The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (18 page)

But in the morning, men began again

To mock Death following in bitter pain.

Nancy Cunard

‘
Education
'

The rain is slipping, dripping down the street;

The day is grey as ashes on the hearth.

The children play with soldiers made of tin,

               While you sew

               Row after row.

The tears are slipping, dripping one by one;

Your son has shot and wounded his small brother.

The mimic battle's ended with a sob,

               While you dream

10                            Over your seam.

The blood is slipping, dripping drop by drop;

The men are dying in the trenches' mud.

The bullets search the quick among the dead.

               While you drift,

               The Gods sift.

The ink is slipping, dripping from the pens,

On papers, White and Orange, Red and Grey, –

History for the children of to-morrow, –

               While you prate

20                            About Fate.

War is slipping, dripping death on earth.

If the child is father of the man,

Is the toy gun father of the Krupps?

               For Christ's sake think!

               While you sew

               Row after row.

Pauline Barrington

Socks

Shining pins that dart and click

     In the fireside's sheltered peace

Check the thoughts that cluster thick –

     20
plain and then decrease.

He was brave – well, so was I –

     Keen and merry, but his lip

Quivered when he said good-bye –

     
Purl the seam-stitch, purl and slip.

Never used to living rough,

10                  Lots of things he'd got to learn;

Wonder if he's warm enough –

     
Knit 2, catch 2, knit 1, turn.

Hark! The paper-boys again!

     Wish that shout could be suppressed;

Keeps one always on the strain –

     
Knit off 9, and slip the rest.

Wonder if he's fighting now,

     What he's done and where he's been;

He'll come out on top, somehow –

20                  
Slip 1, knit 2, purl 14.

Jessie Pope

A War Film

I saw,

With a catch of the breath and the heart's uplifting,

Sorrow and pride,

     The ‘week's great draw' –

The Mons Retreat;

The ‘Old Contemptibles' who fought, and died,

The horror and the anguish and the glory.

As in a dream,

Still hearing machine-guns rattle and shells scream,

10             I came out into the street.

When day was done,

My little son

Wondered at bath-time why I kissed him so,

Naked upon my knee.

How could he know

The sudden terror that assaulted me?…

The body I had borne

Nine moons beneath my heart,

A part of me…

20             If, someday,

It should be taken away

To War. Tortured. Torn.

Slain.

Rotting in No Man's Land, out in the rain –

My little son…

Yet all those men had mothers, every one.

How should he know

Why I kissed and kissed and kissed him, crooning his name?

He thought that I was daft.

30             He thought it was a game,

And laughed, and laughed.

Theresa Hooley

The War Films

O living pictures of the dead,

     O songs without a sound,

O fellowship whose phantom tread

     Hallows a phantom ground –

How in a gleam have these revealed

     The faith we had not found.

We have sought God in a cloudy Heaven,

     We have passed by God on earth:

His seven sins and his sorrows seven,

10                  His wayworn mood and mirth,

Like a ragged cloak have hid from us

     The secret of his birth.

Brother of men, when now I see

     The lads go forth in line,

Thou knowest my heart is hungry in me

     As for thy bread and wine:

Thou knowest my heart is bowed in me

     To take their death for mine.

Sir Henry Newbolt

The Dancers

(During a Great Battle, 1916)

The floors are slippery with blood:

The world gyrates too. God is good

That while His wind blows out the light

For those who die hourly for us –

We can still dance, each night.

The music has grown numb with death –

But we will suck their dying breath,

The whispered name they breathed to chance,

To swell our music, make it loud

10             That we may dance, – may dance.

We are the dull blind carrion-fly

That dance and batten. Though God die

Mad from the horror of the light –

The light is mad, too, flecked with blood, –

We dance, we dance, each night.

Edith Sitwell

Epitaphs: A Son

My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew

What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few.

Rudyard Kipling

‘
I looked up from my writing
'

I looked up from my writing,

     And gave a start to see,

As if rapt in my inditing,

     The moon's full gaze on me.

Her meditative misty head

     Was spectral in its air,

And I involuntarily said,

     ‘What are you doing there?'

‘Oh, I've been scanning pond and hole

10                  And waterway hereabout

For the body of one with a sunken soul

     Who has put his life-light out.

‘Did you hear his frenzied tattle?

     It was sorrow for his son

Who is slain in brutish battle,

     Though he has injured none.

‘And now I am curious to look

     Into the blinkered mind

Of one who wants to write a book

20                  In a world of such a kind.'

Her temper overwrought me,

     And I edged to shun her view,

For I felt assured she thought me

     One who should drown him too.

Thomas Hardy

Picnic

July 1917

We lay and ate sweet hurt-berries

     In the bracken of Hurt Wood.

Like a quire of singers singing low

     The dark pines stood.

Behind us climbed the Surrey hills,

     Wild, wild in greenery;

At our feet the downs of Sussex broke

     To an unseen sea.

And life was bound in a still ring,

10                  Drowsy, and quiet, and sweet…

When heavily up the south-east wind

     The great guns beat.

We did not wince, we did not weep,

     We did not curse or pray;

We drowsily heard, and someone said,

     ‘They sound clear to-day'.

We did not shake with pity and pain,

     Or sicken and blanch white.

We said, ‘If the wind's from over there

20                  There'll be rain to-night'.

                                                            *

Once pity we knew, and rage we knew,

     And pain we knew, too well,

As we stared and peered dizzily

     Through the gates of hell.

But now hell's gates are an old tale;

     Remote the anguish seems;

The guns are muffled and far away,

     Dreams within dreams.

And far and far are Flanders mud,

30                  And the pain of Picardy;

And the blood that runs there runs beyond

     The wide waste sea.

We are shut about by guarding walls:

     (We have built them lest we run

Mad from dreaming of naked fear

     And of black things done.)

We are ringed all round by guarding walls,

     So high, they shut the view.

Not all the guns that shatter the world

40                  Can quite break through.

                                                            *

Oh, guns of France, oh, guns of France

     Be still, you crash in vain…

Heavily up the south wind throb

     Dull dreams of pain,…

Be still, be still, south wind, lest your

     Blowing should bring the rain…

We'll lie very quiet on Hurt Hill,

     And sleep once again.

Oh, we'll lie quite still, nor listen nor look,

50                  While the earth's bounds reel and shake,

Lest, battered too long, our walls and we

     Should break …should break …

Rose Macaulay
     

As the Team's Head-Brass

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn

The lovers disappeared into the wood.

I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm

That strewed an angle of the fallow, and

Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square

Of charlock. Every time the horses turned

Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned

Upon the handles to say or ask a word,

About the weather, next about the war.

10             Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,

And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed

Once more.

               The blizzard felled the elm whose crest

I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,

The ploughman said. ‘When will they take it away?'

‘When the war's over.' So the talk began –

One minute and an interval of ten,

A minute more and the same interval.

‘Have you been out?' ‘No.' ‘And don't want to, perhaps?'

20             ‘If I could only come back again, I should.

I could spare an arm. I shouldn't want to lose

A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,

I should want nothing more…Have many gone

From here?' ‘Yes.' ‘Many lost?' ‘Yes: good few.

Only two teams work on the farm this year.

One of my mates is dead. The second day

In France they killed him. It was back in March,

The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if

He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'

30             ‘And I should not have sat here. Everything

Would have been different. For it would have been

Another world.' ‘Ay, and a better, though

If we could see all all might seem good.' Then

The lovers came out of the wood again:

The horses started and for the last time

I watched the clods crumble and topple over

After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

Edward Thomas

The Farmer, 1917

I see a farmer walking by himself

In the ploughed field, returning like the day

To his dark nest. The plovers circle round

In the gray sky; the blackbird calls; the thrush

Still sings – but all the rest have gone to sleep.

I see the farmer coming up the field,

Where the new corn is sown, but not yet sprung;

He seems to be the only man alive

And thinking through the twilight of this world.

10             I know that there is war behind those hills,

And I surmise, but cannot see the dead,

And cannot see the living in their midst –

So awfully and madly knit with death.

I cannot feel, but I know there is war,

And has been now for three eternal years,

Behind the subtle cinctures of those hills.

I see the farmer coming up the field,

And as I look, imagination lifts

The sullen veil of alternating cloud,

20             And I am stunned by what I see behind

His solemn and uncompromising form:

Wide hosts of men who once could walk like him

In freedom, quite alone with night and day,

Uncounted shapes of living flesh and bone,

Worn dull, quenched dry, gone blind and sick, with war;

And they are him and he is one with them;

They see him as he travels up the field.

O God, how lonely freedom seems to-day!

O single farmer walking through the world,

30             They bless the seed in you that earth shall reap,

When they, their countless lives, and all their thoughts,

Lie scattered by the storm: when peace shall come

With stillness, and long shivers, after death.

Fredegond Shove

May, 1915

          Let us remember Spring will come again

                    To the scorched, blackened woods, where the wounded trees

          Wait with their old wise patience for the heavenly rain,