English poet Robert Graves, who published
poems during the war which were designed to
challenge the public’s attitudes and to offer
the ugly reality of life in the trenches.
Wilfred Owen, whose well-known poem “ Dulce
et Decorum Est” memorialized the horror of
men wounded and dying from gas attacks.
rhythm of lines eleven and twelve. The imagery, too,
is meant to shock—the dying soldier’s face is imaged
as a devil’s, black and contorted but “sick of sin,” his
lungs “obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/Of vile,
incurable sores.” The strong sense of nationality,
pride in identity, belief in death and renewal, the
earth as resting place for dead soldiers who somehow maintain a connection with the living—those
features so prominent in both McCrae and Brooke—
do not appear here. This poem, far from being about
the dead charging the living to fight on, is about the
dying, whose inevitable death is ironically meaningless. Owen, considered by numerous scholars to
be the most technically innovative of the poets of
World War I, enlisted in 1915. Subjected to shelling
from heavy artillery, Owen returned to England as a
victim of shell shock and was hospitalized with fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, with whom he became
friends. Owen was returned to the front in France
in August 1918 and killed in action in the last battle
14
of the war in November 1918, just days before the
Armistice was signed.
Robert Graves
Robert Graves (1895–1985), unlike the three poets
just discussed, lived into ripe old age. Graves served
with fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon and was so badly
wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 that he
was reported dead. Graves, like Owen and Sassoon,
also suffered from shell shock, returned briefly to
the front in France, and spent the end of the war
in England. Graves published poems during the
war which were designed to challenge the public’s
attitudes and to offer the ugly reality of life in the
trenches. The very brief “The Trenches (Heard in
the Ranks)” paints a vivid image of a macrocosmic/
microcosmic universe where soldiers in the trenches
are like lice, the playthings of some huge fingernail
and thumb.
Scratches in the dirt?
No, that sounds much too nice.
Oh, far too nice.
Seams, rather, of a Greyback Shirt,
And we’re the little lice
Wriggling about in them a week or two,
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