The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (7 page)

That politicians or philosophers

Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot

With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.

Beside my hate for one fat patriot

My hatred of the Kaiser is love true: –

A kind of god he is, banging a gong.

But I have not to choose between the two,

Or between justice and injustice. Dinned

10             With war and argument I read no more

Than in the storm smoking along the wind

Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar.

From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;

Out of the other an England beautiful

And like her mother that died yesterday.

Little I know or care if, being dull,

I shall miss something that historians

Can rake out of the ashes when perchance

The phoenix broods serene above their ken.

20             But with the best and meanest Englishmen

I am one in crying, God save England, lest

We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.

The ages made her that made us from dust:

She is all we know and live by, and we trust

She is good and must endure, loving her so:

And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.

Edward Thomas

To Germany

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,

And no man claimed the conquest of your land.

But gropers both through fields of thought confined

We stumble and we do not understand.

You only saw your future bigly planned,

And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,

And in each other's dearest ways we stand,

And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again

10             With new-won eyes each other's truer form

And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm

We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,

When it is peace. But until peace, the storm

The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

Charles Hamilton Sorley

The Poets are Waiting

To what God

Shall we chant

Our songs of Battle?

The professional poets

Are measuring their thoughts

For felicitous sonnets;

They try them and fit them

Like honest tailors

Cutting materials

10             For fashion-plate suits.

The unprofessional

Little singers,

Most intellectual,

Merry with gossip,

Heavy with cunning,

Whose tedious brains are draped

In sultry palls of hair,

Reclining as usual

On armchairs and sofas,

20             Are grinning and gossiping,

Cake at their elbows –

They will not write us verses for the time;

Their storms are brewed in teacups and their wars

Are fought in sneers or little blots of ink.

To what God

Shall we chant

Our songs of Battle?

Hefty barbarians,

Roaring for war,

30             Are breaking upon us;

Clouds of their cavalry,

Waves of their infantry,

Mountains of guns.

Winged they are coming,

Plated and mailed,

Snorting their jargon.

Oh to whom shall a song of battle be chanted?

Not to our lord of the hosts on his ancient throne,

Drowsing the ages out in Heaven

40             The celestial choirs are mute, the angels have fled:

Word is gone forth abroad that our lord is dead.

To what God shall we chant

Our songs

Of battle?

Harold Monro

The Dilemma

God heard the embattled nations sing and shout

‘Gott strafe England!' and ‘God save the King!'

God this, God that, and God the other thing –

‘Good God!' said God ‘I've got my work cut out.'

J. C. Squire

The Trumpet

Rise up, rise up,

And, as the trumpet blowing

Chases the dreams of men,

As the dawn glowing

The stars that left unlit

The land and water,

Rise up and scatter

The dew that covers

The print of last night's lovers –

10             Scatter it, scatter it!

While you are listening

To the clear horn,

Forget, men, everything

On this earth newborn,

Except that it is lovelier

Than any mysteries.

Open your eyes to the air

That has washed the eyes of the stars

Through all the dewy night:

20             Up with the light,

To the old wars;

Arise, arise!

Edward Thomas

The Call

Who's for the trench –

     Are you, my laddie?

Who'll follow French –

     Will you, my laddie?

Who's fretting to begin,

Who's going out to win?

And who wants to save his skin –

     Do you, my laddie?

Who's for the khaki suit –

10                  Are you, my laddie?

Who longs to charge and shoot –

     Do you, my laddie?

Who's keen on getting fit,

Who means to show his grit,

And who'd rather wait a bit –

     Would you, my laddie?

Who'll earn the Empire's thanks –

     Will you, my laddie?

Who'll swell the victor's ranks –

20                  Will you, my laddie?

When that procession comes,

Banners and rolling drums –

Who'll stand and bite his thumbs –

     Will you, my laddie?

Jessie Pope

Recruiting

‘Lads, you're wanted, go and help,'

On the railway carriage wall

Stuck the poster, and I thought

Of the hands that penned the call.

Fat civilians wishing they

‘Could go out and fight the Hun.'

Can't you see them thanking God

That they're over forty-one?

Girls with feathers, vulgar songs –

10             Washy verse on England's need –

God – and don't we damned well know

How the message ought to read.

‘Lads, you're wanted! over there,'

Shiver in the morning dew,

More poor devils like yourselves

Waiting to be killed by you.

Go and help to swell the names

In the casualty lists.

Help to make a column's stuff

20             For the blasted journalists.

Help to keep them nice and safe

From the wicked German foe.

Don't let him come over here!

‘Lads, you're wanted – out you go.'

*

There's a better word than that,

Lads, and can't you hear it come

From a million men that call

You to share their martyrdom.

Leave the harlots still to sing

30             Comic songs about the Hun,

Leave the fat old men to say

Now
we've
got them on the run.

Better twenty honest years

Than their dull three score and ten.

Lads, you're wanted. Come and learn

To live and die with honest men.

You shall learn what men can do

If you will but pay the price,

Learn the gaiety and strength

40             In the gallant sacrifice.

Take your risk of life and death

Underneath the open sky.

Live clean or go out quick –

Lads, you're wanted. Come and die.

E. A. Mackintosh

Soldier: Twentieth Century

I love you, great new Titan!

Am I not you?

Napoleon and Caesar

Out of you grew.

Out of unthinkable torture,

Eyes kissed by death,

Won back to the world again,

Lost and won in a breath,

Cruel men are made immortal,

10             Out of your pain born.

They have stolen the sun's power

With their feet on your shoulders worn.

Let them shrink from your girth,

That has outgrown the pallid days,

When you slept like Circe's swine,

Or a word in the brain's ways.

Isaac Rosenberg

Youth in Arms I

Happy boy, happy boy,

David the immortal-willed,

Youth a thousand thousand times

Slain, but not once killed,

Swaggering again to-day

In the old contemptuous way;

Leaning backward from your thigh

Up against the tinselled bar –

Dust and ashes! is it you?

10             Laughing, boasting, there you are!

First we hardly recognised you

In your modern avatar.

Soldier, rifle, brown khaki –

Is your blood as happy so?

Where's your sling, or painted shield,

Helmet, pike, or bow?

Well, you're going to the wars –

That is all you need to know.

Greybeards plotted. They were sad.

20             Death was in their wrinkled eyes.

At their tables, with their maps

Plans and calculations, wise

They all seemed; for well they knew

How ungrudgingly Youth dies.

At their green official baize

They debated all the night

Plans for your adventurous days,

Which you followed with delight,

Youth in all your wanderings,

30             David of a thousand slings.

Harold Monro

‘
I don't want to be a soldier
'

I don't want to be a soldier,

I don't want to go to war.

I'd rather stay at home,

Around the streets to roam,

And live on the earnings of a well-paid whore.

I don't want a bayonet up my arsehole,

I don't want my bollocks shot away.

I'd rather stay in England,

In merry, merry England,

10             And fuck my bleeding life away.

Soldiers' song

The Conscript

Indifferent, flippant, earnest, but all bored,

The doctors sit in the glare of electric light

Watching the endless stream of naked white

Bodies of men for whom their hasty award

Means life or death, maybe, or the living death

Of mangled limbs, blind eyes, or a darkened brain;

And the chairman, as his monocle falls again,

Pronounces each doom with easy indifferent breath.

Then suddenly I shudder as I see

10             A young man stand before them wearily,

Cadaverous as one already dead;

But still they stare, untroubled, as he stands

With arms outstretched and drooping thorn-crowned

    head,

The nail-marks glowing in his feet and hands.

Wilfrid Gibson

Rondeau of a Conscientious Objector

The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous

    sands

And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West.

I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands;

To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours I

    detest.

I force my cart through the sodden filth that is pressed

Into ooze, and the sombre dirt spouts up at my hands

As I make my way in twilight now to rest.

The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous

    sands.

A twisted thorn-tree still in the evening stands

10             Defending the memory of leaves and the happy round

      nest.

But mud has flooded the homes of these weary lands

And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West.

All day has the clank of iron on iron distressed

The nerve-bare place. Now a little silence expands

And a gasp of relief. But the soul is still compressed:

I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands.

The hours have ceased to fall, and a star commands

Shadows to cover our stricken manhood, and blest

Sleep to make forget: but he understands:

20             To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours I

      detest.

D. H. Lawrence

1914: Safety

Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest

     He who has found our hid security,

Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,

     And heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?'

We have found safety with all things undying,

     The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,

The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,

     And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.

We have built a house that is not for Time's throwing.

10                  We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.

War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,

     Secretly armed against all death's endeavour;

Safe though all safety's lost; safe where men fall;

And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

Rupert Brooke

‘
Now that you too must shortly go the way
'

Now that you too must shortly go the way

Which in these bloodshot years uncounted men

Have gone in vanishing armies day by day,

And in their numbers will not come again:

I must not strain the moments of our meeting