In our English class at school, we studied an anthology of poetry called Rhyme and Reason, edited by Denys Thompson and Raymond O’Malley.
In retrospect, the book was packed with a wonderful variety of poems, some of which I can still recite by heart. At the time, of course, we didn’t appreciate the richness we were being offered, and grudgingly worked our way through the sections – Countryside and the Seasons (yawn), Time and Mortality (who, us?), Love Poetry (not a pop lyric in sight).
Then we came to the selection of war poems. We read the first line, ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks’, and stillness descended as we read the whole of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’.
The poem’s awkward, uncompromising harshness is uncomfortable to read, as it is meant to be. Owen describes a group of soldiers trudging back to base, so exhausted that they are slow to realise a gas attack is being launched.
We see them fumbling with their protective helmets, getting them on just in time – except for one poor man. His death is described in bitter detail, and provides the focus for Owen’s message.
If you could watch this man die, as I did, he says, you wouldn’t encourage children to go to war. You wouldn’t tell them the old lie, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, that it is right and fitting to die for your country.
The build-up to the final line is powerful. If Generals Haig, French and the others had heard the vicious scorn with which a class of gym-slipped schoolgirls spat out the ‘old lie’ they would have taken to their heels.
With the passing of time, I find that single lines and snapshots from Owen’s poems continue to resonate.
There is the youngster who lied about his age – ‘smiling, they wrote his lie’ – seduced by the hype about glory and esprit de corps, who now watches life from his wheelchair in his ghastly suit of grey, legless and sewn short at the elbow.
There is Owen’s introduction to his poems: ‘My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.’
And most of all there’s the final line of Anthem For Doomed Youth. ‘And each slow dusk, a drawing down of blinds.’ Such a moving, poignant picture of the loss shared by thousands, of the gradual death of hope. All those women, waiting for the telegram which says ‘Deeply regret to inform you…’
Such a telegram was delivered to Wilfred Owen’s home in Shropshire on Armistice Day in 1918. We think of the ‘sad shires’, of the towns and villages which lost all their men. You can read their names on the memorials on village greens throughout the country. Villages where everyone returned are called Thankful Villages. There are only 50 or so in the UK. In France, there is just one.
The impact of Owen’s poetry was so great that other, quieter voices were dismissed as being worthy but a bit lame. Now, however, I find Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ evokes the pity of war as powerfully as works which detail the carnage and the suffering. It’s a war poem which actually doesn’t mention war.
Edward Thomas’ Adlestrop is a war poem that doesn’t mention war.
Nothing happens in the poem. On June 24th 1914, Edward Thomas is on a train which makes an unexpected stop at a small Gloucestershire station. That’s it.
There is the hiss of steam. Someone clears his throat. Birds sing. There are fields and trees and clouds in the sky.
It’s the very lack of movement and action that is at the poem’s heart. The incident is a memory, as the first line tells us: ‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop.’
He remembers a moment suspended in time, and every aspect of it is held in an evocative whole, the stillness, the quiet, the sky and the fields. It has the same contained, pure intensity as Dennis Potter’s observation as he neared death that ‘the blossom is the blossemest blossom that there could ever be’.
The quiet is broken by a blackbird singing. The bird’s song is taken up and the sky is filled with the songs of all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
The moment of distilled joy reminds us that not only the peace of the English countryside will be shattered by the war that is to come.
In the latter half of the 20th century we became very familiar with the poetry of protest and with anti-war songs and anthems. When will they ever learn, we sang. All we were asking was give peace a chance. We joined our voices with those of the poets of 100 years ago who brought home to us the horror and madness of the First World War.
