TALES OF WALES - ENGLISH 3320 - THE EARLY POETS (C. 575-C.1100)
LITERARY EXCERPTS & REFERENCES FROM:
Samet, Elizabeth D. Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point.
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007.
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.
[it is sweet and right to die for your country]
- Wilfred Owen, 8 October 1917 - March, 1918
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 the 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, “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (WW2)
The Army is a giant found poem, its newness intriguing and exciting, but it almost seemed
immune to my interpretive powers. I couldn’t even read the ranks on peoples uniforms, especially
field uniforms, on which subdued insignia blend in with the camouflage pattern.
- Elizabeth D. Samet, from Soldier’s Heart
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the 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 neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow 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 remember'd.
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 remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day 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 any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
- Shakespeare, Henry V , 4.3.40-70.
Possess them [soldiers] not with fear! Take from them now
The sense of reck'ning, if the' opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them.
- Shakespeare, Henry V, Henry praying to the God of battles.
To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row
beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine, - who gave up
trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle, - I am indebted for a belief I
religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouserpockets, and had never taken them out in this existence.
- Charles Dickens' Pip in Great Expectations
A man's worth and reputation lie in the mind and in the will; his true honor is found there.
'Knowing' something does not mean knowing it by heart, that simply means putting it into the
larder of our memory. That which we rightly ‘know' can be deployed without looking back at the
model, without turning our eyes back to the book.
- Montaigne, from "On Cannibals"
A man must be ready to choose between death and dishonor without making too much song and
dance about it.
- Clark Gable
All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
- Wordsworth, from Lyrical Ballads
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper
models of human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If at
the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been
salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old lie.
- Tim O'Brien from The Things They Carried.
Thirty years from now when you're sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee
and he asks you, "What did you do in the great World War II?" you won't have to say, "Well, I
shoveled shit in Louisiana. The object of this campaign is not to die for your country but to make
other poor bastard die for his.
- George S. Patton, speaking to his troops in Italy (WW2)
Taylor was not a conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there
could be no mistaking it. He know how to express what he wanted to say in the fewest wellchosen words, but would not sacrifice meaning to the construction of high-sounding sentences.
- Ulysses S. Grant, commenting on Zachary Taylor during the Mexican War.
[Alexander the Great kept Aristotle's annotated copy of the Iliad together with a dagger under his
pillow while on campaign.]
The more a man is possessed of virtue in its entirety and the happier he is, the more he he’ll be
pained at the thought of death; for life is best worth living for such a man, and he is knowingly
losing the greatest goods, and this is painful. But he is none the less brave, and perhaps all the
more so, because he chooses noble deeds of war at that cost.
- Aristotle
...the poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might
happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary . . . Hence poetry is something more
philosophic that history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those
of history are singulars.
- Aristotle
The more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should
inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose X of the establishment have been attained. Ideal
perfection, if that were the object, would require that each person should actually be in that
predicament, during every instant of time. This being impossible, the next best thing to be wished
for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy
himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so.
- Foucault, commenting on Jeremy Bentham's 1787 model prison, the Panopticon
The [Afghan] Colonel knew Rumi, and he was pleased to know that I knew Rumi. Rumi gave us
a point of contact in our respective imaginations; he convinced each of us that we were more
alike than unalike.
- American soldier in Afghanistan
BOOKS ARE WEAPONS - in a free democracy everyone may read what he likes. Books
educate, inform, inspire; they also prove entertainment, bolster morale.
- preface in each Dell War paperback (WW2).
Thanks for the paperback Collected Works of Wallace Stevens. It is a great poetic oasis in the
desert> but the pages are a little sand-word by now, but that was the whole point , wasn't it?
- letter from an American soldier in Iraq
Do what she will, a woman cannot find in them that fountain of life which the critics assure her is
there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of
men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible
. . . With Kipling's officers who turn their backs; . . . and his Men who are alone with their Work;
and the Flag - one blushes at all these capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at
some purely masculine orgy. The fact is that neither Mr. Galsworthy nor Mr. Kipling has a spark
of the woman in him. Thus all of their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalize, crude
and immature. They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however
hard it hits the surface of the mind, it cannot penetrate within.
- Virginia Woolf
In the army of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, the trusty Army Officer's Guide explains, "the
emperor or empress had a medal that was awarded to officers whom by disobeying orders, turned
the tide and won important battles. In the U.S. Army, of course, there is no such medal; this sort
of judgment, wrapped within a full, disciplined understanding of the legal and moral impact of
decisions, is expected.
- Henry David Thoreau
If they [soldiers] have any sense, it is a kind of instinctive glance, that catches proportions, and
decides with respect to manners; but fails when arguments are to be pursued below the surface, or
opinions analyzed.
- Wollstonecroft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, describing women as
soldiers who acquire manners before morals in blind submission to authority.
[General] Pretaeus is a devoted student of T. E. Lawrence, whose ideas and tactics he teaches to
his own commanders; he appears to know Seven Pillars by heart.
- Esquire article, 2006
Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we have lived
anyhow with one another in the naked desert . . . The everlasting battle stripped from us care of
our own lives or of others. Instead of being proud of what we did together, I was continually and
bitterly ashamed.
- T. E. Lawrence, from Chapter I, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
- Soldier's Creed, West Point, 2003
Others are brave out of ignorance; and, when they stop to think, they begin to fear. But the man
who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life
and what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come. Make up your minds
that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous. Let there be no
relaxation if face of the perils of war.
- Pericles, discussing Athenian courage
Nothing could be a more melancholy and distressing sight, than to behold those who have shed
their blood or lost their limbs in the service of their Country, without a shelter, without a friend,
and without the means of obtaining any of the necessities or comforts of Life; compelled to beg
their daily bread from door to door!
- George Washington