And
so “at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918” an
armistice went into effect bringing the cessation of hostilities to what would become
known as The Great War. It is from that event that our Veterans Day is commemorated. Today is the 99th anniversary of that armistice.
I
have now completed the collection of World War I poems titled Some Desperate Glory: The First World War
The Poets Knew by Max Egremont, which I have been posting on for almost two
years now. Each post on my blog
highlighted a poem from one of the war years. You can access these posts here:
As I explained in that last post, I
tried to highlight a different poet for each year, but Wilfred Owen’s poetry
was so superior in the last two years of the war I just had to highlight him
twice. So why am I highlighting another
poem from the book? Well, the book
doesn’t stop with the end of the war (1918) but continues with one more chapter
on the post war, titled, “Aftermath.”
The poets who were not killed in the war went on to write poetry on the
war for their remaining years. So
intense is the war experience that one can only say the soul is forever
traumatized.
Of the eleven poets whose work are
collected in the book, five survived the war.
It only occurred to me recently that Egremont’s book is a book on
British poets of the First World War.
All eleven are British, and frankly I can’t think of any poets from any
of the other countries that fought, even the United States,
though it is incredulous to think there weren’t any poets other than British. I’m not even sure if the eleven poets
constitute all the British poets who served.
I can’t recall if Egremont ever gives his criteria for the selection. I should also provide the list of poets
Egremont selects. Each deserves that
honor.
The six who were killed in action:
The five who survived the war:
Of the poets who survived, Siegfried
Sassoon arguably went on to have the most impact as an ex-war poet. Graves may have had a more celebrated
literary career, but even he acknowledge his work after the war focused on
other themes. I’m selecting Sassoon’s “On
Passing the New Menin Gate” as the highlighted poem of the war’s aftermath.
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A gap opened between
those who’d fought and those who didn’t.
Before 1914, Britain and the new art of continental Europe had been
getting closer; now, for many, the Continent meant death, obliteration and,
even in peace, rumours of chaos.
Some—mostly non-combatants like [T.S.] Eliot, James Joyce, and [Ezra]
Pound—still looked to modernism, to abstract art, to writing without clear
narrative, whereas Sassoon and Blunden, even the more adventurous Graves, stuck
to tradition, often yearning for an imagined, calm past. They had tried to tell the war’s reality,
Wilfred Owen writing that ‘every word, every figure of speech must be a matter
of experience’ and ‘I don’t want to write anything to which a soldier would say
No compris’. Owen had known nothing of
Eliot and Pound. (p. 241)
Sassoon
felt a particular loss from Owen’s death.
He went on to opine that if Owen “had lived, they could together have
made an alternative to modernism, to Eliot’s fragmented world” (p. 256). This decision to split with the modernist
forms isolated the war poets, especially Sassoon, characterizing them as
outdated.
The
second issue of Sassoon post war years was his tumultuous life. “Propelled by his fame…Sassoon began a decade
of guilt-ridden socializing and sex, briefly at Oxford before becoming editor
of the Daily Herald and, billed as a hero
poet…on a lecture tour of the United States” (p. 240). The sex was filled with a series of
homosexual affairs, which filled the whole decade following the war. In 1931 he married, had a child, who he loved
deeply, while he kept his homosexuality indiscreet. He wrote throughout his life, poetry,
satires, novels with mixed results.
Toward the end of his life he had a conversion experience to Roman
Catholicism, which affected him greatly.
In 1927, Siegfried
Sassoon went back to Flanders. He drove
across the battlefields with Glen Byam Shaw, the young actor whom he loved,
weeping at the memories. He wrote ‘On
Passing the New Menin Gate’ about the pompous memorial designed by the imperial
architect Sir Reginald Bloomfield for Ypres and inscribed with the names of the
dead.
Sassoon had tried
politics and lecture tours; he discovered sex, fooling himself that he could
reform his decadent lovers, all the time feeling a bit lost. Thomas Hardy became an idol and Edmund
Blunden an essential friend; to see the two together at Max Gate, Hardy’s home
at Dorset, allowed Sassoon to imagine a world that might respond to his
increasingly traditionalist style. When,
in 1924, Blunden went to teach in Japan, Sassoon missed him badly; and
nostalgia became more intense as he became less inspired by the present. ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’ evoked the
bitterness and anger of the war. (p.
250).
Later,
through the turmoil of the Second World War, Egremont tells us Sassoon “longed
for a more purposeful and ordered life, for spiritual rest. In 1957, [he] converted to Roman Catholicism,
welcoming its clear answers and its discipline” (p. 256). He would live for another ten years and apparently
his new found faith was the only thing that could put his war-torn, dislocated
soul at rest.
As
mentioned in the quote above, New Menin Gate was a war memorial at Ypres,
Belgium dedicated to the British and Commonwealth dead who’s grave went
unidentified. Apparently Sassoon was not pleased with it.
Here is the poem he wrote.
On
Passing the New Menin Gate
By Siegfried Sassoon
Who will remember,
passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed
the guns?
Who shall absolve the
foulness of their fate,-
Those doomed,
conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent
stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world's
worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for
ever', the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so
belied
as these intolerably
nameless names?
Well might the Dead who
struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this
sepulchre of crime.
There’s
not much to analyze, a rather straightforward poem. In the first stanza, the speaker is passing
this new memorial at Ypres, questioning whether this self-conscious monument
actually addresses those who it’s supposed to memorialize. The second stanza shifts the focus to those
who are supposed to be memorialized, and the third ridicules the monument for not
displaying the reality of war’s struggle and death. “Here was the world's worst wound” is truly a
great and memorable line. You can hear
the entire poem read here.
With
the conclusion of these war poets, I want to announce that in 2018 I will be continuing
with Sassoon by reading a play by Joseph Pierce on Owen and Sassoon, Pierce using the
two poet’s own words to form the drama. I will also be going
through T. S. Eliot’s post WWI poem, “The Wasteland,” and so we can compare the
modernist and the traditionalist’s styles. Stay
tuned for that.
Finally,
for Veteran’s Day, say a prayer for those that fought in wars. As you can see with Sassoon, the experience
of war is not pleasant and life-long traumatizing.
