'Blighters' by Siegfried Sassoon
The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
�We�re sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!�

I�d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or �Home, sweet Home�,
And there�d be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

From Robert Graves -

When I'm Killed

When I'm killed, don't think of me
Buried there in Cambrin Wood,
Nor as in Zion think of me
With the Intolerable Good.
And there's one thing that I know well,
I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!

So when I'm killed, don't wait for me,
Walking the dim corridor;
In Heaven or Hell, don't wait for me,
Or you must wait for evermore.
You'll find me buried, living-dead
In these verses that you've read.

So when I'm killed, don't mourn for me,
Shot, poor lad, so bold and young,
Killed and gone--don't mourn for me.
On your lips my life is hung:
O friends and lovers, you can save
Your playfellow from the grave.

We learned "Does it matter" another of Seigfried Sassoon's poems at school. I remember how upset my mother was when I recited it to her. I really don't want to copy it out. It is so sad.

Indeed, they are very sad. The Great War is fascinating to me.

Here is another -

Villanelle

Violets from Plug Street Wood,
Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue, when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head;
It is strange they should be blue.)

Violets from Plug Street Wood-
Think what they have meant to me-
Life and Hope and Love and You
(And you did not see them grow
Where his mangled body lay
Hiding horror from the day;
Sweetest it was better so.)

Violets from oversea,
To your dear, far, forgetting land
These I send in memory,
Knowing You will understand.

Roland Aubrey Leighton

A very short verse by Edward Thomas

In Memoriam

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

Thank you for those 3 which are all new to me.

O Vee, I so love Edward Thomas! Has anyone read 'Under Storm's Wing' - memoirs and memories of Edward by Helen (wife) and Myfanwy (daughter)?

Dido, I haven't read the book, but have heard some recent radio programmes about him. He seems to have been such a troubled person and cannot have been easy to live with. I felt quite sorry for his wife.

All I can do is read and admire here.

But oh, that wonderful and bitter poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" - just brilliant. Thank you for posting it, Dido.

Vee, I felt quite sorry for him. I found Helen to be a bit much.....She loved him like mad but I don't think the passion was quite reciprocated..... But that's the way of things, I'm afraid. His poetry is amazing and apparently so simple! No great images, or masses of adjectives or any hype.The following is not a 'war' poem, but it deserves to be shown. It was introduced to me by the poet Vernon Scanell who was a friend of mine and one of the best poetry critics ever. His Radio 3 programmes were a joy and an illumination. He died a couple of years ago. Here's Edward Thomas's poem, anyway:

Old Man

Old Man, or Lads-Love, - in the name there's nothing
To one that knows not Lads-Love, or Old Man,
The hoar green feathery herb, almost a tree,
Growing with rosemary and lavender.
Even to one that knows it well, the names
Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:
At least, what that is clings not to the names
In spite of time. And yet I like the names.

The herb itself I like not, but for certain
I love it, as someday the child will love it
Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush
Whenever she goes in or out of the house.
Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling
The shreds at last on to the path,
Thinking perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs
Her fingers and runs off. The bush is still
But half as tall as she, 'though it is as old;
So well she clips it. Not a word she says;
And I ca only wonder how much hereafter
She will remember, with that bitter scent,
Of garden rows, and ancient damson trees
Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door
A low thick bush beside the door, and me
Forbidding her to pick.
As for myself,
Where first I met the bitter scent is lost.
I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.
I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember;
No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad's-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end

Edward Thomas

Vee, I felt quite sorry for him. I found Helen to be a bit much.....She loved him like mad but I don't think the passion was quite reciprocated..... But that's the way of things, I'm afraid. His poetry is amazing and apparently so simple! No great images, or masses of adjectives or any hype.The following is not a 'war' poem, but it deserves to be shown. It was introduced to me by the poet Vernon Scanell who was a friend of mine and one of the best poetry critics ever. His Radio 3 programmes were a joy and an illumination. He died a couple of years ago. Here's Edward Thomas's poem, anyway:

Old Man

Old Man, or Lads-Love, - in the name there's nothing
To one that knows not Lads-Love, or Old Man,
The hoar green feathery herb, almost a tree,
Growing with rosemary and lavender.
Even to one that knows it well, the names
Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:
At least, what that is clings not to the names
In spite of time. And yet I like the names.

The herb itself I like not, but for certain
I love it, as someday the child will love it
Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush
Whenever she goes in or out of the house.
Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling
The shreds at last on to the path,
Thinking perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs
Her fingers and runs off. The bush is still
But half as tall as she, 'though it is as old;
So well she clips it. Not a word she says;
And I ca only wonder how much hereafter
She will remember, with that bitter scent,
Of garden rows, and ancient damson trees
Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door
A low thick bush beside the door, and me
Forbidding her to pick.
As for myself,
Where first I met the bitter scent is lost.
I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.
I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember;
No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad's-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end

Edward Thomas

I shiver at the end of that poem. I shiver and feel bewildered and bereft.

An excerpt from "For the Fallen" by Laurence Binyon, often read at Remembrance Day services here:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

And of course from our very own Lt. col. John McCrae:

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

"Dulce et Decorum Est" would have been my first choice, thanks for posting it. I still remember learning it in grade school and not really understanding until years later...

Threnody of the Nations

We have hated and fought,
We have murdered and fled,
But the peace that we sought
Is alone with the dead.

We have offered ourselves
On the altar of greed;
We have poisoned our sons
With our venomous creed.

We have bombed and destroyed;
We have raped and diseased,
Till the earth has grown dark
With our war-obsequies.

We have sung our wild song
In the ghouls' jubilee,
And, O Love, once again
We have crucified Thee.

Leon Adams

RENDEZVOUS

I have a rendezvous with death
at some disputed barricade,
I have a rendezvous with death
When spring comes back with rustling shade
and apple blossoms fill the air --
I have a rendezvous with death
when spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
and lead me into his dark land
and close my eyes and quench my breath--
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with death
on some scarred slope of battered hill,
when spring comes round again this year
and the first meadow flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
where hushed awakenings are dear....
But I've a rendevous with death
at midnight in some flaming town,
when spring trips north again this year,
and I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendevous.

Alan Seeger, born 1888, Harvard graduate, killed in France, July 4, 1916.

This one is not very well known (at least not in the U.S.) Gurney was a brilliant man who survived the war but lived a tragic life.

First Time In

After the dread tales and red yams of the Line
Anything might have come to us; but the divine
Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony
Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory
Soft foreign things. Then we were taken in
To low huts candle-lit shaded close by slitten
Oilsheets, and there but boys gave us kind welcome;
So that we looked out as from the edge of home.
Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions
To human hopeful things. And the next days' guns
Nor any line-pangs ever quite could blot out
That strangely beautiful entry to War's rout,
Candles they gave us precious and shared over-rations -
Ulysses found little more in his wanderings without doubt.
'David of the white rock', the' Slumber Song' so soft, and that
Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys
Are sung - but never more beautiful than here under the guns' noise.

Ivor Gurney

I know of Ivor Gurney, Siobhan. But being Welsh, of course, I'm a sucker for 'Welsh things' and know the songs they sang! Lovely! Thank you so much - Diolch yn fawr! Hwyl!

D.

I studied quite a lot of WWI poetry as part of my final year of school.

The Soldier

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.

Rupert Brooke

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.

Wilfred Owen