Friendship Under Fire: the poetry of Graves /Owen /Sassoon
1)
‘We had reports of that “business”: the first said “no real damage”; the second said “a few persons killed” a third said
“more than 80 killed, 115 wounded.” When I read that a shell fell into a group of sixteen schoolboys and killed fifteen, I
raved. Talk about rumours of wars and earthquakes in diverse places: all that’s historic now. The beginning of the End
must be ended, and the beginning of the middle of the end is now.’ Wilfred Owen to Susan Owen, 21 December 1914, in
Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters, edited by Harold Owen and John Bell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 310.
2)
You'll see where Math, Mathonwy's son,
Spoke with the wizard Gwydion
And bade him for South Wales set out
To steal that creature with the snout,
That new-discovered grunting beast
Divinely flavoured for the feast.
No traveller yet has hit upon
A wilder land than Meirion,
For desolate hills and tumbling stones,
Bogland and melody and old bones.
Fairies and ghosts are here galore,
And poetry most splendid, more
Than can be written with the pen
Or understood by common men.
In Gweithdy Bach we'll rest a while,
We'll dress our wounds and learn to smile
With easier lips; we'll stretch our legs,
And live on bilberry tart and eggs
Robert Graves, ‘Familiar Letter to Siegfried Sassoon’ [‘Letter to S.S. from Mametz Wood’], from Fairies and Fusiliers
(1917). In Robert Graves: The Complete Poems, ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 38–39.
3)
To you who'd read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I'll say (you've heard it said before)
'War's Hell!' and if you doubt the same,
To-day I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.
Robert Graves, ‘A Dead Boche’, from Goliath and David (1916). In Robert Graves: The Complete Poems, p. 27.
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4)
O blast it isn't fair,
Because they'll all be wondering why
Dotty Captain wasn't standing by
When they came marching home.
Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Letter to Robert Graves’, The War Poems, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber, 1983), p. 130.
5)
In return he showed me some of his own poems. One of them began:
Return to greet me, colours that were my joy,
Not in the woeful crimson of men slain....
This was before Siegfried had been in the trenches. I told him, in my old-soldier manner, that he would soon change his
style.
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), p. 224.
6)
Who knows a tune so soft, so strong,
So pitiful as that 'Saucepan' song
For exiled hope, despaired desire
Of lost souls for their cottage fire?
Then low at first with gathering sound
Rose their four voices, smooth and round,
Till back went Time: once more I stood
With Fusiliers in Mametz Wood.
Fierce burned the sun, yet cheeks were pale,
For ice hail they had leaden hail;
In that fine forest, green and big,
There stayed unbroken not one twig.
Robert Graves, ‘Sospan Fach’, from Country Sentiment (1920). In Robert Graves: The Complete Poems, p. 95–96.
7)
Here is this patchwork quilt I’ve made
Of patterned silks and old brocade,
Small faded rags in memory rich
Sewn each to each with feather stitch.
But if you stare aghast perhaps
At certain muddied khaki scraps
Or trophy-fragments of field grey
Clotted and torn, a grim display
That never decked white sheets before,
Blame my dazed head, blame bloody war.
Robert Graves, ‘The Patchwork Quilt’, Selected Poems, ed. Michael Longley (London: Faber, 2013), p. [v].
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8)
And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard,
Bones without number;
For many hearts with coal are charred,
And few remember.
‘Miners’
There was a whispering in my hearth,
A sigh of the coal,
Grown wistful of a former earth
It might recall.
I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed:
I listened for a tale of leaves
And smothered ferns,
Frond-forests, and the low, sly lives
Before the fauns.
My fire might show steam-phantoms simmer
From Time’s old cauldron,
Before the birds made nests in summer,
Or men had children.
Comforted years will sit soft-chaired,
In rooms of amber,
The years will stretch their hands, wellcheered
By our life’s ember;
But the coals were murmuring of their mine,
And moans down there
Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men
Writhing for air.
The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming
lids,
While songs are crooned.
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Lost in the ground.
Wilfred Owen, ‘Miners’, The Nation, 26
January 1918, p. 539.
9)
from ‘Over the Brazier’
What life to lead and where to go
After the War, after the War?
We’d often talked this way before,
But I still see the brazier glow
That April night, still feel the smoke
And stifling pungency of burning coke.
I’d thought: ‘A cottage in the hills,
North Wales, a cottage full of books,
Pictures and brass and cosy nooks
And comfortable broad window-sills,
Flowers in the garden, walls all white.
I’d live there peacefully and dream and write.
Robert Graves, Poems about War, ed. William Graves
(London: Cassell, 1988), p. 25.
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10)
from ‘The End’
When I do ask white Age he saith not so:
‘My head hangs weighed with snow.’
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
‘My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.’
Wilfred Owen, The Poems, p. 136.
11)
from ‘Strange Meeting’
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Wilfred Owen, The Poems, p. 125.
12)
‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for evermore’ the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems, p. 153.
*Useful Websites:
First World War Poetry Digital Archive: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/
The Wilfred Owen Association: http://www.wilfredowen.org.uk/home/
Robert Graves Society: http://www.robertgraves.org/
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Charles Mundye, February 2016
E: c.mundye@shu.ac.uk
‘Friendship Under Fire: the poetry of Graves/ Owen / Sassoon’, a talk by Charles Mundye
Showroom Cinema, Friday 19 February 2016
As a result of this talk I will:
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