Compiled by: Gabrielle McLaren
The sea of red poppies across Canada commemorating Canadian troops burst from a single poem. Though eyewitness accounts vary, Canadian medical officer John McCrae is thought to have written “In Flanders’ Field” while overlooking the field of poppies where he had recently buried his best friend. McCrae himself did not survive the First World War, but his poem continues to commemorate not just his best friend, but an entire generation of lost soldiers, the veterans who returned home from the war — and all veterans who came after his time. Poets on the home front and on battlefields commemorated and processed the trauma of the war through poetry. The following selection is incomplete, but reflects different poets and their realities.
Spring 1915
With that beautiful voice of yours
You insisted:
Will spring come again?
Will the leaves still grow?
War engulfs sky
Rivers, mountains, woods, earth.
But where does the rose rise?
Where is the brave bees’ honey?
Where do the brambles grow
The anemones bloom?
Where in the deep woods
Do Flora and Ponoma meet?
— Alas! Nothing blooms
But the fires in the sky,
Furious, threatening bouquets
Strewn across the horizon.
Alas! No more red splendours
But the mad bullets,
Splashing in great streaks over
Steeples, farms, huts and hamlets.
Everything is without joy, without pity;
The struggle spreads from plain to plain,
In great leaps of rage and hate:
This is our spring.
– Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, on the atrocities committed on Belgian civilians
Vigil
A whole night long
crouched close
to one of our men
butchered
with his clenched
mouth
grinning at the full moon
with the congestion
of his hands
thrust right
into my silence
I’ve written
letters filled with love
I have never been
so
coupled to life
– Italian soldier, poet, and pacifist Giuseppe Ungaretti
The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
– British soldier Rupert Brooke (killed in 1915)
Marching Men
Under the level winter sky
I saw a thousand Christs go by.
They sang an idle song and free
As they went up to calvary.
Careless of eye and coarse of lip,
They marched in holiest fellowship.
That heaven might heal the world, they gave
Their earth-born dreams to deck the grave.
With souls unpurged and steadfast breath
They supped the sacrament of death.
And for each one, far off, apart,
Seven swords have rent a woman’s heart.
– Canadian poet Marjorie Pickthall
Guard Duty
A star frightens the steeple cross
a horse gasps smoke
iron clanks drowsily
mists spread
fears
staring shivering
shivering
cajoling
whispering
You!
– German soldier, August Stramm (died in hand-to-hand fighting, 1915)
War
Why was I born into this age
In which mankind has exiled God?
With God departed Man, with rage,
now sits upon the throne of God.
And when man knew that God had gone,
To spill his brother’s blood he bore
His eager sword, and cast upon
Our homes the shadow of the war.
The harps to which we sang are hung
On willow boughs, and their refrain
Drowned by the anguish of the young
Whose blood is mingled with the rain.
– Welsh poet and British soldier Hedd Wyn. Six months after his death, he was awarded the prestigious bardic chair at the Welsh National Eisteddfod (an important celebration of Welsh culture). Instead of reassigning the chair to a living poet, it was draped in black cloth and remains a memorial to Wales’ lost soldiers to this day
The Last to Leave
The guns were silent, and the silent hills
had bowed their grasses to a gentle breeze
I gazed upon the vales and on the rills,
And whispered, “What of these?’ and “What of these?
These long forgotten dead with sunken graves,
Some crossless, with unwritten memories
Their only mourners are the moaning waves,
Their only minstrels are the singing trees
And thus I mused and sorrowed wistfully
I watched the place where they had scaled the height,
The height whereon they bled so bitterly
Throughout each day and through each blistered night
I sat there long, and listened – all things listened too
I heard the epics of a thousand trees,
A thousand waves I heard; and then I knew
The waves were very old, the trees were wise:
The dead would be remembered evermore-
The valiant dead that gazed upon the skies,
And slept in great battalions by the shore.
– Australian poet and soldier Leon Gellert
Perhaps (To R.A.L.)
Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,
And I shall see that still the skies are blue,
And feel once more I do not live in vain,
Although bereft of You.
Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet
Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,
And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.
Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.
Perhaps some day I shall not shrink in pain
To see the passing of the dying year,
And listen to Christmas songs again,
Although You cannot hear.’
But though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.
– British nurse and poetess Vera Brittain. The poem was dedicated to her fiancé Robert Audrey Leighton, killed by a sniper in 1915 (at the age of twenty)
My Boy Jack
“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide.
– English poet Rudyard Kipling. The poem was commissioned by the British Navy following a major loss. Years before, Kipling’s son was lost in combat
Here Dead We Lie
Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.
– British poet A E Housman
