The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (24 page)

tilted stacks:
Haystacks.

fallow:
A ploughed area of farmland left unsown for a period of time.

loam:
Soil consisting of varying proportions of clay, silt, and sand.

Downs:
The Berkshire Downs are part of a picturesque area of gently hilly countryside in southern England to the west of London.

byres:
Cow sheds.

brae:
A hillside especially alongside a river, and also a colloquialism meaning ‘raw or fierce weather'.

Happy is England Now

the destroying Dragon:
England's patron saint is St George, who killed a dragon that was laying waste to the countryside.

This is no case of petty Right or Wrong

The phoenix:
A mythical Egyptian bird said to die on a funeral pyre and to rise again from the ashes.

made us from dust:
An echo of Genesis 2:7, where God creates Adam from ‘the dust of the ground'.

The Poets are Waiting

fashion-plate:
Fashion magazines at this time frequently contained glossy pages or plates illustrating the most up-to-date and stylish clothing.

Plated and mailed:
Wearing body armour. Chain mail is constructed from interlocked rings of metal, and plate mail consists of welded plates of metal.

The Dilemma

‘Gott strafe England':
German for ‘God Punish England', a slogan frequently used in early German wartime propaganda.

‘Who's for the khaki suit'

The Call

French:
Sir John French (1852–1925) was Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force between August 1914 and December 1915.

Recruiting

‘Lads, you're wanted, go and help':
This slogan appears to be Mackintosh's own invention, but it echoes many posters of the time encouraging enlistment. They bore slogans such as ‘Is Your Best Boy in Khaki?' and ‘There's Room for You! Enlist To-Day'.

Girls with feathers:
In the early months of the war, organizations such as The Order of The White Feather gave men not in uniforms white feathers, meant to represent cowardice, but the practice proved highly unpopular and was soon stopped.

Washy:
Slang for ‘lacking in strength or character'.

three score and ten:
Seventy: ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away' (Psalms 90:10).

Soldier: Twentieth Century

Titan:
In Greek mythology, the Titans were pre-Olympian gods or demi-gods, the children of Uranus and capable of enormous power and strength.

Napoleon:
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) became commander of the French army in 1796 and was emperor of France between 1804 and 1814. He emerged from exile to be defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Caesar:
Julius Caesar (
c
. 101–44 BC) invaded Britain in 55 BC.
He became a dictator in Rome, and founded the Julian dynasty of emperors.

Circe's swine:
In Book 10 of Homer's
Odyssey
, Odysseus' men are turned into pigs by the sorceress Circe while sleeping on the island of Aeaea.

Youth in Arms I

David:
The Jewish Old Testament king famed for his defeat of the Philistine Goliath in his youth: ‘And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth' (1 Samuel 17:49). His subsequent military victories were envied by his adoptive father, Saul, who subsequently plotted to kill him. ‘And the women answered one another as they played, and said, Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands' (1 Samuel 18:7).

avatar:
Incarnation or manifestation.

Greybeards:
Old men.

baize:
Green felted wool cloth often used to cover gaming tables.

‘
I don't want to be a soldier
'

Sung to the tune of ‘On Sunday I Walk Out With a Soldier', from the popular revue
The Passing Show of
1914.

The Conscript

thorn-crowned head, | The nail-marks:
A crown of thorns, a mock symbol of royalty, was forced upon Jesus before his crucifixion, according to Matthew 27:29, Mark 15:17 and John 19:2.

Rondeau of a Conscientious Objector

Rondeau:
A medieval French verse form consisting of thirteen
octosyllabic lines grouped into stanzas of five, three and five lines. The rondeau uses only two rhymes, and the first word or phrase of the first line recurs twice as a refrain after the second and third stanzas. Technically Lawrence's poem is not a rondeau.

conscientious objector:
A person who, for political, moral or religious reasons, refused to fight during the war.

In Training

The Kiss

Brother Lead:
A bullet.

Sister Steel:
The bayonet.

Arms and the Boy

Arms and the Boy:
The title is probably an allusion either to George Bernard Shaw's anti-romantic drama about militarism,
Arms and the Man
(1894), or to Siegfried Sassoon's poem ‘Arms and the Man', first published in
The Old Huntsman and Other Poems
(1917). Both works derive their title from the opening line of John Dryden's 1697 translation of the
Aeneid
, the epic poem by the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC): ‘Arms, and the man I sing.'

For his teeth…his curls:
The creature referred to in the third stanza does not seem to be based on any recognizable mythological animal or figure, and could be either a generic form of devil or merely a product of Owen's imagination.

‘
All the hills and vales along
'

Barabbas:
Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor in Jerusalem, set free the thief Barabbas in preference to Jesus at the Feast of the Passover (John 18:38–40).

Hemlock:
A white flowering plant known for its poisonous qualities.

Socrates:
A Greek philosopher (470–399 BC), who was found guilty of corrupting the young and was forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.

‘
We are Fred Karno's army
'

Sung to the tune of the hymn ‘The Church's One Foundation', by Samuel J. Stone and Samuel Sebastian Wesley.

Fred Karno:
The stage name of Fred Wescott (1866–1941), a knockabout music-hall comedian, often used to describe a muddle.

ragtime:
A popular form of music-hall entertainment, of African-American origin.

Hoch! Hoch! Mein Gott:
German, literally meaning ‘High! High! My God'.

Song of the Dark Ages

down:
A gently rolling hill.

barrows:
Grave mounds or tumuli.

calcined:
Reduced to quicklime, desiccated or burnt to ashes.

ossuary:
A depository for the bones of the dead.

sod:
A piece of turf.

Sonnets 1917: Servitude

This is the third of a group of five sonnets which Gurney dedicated ‘To the Memory of Rupert Brooke'. He described them in a letter of 14 February 1917 as ‘a sort of counterblast against “Sonnetts 1914” [
sic
], which were written by an officer…They are the protest of the physical against the exulted spiritual; of the cumulative weighted small facts against the one large. Of informed opinion against uninformed.'

In Barracks

soldiers of the Line:
Members of a regular army regiment, as opposed to those regiments which were raised specially from civilian volunteers during the First World War.

‘
Men Who March Away
'

purblind:
Lacking in vision, insight, or understanding.

Dalliers:
People who dawdle or take things slowly.

braggarts:
Boastful people.

Marching Men

Calvary:
The hill upon which Christ was crucified.

Seven swords:
A conflation of the seven wounds inflicted on Christ at his crucifixion and the seven sorrows of his mother Mary, a series of religious observances instigated in the thirteenth century.

rent:
Torn.

Fragment

pashed:
Smashed.

phosphorus:
A substance that shines or glows green in the dark, often noticed on breaking waves at sea.

2 SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE
In Trenches

First Time In

Oilsheets:
Pieces of canvas impregnated with oil to make them waterproof, used to cover dugouts.

Ulysses:
In Greek mythology, Odysseus – known as Ulysses in Latin – blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus after the Trojan Wars
and was cursed by the god Poseidon never to reach home. The goddess Athena intervened, and after ten years Ulysses returned to his family in Ithaca.

‘David of the White Rock':
Sometimes known by its Welsh title, ‘Dafydd y Garreg Wen', this folk song was highly popular among Welsh soldiers.

‘Slumber Song':
Probably the traditional Welsh lullaby ‘All Through the Night', which talks of how ‘Soft the drowsy hours are creeping | Hill and vale in slumber sleeping'.

Beautiful tune…roguish words:
Gurney may have in mind one of the mildly obscene versions of the Salvation Army hymn ‘Wash Me in the Water' popular during the war, or perhaps ‘Big Willie's Luvly Daughter', a variant of ‘Where are the Boys of the Village Tonight' favoured by the Welsh Fusiliers which, according to David Jones in his notes to Part V of
In Parenthesis
(London: Faber & Faber, 1938), suggested that ‘the object of the British Expedition into France was to enjoy the charms of the Emperor's daughter'.

Break of Day in the Trenches

druid:
A pre-Christian Celtic priest.

poppy:
The red poppy (
Papaver rhoeas
) flourishes in disturbed ground and was a ubiquitous sight on the Western Front. The practice of selling artificial poppies to raise money for wounded ex-servicemen immediately after the war resulted in it becoming an internationally recognized symbol of remembrance.

‘
Bombed last night
'

Sung to the tune of the music-hall song ‘Drunk Last Night and Drunk the Night Before'.

Higher Germany:
An allusion to the traditional English folk song
‘High Germany', which describes a lover going off to fight in the wars between England and France of 1702 to 1713.

Breakfast

Hull United:
No football team with that name existed in 1914 when the poem was written; like
Jimmy Stainthorp
and
Billy Bradford
, it seems to be Gibson's own invention. However, Hull City Reserves and Halifax Town both played in the Midland Counties League and met twice in 1914 – on 3 October and 12 November – so one of these matches may be what Gibson has in mind.

In the Trenches

Demeter:
The Greek corn goddess, whose search for her daughter Persephone took her into the underworld.

Psyche:
In Greek mythology, the woman so beautiful that men would worship her instead of courting her. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was jealous and sent her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with an unworthy man, but he fell in love with her himself. After several complications, the two eventually united.
Psyche
is also the Greek for ‘soul'.

Pleiades:
Also known as the Seven Sisters, in Greek mythology these were the daughters of the demi-god Atlas and were nymphs in the train of the goddess Artemis. They were eventually placed in the sky, where they form one of the most visible constellations of stars in the northern hemisphere.

Orion swings his belt:
In Greek mythology, Orion the hunter was unwittingly killed by the goddess Artemis, who, in remorse, placed him in the sky as a constellation of stars; three parallel stars in the middle of the constellation represent his belt.

carrion crow:
A common black crow which feeds on rotten flesh (carrion).

Winter Warfare

Tabs:
Senior officers in the British army wore red tabs on their lapels.

rime:
The frost caused by a sudden and rapid drop in temperature.

spurs:
Worn by senior officers as well as cavalry in the British army.

hoary:
Grey or white with age, or with a kind of frost.

Hauptman Kälte:
German for ‘Captain Cold'. (‘Hauptman' is more usually spelled ‘Hauptmann'.)

Futility

clays:
A poeticism for ‘mankind', possibly echoing Genesis 2:7, where God creates Adam from ‘the dust of the ground', or John Milton's
Paradise Lost
(1667): ‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay | To mould me man?' (X, 743–4).

cold star:
The Earth.

fatuous:
Foolish and pointless.

Exposure

glozed:
Shining brightly.