E E Cummings: Selected Poems

      One of the good things about teaching sixth-formers (all those years ago) was that occasionally, instead of my recommending things for them to read, they suggested books to me, and I’m grateful to Giles because I did buy a collection of e e cummings’ poetry, and have enjoyed it very much.

He’s a difficult one to approach for a number of reasons, not the least being his unusual presentation conventions – never a capital letter, unspaced punctuation, random brackets and line breaks and a lot more. He was satirised for many years as e j thribb in Private Eye.

Re-reading (most of) this collection, I was struck this time by his love of the sonnet, at least as a 14-line poem, for I’d say that’s what the majority of them are. Some of them obey more of the traditional sonnet conventions such as rhyme schemes, octave and sestet, shift of focus and so on. And I wondered, do the ‘gimmicks’, does the unconventional approach get in the way of poetic communication? I thought of visual art – painting – and wondered further; can we think about and modern appreciate poetry in the same way as we do modern art? For me, the poetic vision and inspiration are definitely there, but do we process the words of a poem in the same ways we react to shape and colour in a painting, for example?

I wasn’t seeking comparisons, but two in particular surfaced as I read. Firstly, John Donne, whose verse is clever and witty (in the metaphysical sense) and full of multiple meanings, but flow and meaning are only rarely overshadowed by form, structure or language, which is much more the case with e e cummings. And then, looking even more closely at how he uses language, and also rhythm, I found plentiful echoes of the master of sprung rhythm, Gerard Manley Hopkins, another poet whom I rate very highly. The abrupt pauses and changes of direction are there, as is the sense of wonderment at life and the world.

Cummings’ love poetry comes over as genuine, truly felt, and unashamedly erotic at times, and this is very difficult to achieve without slipping over the edge into smut or porn, and I think he only overdoes this a couple of times. He’s also capable of some pretty vicious political satire, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

This is a really good selection, and it’s well presented, too, with a helpful introductory couple of pages of context before each of the different sections the anthologist has chosen to create. A good one to revisit, and it was on a whim, too.

Paul Fussell: Poetic Meter & Poetic Form

      This is a pretty old book – even the revised edition is over 40 years old – but I found myself thinking, “I wish I’d had this when I was teaching.” It’s a slim volume that does what it says on the cover, comprehensively. I like Fussell; his books on the effects of the First World War, and on war itself, are great insights into how people and artists have been affected by this plague on the species. He is American, and at times his scansion reveals this…

This book is quite technical, almost mathematical at times, but always in a useful sort of way; it requires serious concentration as the different kinds of poetic meter are explained and illustrated, in a logical and historical sequence. It’s highly informative, and very much worth the effort, and even after years of teaching poetry and practical criticism in the English school system, I had a greater awareness of the hidden or unnoticed artifice in the construction of poetry.

There are myriad excellent helpful examples and illustrations in the section on metre, with relevant parts inflected for clarity. He offers pithy and cogent judgements throughout, particularly about free verse and its excesses; he illustrates both bad and good, which is illuminating, and there are helpful comparisons at times. I found him particularly good on the sonnet.

Overall, the book offers a good and logical way into the joys and complexities of practical criticism, and despite the necessary analytical approach, nowhere does Fussell lose sight of what poetry actually is, what it does and how it can affect us. His ultimate aim is clear: the ‘trained reader’, for ‘the innocent eye sees nothing’. If you can track down a copy, well worth it.

A poem for Valentine’s Day

Marian Allen: The Wind on the Downs

 

I like to think of you as brown and tall,

As strong and living as you used to be,

In khaki tunic, Sam Brown belt and all,

And standing there and laughing down at me.

Because they tell me, dear, that you are dead,

Because I can no longer see your face,

You have not died, it is not true, instead

You seek adventure in some other place.

That you are round about me, I believe;

I hear you laughing as you used to do,

Yet loving all the things I think of you;

And knowing you are happy, should I grieve?

You follow and are watchful where I go;

How should you leave me, having loved me so?

 

We walked along the tow-path, you and I,

Beside the sluggish—moving still canal;

It seemed impossible that you should die;

I think of you the same and always shall.

We thought of many things and spoke of few,

And life lay all uncertainly before,

And now I walk alone and think of you,

And wonder what new kingdoms you explore.

Over the railway line, across the grass,

While up above the golden wings are spread,

Flying, ever flying overhead,

Here still I see your khaki figure pass,

And when I leave the meadow, almost wait

That you should open first the wooden gate.

Many years ago the school and my department had its first ever OfSTED inspection; our inspector was an English specialist and after a lesson on First World War poetry asked if I was familiar with this poem. I wasn’t, and given that this was in pre-internet days, he kindly sent me a copy, with a letter expressing pleasure at time spent with the department. O tempora, O mores…

This is a poem that you have to read aloud, ideally several times, and listen carefully to how it sounds.

There’s something particularly effective in her use of one of the forms of the imperfect tense ‘used to be’ a number of times, with an immediacy that’s almost, but not quite, like the continuous present.

All the speaker has is the memory of her dead lover: she speaks of him as you used to be, and what you used to do. His death is clearly so recent that she cannot quite believe, has not yet been able to accept it. Her memories are very vivid: how he stood, how he laughed.

She talks to him as if he’s there next to her: note the profusion of yous and Is that denotes their closeness and shared existence. There’s a realisation that he’s now in some other place, but it’s still close by, and he can still see can hear her, she imagines. There is the touching final moment when, as the courteous male, he should be there to open the gate for her.

And yet behind this refusal or denial there is the fact of his death: the alliteration of dear and dead in the fifth line, and then the rhyme instead some lines later is an echo of the reality. The repetitions at the start of two consecutive lines in the first stanza Because…Because feel like her trying to convince herself, as do the three lines in the next stanza that all start with And.

The first stanza focuses on the poet herself, and her memories, the second is rather more about the two of them; the length of the stanzas allows her to develop her memories fully, and creates a more reflective mood to the poem, I feel. The rhyme scheme is regular and gives the poem structure, without getting in the way of her memories and ideas; the length of the lines helps with this.

It’s a quiet, calm, measured poem; it’s a love poem, and the depth of her love shines through the quietness.

John Carey: A Little History of Poetry

     Well, as I reached the end of this book, I was thinking how useful it would have been at the start of my Eng.Lit. Degree. It is exactly what is says on the cover, starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh and reaching as close to today as reasonably possible. I’ve liked John Carey’s writing about literature for quite a number of years, and his modest biography of John Donne (John Donne: Life, Mind and Art) has subdued my desire to read the latest one everyone is raving about…

Apparently the Jews in exile in Babylon may well have encountered the Gilgamesh story, which, surprise surprise (!) features both a flood and a snake, both of which later turn up in the book of Genesis.

Carey portrays the broad sweep of the development of poetry through the ages, and its changing purpose and function, too. It’s highly accessible as an introduction and a survey, both for the informed and uninformed reader. It’s eminently readable, and Carey’s knowledge and above all love of poetry shine through; he shows us the good stuff and explains why he thinks it’s good, and equally, at times, tells us what isn’t.

The book consists of many short, often thematic and comparative chapters. Whilst this works most of the time and suits his purpose, you can also see how hard it is to do justice to Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance, in such a chapter. His love of John Donne’s poetry shines through in such a chapter, though, but I felt that Milton lost out. He’s tuned into the beauty and variety of the ways poets use our language – there are a couple of chapters on poetry not written in English, as there needs to be, but these don’t work nearly as well. I thought I knew poetry pretty well after a lifetime of study and teaching, but not; there’s just so much of it, and one inevitably both selects and sticks to what one likes best.

Carey achieves what he sets out to do, and admirably; I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

On literature and race

This is an issue I’ve wrestled with for a while, and felt challenged by when I was teaching.

Firstly, how good is literature by black and minority ethnic writers in this country? Then, what am I/we doing judging writing by the race/skin colour/nationality of its author? Isn’t literature an absolute, in the sense of it either being good/bad/indifferent? The question is then complicated by reflecting on the past, when perhaps works by such writers were not published or exposed to an audience, and also when people from those communities might not have had the opportunity to write, find an audience, be published: does this imply that there is ‘catch-up’ to be done, allowances to be made, and so on?

What about white critics passing judgements on literature and poetry written by members of other communities? Is there covert racism, is there on the other hand the potential for being patronising? As white critics and teachers, are we merely guilty of tokenism? Past (cultural) history has left us, it seems to me, with a massive can of worms here.

Let’s be a little more concrete. When I was teaching GCSE English and English Literature, a good number of years ago now, there was a compulsory unit of ‘Poetry from Other Cultures and Traditions’ which, as you can see from the label, put various works in their own, separate compartment. There was some interesting poetry, some that I really liked, and some that I thought was basically tosh. And I didn’t feel wholly comfortable with any of those judgements, but I had to teach 15 and 16 year olds to analyse and appreciate it, to write essays on it and gain marks… Why was it all in a separate box from the usual white/home-grown subjects like Seamus Heaney, Gillian Clarke, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, all of whom I found it easier both to teach and appreciate because I was comfortable with the traditions from which their works sprang? How valid would comparison across those genres be?

I was always clear with students that there was no law saying they had to like a poem; they just needed to be able to explain why they did or didn’t like a poem, and give evidence to back up their opinion. I did not have a problem illustrating this approach when we were faced with some quite grim (to me) poetry by some of our more hallowed poets…

This leads me on to surmising that appreciation and analysis of poetry or novels written by members of different racial minority groups are possibly better taught by members of those communities, who would have the necessary contextual background and understanding to do them justice. And here, we are of course in dreamland, given the relatively small number of English teachers from such communities.

For me, these issues seems even more acute when I read of examination boards recently making deliberate choices to remove from examination specifications poetry by well-known, white British poets (such as Philip Larkin, for example) and replacing them by works from other cultures and traditions. Something, it seems to me, must be lost by depriving those who live in the country of making the acquaintance of some of its best poetry. And I don’t feel completely at ease saying that, either. Colonialism, empire, immigration and racism has a great deal to answer for.

One thing: I have no trust in any politician to make any useful suggestion or help the discussion forward. I am still struck by the utter idiocy of one M Gove decreeing that GCSE students should only study novels by British writers, thus depriving teachers and students across the country of To Kill A Mockingbird as an examination text; for all its faults, it allowed much mature discussion of growing up, parenting, community and racism, opening students’ eyes to a whole raft of ideas and issues relevant to them, their age and their world.

I wonder what other readers and teachers think about all this?

Siegfried Sassoon: Reconciliation

When you are standing at your hero’s grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.

Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred, harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.

I only came across this poem recently: what a powerful one it is, in the light of some of his others, and its theme. After the war, there is peace, and a coming to terms with what happened before, however difficult that may be.

Sassoon creates a situation that would have been familiar to his readers; British relatives would have to travel to France or Belgium to visit either the grave of a loved one, if a grave existed, or to see the dead soldier commemorated somewhere like the Menin Gate in Ypres, or the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme. People are still making such visits today, seeking the last resting-place of an ancestor.

Is your hero in that first line innocent, or ironic, or both? (link to poem) What, exactly, is a homeless village? Do we imagine ruins, one of the lost villages of the Somme which were wiped from the face of the earth and never rebuilt? Sassoon allows the visitor, and the reader, a sense of pride in the sacrifice of a life, though he never alludes to the purpose of that sacrifice, or the meaning of that death.

The challenge is in the fourth line: think of the other side, the former enemy, too. And this is hard. I recall that in my innocent childhood days, our local parish priest had fought in the Great War and lost a leg; it was replaced by a tin prosthesis, and occasionally, if someone looked sceptical – though he walked with a limp – they would be invited to tap the leg, which sounded hollow and metallic. But what impressed me most profoundly about him was that on Remembrance Sunday he always solemnly reminded the congregation to pray for the dead Germans too. Those men also did their duty, were brave or cowardly, and died for their country as well.

The fifth line sums up the savagery of that war in a single line: humans behaving inhumanly, doing things that they no longer wish to remember. Listen to the leaden-sounding monosyllables of that line, interrupted only by the emphasis in the three-syllable hideous.

And then the judgement in the next line, directly addressed again – you – the juxtaposition of nourished and hatred, the alliteration of hatred/harsh, the lapidary blind at the end of the line: no escaping here. Yet the judgement is only implied; there is a hint that the poet understands such feelings. But we have also to remember: he was there, he saw.

The final two lines must be wrestled with. The Golgotha reference – ‘place of the skull’ in Hebrew, I think, from the gospel account of the crucifixion of Christ. Perhaps you’ll find – and perhaps only now do we reflect on the gender of the visitor Sassoon is addressing: is she female? A mother, a sister, a wife, a lover? What are those (German) mothers doing? (see Sassoon’s poem Glory of Women) Are they on the same errand? And if all are in the same situation, then the overarching humanity is surely emphasised, and we are brought back to the title of the poem.

Sassoon’s experiences in the trenches, his anger at what he saw, and the apparent indifference or lack of understanding on the part of those back home, gave him the right to challenge, to question, to confront. But what words would you use to describe the tone of this poem? For it surely is not an angry poem. Solemn? Reflective?

Think about the metre and the rhythm of the verse. Iambic pentameters, solemn; rhyming ABBA ABBA which slows down the pace of the poem as you must wait longer for the final rhyme. Only two stanzas; nothing too complex is being presented or explored here: it’s a very simple poem in a lot of ways, but the feelings and the emotions are rather harder to deal with. For me, it’s another example of Sassoon at his best.

Fifty years on…

The older you get, the more anniversaries there are; it recently occurred to me that it’s now 50 years since I sat my A Levels… good grief! And what a simple business it all was way back then. All exams, for a start: no continuous assessment, no coursework or anything like that. Just sit in silence and write and write and write.

English literature (well, obviously); I think we’d studied eight set books and only had to write about six, so there was a choice. Othello and King Lear, Doctor Faustus, Paradise Lost 9 & 10, Chaucer’s Merchant’s Prologue and Tale, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Shadow of a Gunman, Andrew Marvell’s poetry… is that all of them? Don’t recall which I avoided…

French: dictation, I remember, unseen and prose translation, essay, and literature. Le Mariage de Figaro, Le Roi Se Meurt, Servitude et Grandeur Militaires, Confession de Minuit. The killer was, that French Lit and one of the English lit papers were timetabled on the same day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon; eight essays altogether and I remember I filled thirty-six sides of foolscap (predecessor to A4 if you need to know) that day and had a seriously sore hand.

Latin of Classical Civilisation (yes, weird title) with unseen, prose translation, a Roman history paper and set books, though I can no longer remember what they all were, apart from tiresome Livy Book 30.

I’d already passed two A levels in previous years so I knew what to expect, roughly, and I had my revision plan and just powered on through it; I certainly have no recollections of pressure from other or myself, and no stress about any of it, either. Innocent days, perhaps; the end of school, certainly. I recall getting pissed in the village pub, raiding the kitchens where we took and ate all the strawberries, a naked dip in the freezing pool and ceremonial urination on the cricket pitch. Then it was all over.

I had offers from three of the five universities I’d applied to and had fallen in love with Liverpool, so that was my first choice. With two A levels already, and since I’d originally applied to read Latin and French, my offer was one D grade, in French. Results day meant an envelope in the post and a scrawled note from my tutor saying, ‘That should be good enough for Liverpool’ (about my 2 As and a C). Done. Except my A in English Literature was making me review my options, and I knew I’d really rather read English than Latin. So I wrote and asked – I’d already made the rather unusual for those days request for deferred entry – could I change my course based on my results. That would be fine, they said.

Do I make it all sound far too easy? Maybe. I did take naturally to study, because I enjoyed the subjects and they fascinated me; I was also quite an organised student, and I had really good teachers. I put in the time and did the work; at a Catholic boarding school there were few other distractions, which meant I was rather a slow learner in other areas of life.

What I took away from the whole experience is rather more important: a deep love of literature and languages instilled by teachers with a genuine passion for their subjects, and I suspect already at that time the prospect of becoming a teacher and passing on some of that enjoyment to future students was beginning to form itself somewhere deep in my unconscious.

What I realise now is the simplicity of those days, without pressure or expectation, which students of today cannot know or enjoy; no real thoughts about what would come after university; the comfort of knowing that with my place would come a grant to cover my living expenses, and the course costs I didn’t even have to think about, because there were no tuition fees. I have often wished that such freedom was on offer nowadays, because I have always been a great believer in learning for learning’s sake, and studying what you enjoy, rather than because it will bring you a high salary. I’m aware that university students were an elite then, a very small percentage of the population rather than today’s 50%. The greater democratisation and accessibility of higher education is surely a good thing, but I’m also aware that it’s primarily a great money-making opportunity for so many different people, with the needs and rights of the actual students quite a way down the list of priorities.

I’ll finish with a line from Virgil. Forsan et olim haec meminisse juvabit…

Siegfried Sassoon: Does It Matter?

Does it matter? – losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter? – losing your sight?
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter-those dreams in the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they know that you’ve fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.

Another poem from Sassoon designed to shock readers back home, more than anything else, I feel. Let’s start with the jaunty rhythm, the metre forcing you to sound jolly and cheerful as you read the poem aloud, even as the words themselves hint at real horror: such a mis-match between metre and subect-matter is both deliberate and very effective.

Three stanzas, and a repeated first line (more or less): repetition used to dramatic effect. Sassoon moves from the physical disability of being confined to a wheelchair to the arguably, for most of us, worse condition of blindness, onto the unseen mental horrors of shell-shock, nowadays hidden by the initials PTSD, which nobody thinks to unpick as they hear the letters.

The poem is about survivors – in a similar way to Owen’s Disabled, though the subject is treated in a totally different way. And the response of those around them is outlined in the shocking couplet that is the second and third lines of each stanza, the repetition in the second and third stanzas of the vague phrase people will always be kind. You need to stop and think: who are these people, and what does being kind mean, for a young person faced with the rest of their life in such a condition? The survivor’s life is then contrasted with the so very different lives of those back home, unaffected, in the final two lines of each stanza. Look particularly at the sadness implied in the last line of the second stanza, or the horrible effect of rhyming glad and mad in the final stanza.

Sassoon attacks the notion of patriotism in the final two lines, implying that the words fought for your country mean everything, while then implying that people soon forget.

It’s another very simple poem, in terms of language used: none of the complex and sometimes deliberately archaic language that Owen often uses, none of Owen’s very effective poetic devices either. It’s all done through suggestion and shock: the treatment of such a serious subject in such a casual and offhand manner stops the reader short; we are forced to reflect more deeply on the implications of what the poet is saying, of what lies behind the words. We are in the later years of the war here, and the early illusions everyone had at the outset have gone, only to be replaced by others,,,

Siegfried Sassoon: The General

‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
……
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

 

If Wilfred Owen is ‘in your face’ through his use of graphic detail in many of his war poems, Siegfried Sassoon is often brutally out to shock by saying a different kind of unspeakable thing. We see it here in a very short but vicious poem which goes straight to the heart of an issue that historians still argue about today: the competence or incompetence of the high command, those who ran the war and took the decisions that led to the deaths of millions of ordinary men on all sides.

There’s no specific form to identify, and the rhyme scheme is very simple; the hiatus between lines 6 and 7 is deliberate, and the final point is amplified by the third occurrence of the ‘-ack’ rhyme.

The metre is inescapably jaunty, jolly even, nursery rhyme-like, as becomes evident when you read the poem aloud, and the jolliness is designed to clash with the power and seriousness of the underlying message. It helps to visualise the scene: the general walking through a long line of soldiers at attention, with a repeated lively ‘Good-morning!’ every few yards. Sincerity? No.

The language is informal, casual, the language of squaddies among themselves, with slang thrown in. The third line is delivered in an almost throwaway manner, and the fourth line continues this feeling; the scene is personalised in the fifth and sixth lines when it’s narrowed down to two soldiers, being talked about by the anonymous speaker of the poem; their names are commonplace, Harry and Jack. They grunt to each other, they slog up the line with their kit.

And then the shock of their deaths – they were cheerful and alive last week, remember – is delivered in the same offhand way: he did for them both. The incompetence referred to in the fourth line has its results in a plan of attack. Interesting to notice that incompetent is the only complex word in the entire poem.

Effect? Well, I find it shocking in the manner in which Sassoon delivers such a simple tale, and one which must have been repeated countless times. And I also try and imagine the effect of such verse at the time of the Great War, when many people would have found the idea of speaking about death so casually extremely shocking, and the idea that the generals and other senior officers didn’t really have much of a clue what they were doing was also very shocking. We all have a tendency (perhaps not so much nowadays) to trust that those in power and control, above us, know what they’re doing…

Wilfred Owen: Anthem For Doomed Youth

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 good-byes.
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.

Form, first of all: this one is obviously a sonnet. Sonnets were traditionally love poems above all else, so what is Owen doing here? Is he sending up the idea of love poetry, using the sonnet in an opposite way (war=hate)? Or is he expressing a sense of love for those who are lost, killed in war? Or both, perhaps? Why not? It’s a Petrarchan, rather than a Shakespearean sonnet. Notice the rhyme scheme, and the shift in mood after the eighth line.

What is it about? Funerals. Except that Owen is drawing out a distinction, all the way through the poem, between the traditional religious funeral rituals of peacetime, and the total absence of anything like that when someone is killed at the front line. And it’s also interesting to think about the fact that Owen originally called his poem Anthem for Dead Youth, rather than Anthem for Doomed Youth. Is that significant, and is his final choice of title more effective? There’s a finality about dead, whereas doomed sounds more ominous, because the person is alive but not for much longer… And if you are interested in how Owen changed and revised his poems, then you can find drafts and revisions to look at online.

You need to pay full attention to how Owen uses language, and all the poetic devices that he crams into his poems; this one is no exception. Although I shall mention many of them, you may well find more.

The passing bells are those that would toll slowly at the church where a funeral was about to take place. They sounded very solemn and everyone would know what they signified. On the battlefield, the only sound is that of gunfire: look at how Owen presents this. The men die as cattle; contrast the lengthy vowel sounds early in the line with the short a of cattle, which brings us up short, as does the image of cattle, which conjures up the image of a slaughterhouse. The heavy two syllables of monstrous echo artillery fire, whilst the onomatopoeia of the stuttering rifles, and the alliteration (rifles, rapid, rattle) echoes machine-gun fire. This continues with the half rhyme in the next line (rattle, patter).

Orison is an archaic word for a prayer, a crucial part of any church funeral service. On the battlefield these are hasty – as if there would be any time at all for praying over someone killed there. Patter is remarkable in a number of ways. Firstly there is the echo of rattle I just noted above. Then there is the meaning of the word, in the sense of words used quickly without any real focus on their meaning, like the patter of a salesperson. Finally there would be, for readers in Owen’s time, the reminder of the Lord’s Prayer (which begins Pater Noster in Latin).

Into the second quatrain: such ritual would be a mockery on the battlefield. No prayers or bells then; no choirs such as would sing hymns and anthems (back to the poem’s title) at a funeral in church. Instead, the poet likens the sound of approaching shells before they explode; the word demented emphasises the utter craziness of it all. The bugles recall the training camps before the men were sent to the front (look at Owen’s poem The Send-Off) and the alliteration of sad shires reminds us of all the different local regiments which the men volunteered for, or were conscripted into. These ‘pals battalions’ often meant that entire communities of men were wiped out together in a single day’s fighting; there are monuments all along the Western Front to such battalions.

The noise and anger of the octave gives way to a calmer, more peaceful, sad and mournful mood in the sestet. Candles are an obvious part of a church service; in days gone by, special candles made from unbleached wax were often used to add solemnity (and gloom) to a funeral service. No alter servers or choirboys will be carrying these to funerals at the front. We need to remember that often there would be no physical remains after a death on the battlefield, as well as the government decision that all the war dead would be buried where they fell rather than brought back home. So the grief is internalised. The rhyming of eyes and goodbyes is very effective, very moving, as is the idea of holy glimmers.

A pall is the heavy embroidered cloth which was used to cover the coffin while it rested in church during a funeral; none of these at the front, obviously; and yet the idea of the pall is prefigured in the pallor of girls’ brows. Who are the girls? Girlfriends? Daughters? No flowers at the front either, although we may be reminded of the poppies of Flanders’ fields. And look at how the pace of the poem gradually slows down as the sestet develops, through longer vowel sounds until we reach the poignant alliteration of the final line: dusk/drawing/down/blinds. This is a reference to how blinds or curtains would be shut in a house from which a funeral set off.

It’s a powerful poem, which pays reading aloud, with attention to how the poet uses sounds and repetitions to create a solemn mood, a sad mood. We are reminded how serious a business a funeral was a century and more ago. If you need to compare this poem with another, you can do worse than pair it with another sonnet, Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier. Contrast the tone and mood of the two poems, and remember that one was written in the early days of the war, and the other when the war was part of everyone’s lives, and its awful reality had sunk in on the people of England.