write a detailed note on the poetry of the first world war
Answers
Answer:
The poetry of the First World War
A collection of poems inspired by World War One, featuring poems by First World War poets including Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen.
The First World War inspired profound poetry – words in which the atmosphere and landscape of battle were evoked perhaps more vividly than ever before.
The First World War poets – many of whom lost their lives – became a collective voice, illuminating not only the war’s tragedies and their irreparable effects, but the hopes and disappointments of an entire generation.
Although it has been more than one hundred years since the Armistice and the end of the First World War, it continues to move and inspire poets, with Carol Ann Duffy penning a sonnet, ‘The Wound in Time’, as part of a series of special Remembrance Day events organised by film director Danny Boyle in 2018.
Alongside ‘The Wound in Time’, here we’ve curated a collection of just some of the poignant WW1 poems, featuring the writing of the famous soldier poets, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, alongside the WW1 poetry of nurses, mothers, sweethearts and family and friends who experienced the war from entirely different perspectives. These poems from World War One give a profound insight into this period of history.
'It’s necessary to separate politics, even history, from the poetry. The work of the British First World War poets can be seen as one of the most powerful collective statements not just against what happened on the western front but against all war.' - Max Egremont, Some Desperate Glory
The Wound in Time
Carol Ann Duffy
It is the wound in Time. The century’s tides,
chanting their bitter psalms, cannot heal it.
Not the war to end all wars; death’s birthing place;
the earth nursing its ticking metal eggs, hatching
new carnage. But how could you know, brave
as belief as you boarded the boats, singing?
The end of God in the poisonous, shrapneled air.
Poetry gargling its own blood. We sense it was love
you gave your world for; the town squares silent,
awaiting their cenotaphs. What happened next?
War. And after that? War. And now? War. War.
History might as well be water, chastising this shore;
for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice.
Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea.
G.K. Chesterton
Elegy in a Country Churchyard
The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.
But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.
And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England
They have no graves as yet
The Soldier
Rupert Brooke
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England
given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Reported Missing
Anna Gordon Keown
My thought shall never be that you are dead:
Who laughed so lately in this quiet place.
The dear and deep-eyed humour of that face
Held something ever living, in Death’s stead.
Scornful I hear the flat things they have said
And all their piteous platitudes of pain.
I laugh! I laugh! – For you will come again –
This heart would never beat if you were dead.
The world’s adrowse in twilight hushfulness,
There’s purple lilac in your little room,
And somewhere out beyond the evening gloom
Small boys are culling summer watercress.
Of these familiar things I have no dread
Being so very sure you are not dead.