiloh: A Requiem

By Herman Melville  (1819-1891)

 

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,

  The swallows fly low

Over the field in clouded days,

  The forest-field of Shiloh—

Over the field where April rain

Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain

through the pause of night

That followed the Sunday fight

  Around the church of Shiloh—

The church so lone, the log-built one,

That echoed to many a parting groan

            And natural prayer

  Of dying foemen mingled there—

Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—

  Fame or country least their care:

(What like a bullet can undeceive!)

  But now they lie low,

While over them the swallows skim,

  And all is hushed at Shiloh.

 

Here is a YouTube video providing the details of the battle, and a reading of Melville’s poem.

 

Now here are the five sections as I see it.  I added some line numbers as well off to the right.

 

            I

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,

  The swallows fly low

Over the field in clouded days,

  The forest-field of Shiloh—                                     4

 

            II

Over the field where April rain

Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain

through the pause of night

That followed the Sunday fight

  Around the church of Shiloh—                                9

 

            III

The church so lone, the log-built one,

That echoed to many a parting groan

            And natural prayer

  Of dying foemen mingled there—                           13

 

            IV

Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—

  Fame or country least their care:

(What like a bullet can undeceive!)                            16

            V

  But now they lie low,

While over them the swallows skim,

  And all is hushed at Shiloh.                                      19

 

Let’s walk through the five sections.  The first describes the scene well after the battle, perhaps when Melville himself got there, possibly after the war but certainly after the battle.  Shiloh here refers to the field on which the battle took place, and the swallows flying about do not give any indication of the agony and turmoil that ensued.  The swallows might symbolize nature’s reverence for the dead.  The section ends with what will be the first of three refrains using the name of “Shiloh.”  It should be noted that Shiloh, Tennessee was named after the Old Testament city of Shiloh, a religious center in the pre monarchial days.  While the biblical city had nothing to do with the battle, Melville uses the religious association as a theme in the poem.

In section II, Melville takes us back to the night between the battle where the injured lay in agony.  The battle took place on April 6^th and 7^th, a Sunday and Monday.  So the April rain “solaced” the men who lay dying on Sunday night.  From the Wikipedia entry on the battle, “It began raining at 10:00 pm, and at midnight the rain became a storm with thunder and lightning.”  So implied in the poem is that the battle started on the Lord’s Day, and by night the dying were baptized with rain.  The use of the word, “solace” is charged here.  Who would actually be solaced by having to endure rain in the outdoors, except were it to have a religious connotation?  The refrain now refers to the Church of Shiloh.

In Section III, Melville calls forth the church building, a simple, natural edifice built of logs.  The church is characterized as single, even universal.  It does not distinguish between the sides, neither being a church for the Union nor one for the Confederate.  All suffering in agony pray there with their “groans.”  Melville identifies it as a “natural prayer,” coordinating it with the natural edifice.  There is no denomination identified or even specific theology.  In the existential crises of painful death, man, undistinguished between Union and Confederate—“mingled” enemies—come to God.

In Section IV, we come to what I think is the intellectual core of the poem.  In the face of death and God, enemies who had just fought to kill each other become “friends,” realizing the brotherhood of man.  Whatever had inspired them to fight is now meaningless.  These were just illusions, romanticized notions.  The central theme is written as a parenthetical sentence, an apparent mere side note.  But like the Fool in King Lear, the side note speaks with true depth.  “What like a bullet can undeceive!”  The bullet is the true reality.  It not only has killed bodily, but it has killed whatever romantic notions you may have had about war.

The final section returns to the present field, where the dead have been put to rest, and to the poem’s beginning image of the swallows flying.  But having taken us through the dying men at the church, Melville now instills more meaning to the scene.  There is silence, and the flying birds provide a natural reverence to those who have died.  It recalls two sentences from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, though I don’t know if Melville was conscious of it.  Here Lincoln is referring to another battlefield filled with dead soldiers.

 

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

Melville with the swallows flying in the silence imputes a natural consecration to the battle field of Shiloh.  So now that final refrain of Shiloh neither refers to the town or the church, but to the resting place of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

Eternal rest in peace to those and all American soldiers fallen in our service.

Matthew Monday: Memorial Day, Fleet Week

Memorial Day (last Monday in May) is the day we honor fallen troops, and Fleet Week is the week the Navy brings in some ship into New York City for civilian visitation.  They coincide.  I took Matthew in Manhattan to look at some ships.  We had a nice time.  Took the Staten Island Ferry over, passing the Statue of Liberty.  We stopped in down town and took some pictures of the World Trade Liberty Tower, and then went up to the piers to look at some Navy vessels.  Here are a couple of pictures.

Poem: Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen

Today is Memorial Day, a holiday to honor the war dead from our history.  This is a perfect opportunity to continue with my poetry read, Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew by Max Ergremont.  I gave a quick little introduction on the book last year when I first discussed it.  Here’s what I said:

My poetry read for this year is a collection poems from poets of WWI, titled Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, written and edited by Max Egremont.  It’s written by Egremont because it’s more than just a collection of poetry.  The poetry is integrated with the history and poet’s lives.  The book is organized around the year by year history and what the poets were up to in that year, and it provides a sampling of that year’s poetic output.

I’ve been tracking the book by posting a poem from each year of the war.  I am now up to 1917 and the poem I want to highlight is Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.”   I keep making the mistake that the poem is about ‘a doomed youth,” singular, but it’s for “doomed youth,” general and plural.  So when you read the poem, don’t make the mistake I’ve been making.

Some consider Wilfred Owen to be the best of the First World War poets.    He seemed to have grown up from a struggling family, though reasonably well educated.  He began writing poetry at a young age, so when he enlisted in 1915 at the age of twenty-two, he had built up some skill.  He was severely injured in 1917 and went back to home country where he met one of the other great poets of the war Siegfried Sassoon at hospital in Edinburgh.  They built up a friendship and a correspondence.  Owen returned the front in the summer of 1918, and would be killed in action on the 4^th of November, exactly one week before Armistice. 

Here is some background from Some Desperate Glory:

In January 1917, Wilfred Owen was with the 2^nd Battalion, the Manchester Regiment in the transit camp of Etaples.  Here he was hit, during bombing practice, by a fragment which grazed his thumb, letting him coax out one drop of blood, a glimpse of what it was to be a warrior.  ‘There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France,’ Owen told his mother on New Year’s Day, ‘and I am in perfect spirits.  A tinge of excitement is about me, but excitement is always necessary to my happiness.’  He wrote again ten days later, ‘Have no anxiety.  I cannot do a better thing or be in a righter place…’

He’d been under shellfire in the snow at Bertrancourt by 4 February.  The ugliness of the trenches cut into the crimson aestheticism, nurtured by Tailhade and the reading of Wilde.  ‘I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and face-to-face death, as well as another, but extra for me there is the universal perversion of Ugliness,’ he told his mother.  ‘Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one’s own mouth (for all are devilridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth.’  Owen claimed that he’d been too busy to be frightened: ‘I cannot say I felt any fear.’  That day he arrived at Abbeville to take a transport course.  Another offensive was only two months away. 

That offensive was the Battle of Arras, and it would alter Owen’s life significantly and effect his poetry.   

Arras brought humiliation for Wilfred Owen.  He returned to his company in March and, when with a working party, fell into a hole which brought mild concussion and a visit to a casualty clearing station in Gailly on the Somme canal where he passed his twenty-fourth birthday.  Here Owen thought of his future; perhaps after the war he might live in a cottage in southern England with an orchard, or so he told his brother Colin, 'and give my afternoons to the care of pigs.  The hired labour would be very cheap, 2 boys could tend 50 pigs.  And it would be the abruptest change' from the writing that would be 'my moruning work.'

He came into the front line again near Saint Quentin on 3 April where there was still snow, and lay four days and four nights without relief in the open, kept going by brandy and the fear of death.  On 14 April, Owen led his section in an attack on the German trenches under fire and shelling, later telling his brother Colin that 'going over the top' was 'about as exhilarating as going over a precipice', that he'd wish'd for a bugle and drum and had kept chanting 'Keep the line straight!  Not so fast on the left!  Steady on the left' before the 'tornado' of shells. 

The imagery of the 1918 poems goes back to this, and to the horror of a few days later, indelibly marking the literature of war.  Owen's battalion stayed in the line around Savy, lying again in holes where 'for twelve days I did not was my face, nor take off my boots nor sleep a deep sleep...'.  A shell hit a bank , just two yards from his head, and he was blown into the air, ending up in a hole just big enough to shelter him, with the dead body of a comrade near by, covered with earth.  There followed a collapse, then possible imputations of cowardice from his commanding officer who judged that Owen was no longer fit to lead men and ordered him back to the casualty clearing station.  The diagnosis was 'neurasthenia', or shell shock, although he assured his mother that he hadn't had a breakdown.  A medical report stated that on 1 May he was found to be 'shaky and tremulous and his conduct and manner were peculiar and his memory confused.'  By the end of June Owen was in Craiglockhart, a hospital housed in a dark, converted Victorian hydro in Slateford, a suburb of Edinburgh.

It was at Craiglockhart he met Sassoon, and the two discussed the art of poetry.  Nothing like discussion to focus one’s mind and skill. 

Owen had been transformed by Craiglockhart.  Early in November, his poem 'Miners' was accepted by the Nation; later that month he visited his cousin and former literary confidant Leslie Gunston, displaying a new confidence by writing mockingly to Siegfried Sassoon about Gunston's tame verses and sexual innocence.  In November, he rejoined the 5th Battalion, the Manchester Regiment, at Scarborough, still thought capable of light duty. 

Now let’s get to the poem.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

By Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

(September - October, 1917)

The first thing that should be mention is that the form is of a sonnet, and despite the break after the eighth line and the grouping of the last six lines together, the sonnet is not an Italian sonnet but a Shakespearean, or sometimes called an English sonnet.  An Italian sonnet has a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFGEFG.  The way those last six lines are intertwined in the rhyme scheme creates a bulk of lines that if handled properly consolidate into a contrasting thought to the opening eight lines.  Sometimes an Italian sonnet is arranged with the two quatrains grouped together with a line break before the sestet to emphasize the change in thought in that sestet. 

A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, has three quatrains ABAB CDCD EFEF and a closing couplet GG, and is almost never displayed with any line breaks.  The internal logic of a Shakespearean works differently than an Italian.  Typically a Shakespearean builds to a climax within the three different quatrains and then delivers the climatic thrust in the couplet.  So Owen shapes the poem like an Italian sonnet, though it’s actually a Shakespearean, and he varies the rhyme scheme of third quatrain to EFFE. 

Why does he group the last six into a sort of Italian sonnet sestet?    In the Italian sonnet there is that turn in thought, referred to as the “volta,” going from the octave (the two quatrains) to the sestet.  In Owens poem there isn’t so much a turn in thought but a change in imagery.  I’ll get to that.

The poem is built on a grotesque metaphor that the elements of battle are like that of a funeral.  And so in the octave we get artillery fire described as church bells and the prattle of guns as orisons or prayers.  The sound of whistling shells are choir song and military bugles are local voices.  Bells, bombs, prattle, choirs, and so on are a merging of sounds from two disparate environments, a church and a battle field.  For me the octave is the strongest part of the poem.  Its internal logic is clear.

The turn in the sestet is a shift from sound imagery to visual imagery.  Now we have candles, eyes that shine, glimmers, and the pallor of brows.  I’m confused as to what “speed them all” refers to in the ninth line.  Speed toward death?  Toward their grave?  Toward heaven?  Whatever that is supposed to mean, it doesn’t seem to shift the conceit; it’s still a funeral and a battle field. 

The closing couplet brings in the funeral flowers, and a closing of blinds to indicate a closing of eyes and therefore sight.  I don’t know what Owen means by flowers being “the tenderness of patient minds”—why patient minds?—but intuitively I can understand how we’ve come to flowers. 

So what Owens tried to do is create a hybrid between the Italian and Shakespearean sonnet forms, keeping the Shakespearean three quatrains but grouping the last quatrain and couplet into a sestet-like unit.  Is he successful?  Personally I would say no.  As a sonnet it lacks the intellectual sophistication of an Italian and the power of a Shakespearean.  He’s lost what makes each sonnet work best for no apparent gain.  There are reasons why each sonnet form are the way they are, arrived at through trial and error.  He should have written a clean Italian sonnet, where the last six lines are interlocked in rhyme.

So why did Owen choose to write it this way?  I think the poem came to him in this form, and instead of editing into an Italian sonnet, he felt compelled to keep it this way.  It’s still a good poem, and I can understand how a young poet is reluctant to rejigger what seems adequate. 

The other thing that’s usually mentioned with this poem is the disconnect between the poem being called an “anthem,” which is a celebratory song and the subject of the poem, which is “doomed youth.”  No one celebrates dead youths.  That’s verbal irony and accentuates the irony of the central conceit.

Of course a poem should be listened to as well as read.  Here is Kenneth Branagh reading the poem.

The poem sounds lovely to listen to. It’s a good poem, despite what I think are some internal flaws.  Still, on Memorial Day, keep all those poor doomed youth that have died in the service of our nation in your thoughts, hearts, and prayers.  

Matthew Monday: Memorial Day at the USS San Antonio

I know, it’s Tuesday, but this is from yesterday on our trip to Fleet Week Naval ship on Memorial Day.  Fleet Week is an event that comes to New York City every year where Navy, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen put on displays for the City the week prior to Memorial Day and concluding on Memorial Day.  Usually a major Naval sea vessel docks at one of the ports and allows the public to come aboard.  This year the naval vessel was the USS San Antonio, an amphibious landing craft which brings Marines or Naval Seals into a disputed situation.  So it carries both Sailors and Marines.

It was difficult to choose from all the pictures we took which to post, but here’s a bunch.

Standing in front of an artillery cannon with a couple of Marines.

Matthew holding an M16.  He just loved holding the guns.

On deck was an Osprey air craft, which is sort of a hybrid helicopter/air plane.  I think Matthew is with the piolt here.

Sitting inside a landing craft vehicle.

Posing with a sailor and then Commanding Officers.

And finally there was a chin up bar which a couple of sailors challenged the guests to see how many they could do.  Matthew was able to snap Daddy giving it a try.

For the record, I did four.  I told the sailor I could probably only do two (I low balled it to reduce expectations) but if I really was going to give it my all I could probably have squeezed out a couple of more, which I guess is OK for my age.  But the teenage girl before me did ten, which impressed everyone, and the sailor after me did twelve, but that was 82 for that morning.

Finally this video explains everything we saw on board. 

Just too cool.  One of the things I taught Matthew is to tell each service man or woman thank you for their service.  Even Matthew said afterward we thank them because they protect us.  Happy Memorial Day.  Honor a solider, sailor, marine, coast guardsman, or any of the other military, especially one who has made the ultimate sacrifice.