The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry Page 10
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 goodbyes.
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.
Wilfred Owen, 1917
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Owen
The Send-Off
Down the close, darkening lanes they sang
their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with
wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual
tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front
these were sent.
Nor there if they yet mock what women
meant
Who gave them flowers.
Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.
Wilfred Owen, 1918
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Sassoon
Base Details
If I were fierce and bald and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honor. "Poor young chap,"
I'd say—"I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap."
And when the war is done and youth
stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.
Siegfried Sassoon, 1918
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Reed
Naming of Parts
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing.
But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring
gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you
will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is
the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got.
The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent
gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.
This is the safety-catch, which is always
released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please
do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it
quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb.
The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting
anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt.
The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see.
We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards;
we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards
and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and
fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring.
It is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb:
like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and
the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got;
and the almond blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees
going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.
Henry Reed, 1946
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Howe
The Battle Hymn of the Republic
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where
the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His
terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of
a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the
evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the
dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in
burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you
my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the
serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."
He has sounded forth the trumpet
that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men
before His judgment seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him!
Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was
born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that
transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us
die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Julia Ward Howe, 1862
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Shakespeare
If we are marked to die
KING HENRY: If we are marked to die,
we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honor.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not
one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honor,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man
from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so
great an honor
As one man more, methinks, would share
from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish
one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland,
through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die w
ith us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tiptoe when this day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,
And say "Tomorrow is Saint Crispian:"
Then will he strip his sleeve and
show his scars,
And say "These wounds I had on
Crispin's day."
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall
our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury
and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.
This story shall the good man teach
his son.
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band
of brothers
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they
were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles
he speaks
That fought with us upon Saint
Crispian's day.
William Shakespeare, 1599
King Henry V, Act IV, Scene 2
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> McKay
If We Must Die
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and
hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show
us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one
deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous,
cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Claude McKay, 1919
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Whitman
An Army Corps on the March
With its cloud of skirmishers in advance,
With now the sound of a single shot snapping
like a whip, and now an irregular volley,
The swarming ranks press on and on,
the dense brigades press on,
Glittering dimly, toiling under the sun—
the dust-covered men,
In columns rise and fall to the undulations
of the ground,
With artillery interspersed—the wheels rumble,
the horses sweat,
As the army corps advances.
Walt Whitman, 1865
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Sassoon
Counterattack
We'd gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held
their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow
trench.
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along
the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sandbags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the
plastering slime.
And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain!
A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,
Staring across the morning blear with fog;
He wondered when the Allemands
would get busy;
And then, of course, they started with
five-nines
Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.
Mute in the clamor of shells he watched
them burst
Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts
from hell,
While posturing giants dissolved in drifts
of smoke.
He crouched and flinched, dizzy with
galloping fear,
Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.
An officer came blundering down the trench:
"Stand-to and man the fire-step!" On he went . . .
Gasping and bawling, "Fire-step . . .
counterattack!"
Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right
Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;
And stumbling figures looming out in front.
"O Christ, they're coming at us!" Bullets spat,
And he remembered his rifle . . . rapid fire . . .
And started blazing wildly . . . then a bang
Crumpled and spun him sideways,
knocked him out
To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him;
he choked
And fought the flapping veils of smothering
gloom,
Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans . . .
Down, and down, and down, he sank
and drowned,
Bleeding to death. The counterattack had failed.
Siegfried Sassoon, 1918
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Owen
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags,
we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame;
all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that
dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and
thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen, 1920
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Spender
Ultima Ratio Regum
In letters of lead on the Spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.
When he lived, tall factory hooters never
summoned him.
Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to
wave him in.
His name never appeared in the papers.
The world maintained its traditional wall
Round the dead with their gold sunk deep
as a well
Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange
rumor, drifted outside.
O too lightly he threw down his cap
One day when the breeze threw petals from
the trees.
The unflowering wall sprouted with guns,
Machine gun anger quickly scythed the grasses;
Flags and leaves fell from hands and branches;
The tweed cap rotted in the nettles.
Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?
Stephen Spender, 1942
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Jarrell
The Death of the Ball Turret
Gunner
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its
dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret
with a hose.
Randall Jarrell, 1945
Next | TOC> Arms and the Boy> Owen
Arms and the Boy
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,