WWII poetry

I know I have covered a war poem already but I have read that there is great contrast between the literature that came from the two great wars.

First, I'll share a source I have used to read a range of WWII poems as it contains many indicative pieces, about the Holocaust, piloting and the life of soldiers after war:

http://world-war-2.info/poems/ This website also has general information on the war as a whole.

While we are on the subject of war poetry, I would like to highlight Tennyson's 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' as it is a beautifully emotive poem about earlier battle methods of the 1800s.

Now onto the poem of the week. I found this poem in an archived section of the BBC website and all copyright goes to the talented soul who posted it there (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/04/a4473704.shtml).

Best Friend

When I was four and almost a half
I loved you with a passion
Only experienced by little girls;
Best friend intensities,
Whispered confidences,
Heads together and joined at the hip,
World-oblivious, world- creating
Absorbed in each other
Through the endless days.

You were the last thing
I waved to at night
Face framed in the window opposite
And, throwing back curtains,
The person I greeted
When I surfaced,
Shooting awake ,
Racing to windows,
Sure in the knowledge
That you would be waiting
With strange signs and our secret language

Wild in the absence of fathers
And bane of our mothers' existence
Life centred around us.
Till the morning when I opened the curtains
And your house was gone.
Direct hit in the night,
While I slept safe
Under the stairs
In the arms of my fearless mother

I never saw you again
Though for months I looked
More awful than death
Was the disintegration
Of flesh And security And trust
But sixty years on
I still remember you.

Although this poem was not written during the war (conveyed by the last couplet) I still classify it as a war poem, as it speaks of the same events and was lived through by the writer, who suffered due to it, even though they did not fight; they lost both 'security' and 'trust', which are key concepts that make human life worth living without worry. The use of polysyndeton captures the sense of build in loss and grief.

Sometimes it is easier to remember those who lost their lives during the war than to remember those whose lives were irreparably damaged as a consequence of the deaths of others. The writer here uses pathos throughout the first two stanzas to recreate the emotions that are felt during a close friendship. 'Four and almost a half' immediately places the reader in their own mind at that age, how vulnerable a child can be in their hope and imagination. This is later returned to in the final stanza, when the narrator looked 'for months' in vain.

The metaphorical phrase 'shooting awake' has poignancy when we consider that a child might play a war game in their innocence, and the word 'shooting' has been used to indicate this dangerous innocence. By the end of the poem, weapons like these have killed her best friend and so could be a form of foreshadowing. To me, 'strange signs' and a 'secret language' do the same by giving connotations of war spies and espionage.

I suppose we can at least say that war does some good as it inspires the creative mind to speak out but would that it weren't necessary!

In respect for all those who have sufferd at the hands of terrorism

Today I thought it would be poignant to read some poems that have been inspired and driven by attacks on so many innocents around the world. Many of these have been written by amateur poets, including the one I am covering today. This means that the poetry is not swayed by the fact that it has to be published and has to sell; it is a very personal account. This one is in particular as the writer says they had a dream about an attacker and so wished to write from their point of view.


It is called 'Purification'


I soar the skies in a state of euphoria,
My lengthy hair fluttering in the gusts,
Lashing out at my heels as I plummet:
An architectural wonder anticipates my arrival.
I shatter the gleaming stained glass windows:
Faux renditions of a woman holding a child
(Rings around their heads: colourless glass).
A grin smears across my blood-covered face
And the light of a thousand candles gleams in my eyes…

Velvet draperies fall to the dirty floor;
Screams arise from the shouting priests as I
Drop down behind them and
Slit their unholy throats with my encrusted sword.
Groans of pain and tearing of flesh resounds
Beneath the echoes of the bullets as they fly
With thunderously wondrous abandon from my
UZI.

Merrily I laugh at the elated passion that
Surges through my veins like a prairie fire.
My mind calms and with pride I wade
Through my personal lake of blood, tears, and terror,
Blotting out the flames of the meaningless candles.
My teeth glimmer midst my ecstatic smile as I crush
With the tread of my shoe the remnants of countless crucifixes.
One more pointless conclave of lies annihilated.


As the whole world wonders how one human being could act so against another, this poem aims to encapsulate part of the thought processes that a terrorist might experience. Before I go further I would like to make clear that I will by no means cover all views on terrorism and do not aim to cause offence. I merely wish to show how poetry can help us consider and ponder the events that are happening around us. It is such a sensitive, difficult topic to handle and even my own views are not solid, so I will try to come across as unbiased on the matter, for who knows, some of the terrorists themselves could be seen as victims in their own right.


The poet has done well to show rather than tell where we are in the poem; we begin in the 'skies' headed for 'an architectural wonder', producing echoes of the Twin Towers attack. however, the 'stained' glass windows broaden the picture to any Christian church, a specific attack on religion, labelled as a 'conclave of lies'. The use of the present tense helps the reader gain the sense of immediacy and makes the 'euphoria' more tangible as we go through action by action with the narrator, seeing and feeling all that they do. The only past tense used is in the last line, when their task is done and the people, removed from the narrator's guilty mind by using the metonymy of 'conclave' to remove their humanity, are 'annihilated'. No back-story to the terrorist is given, we only know their present task and feelings, which perhaps highlights the problem that we are not reaching these people sooner and preventing conversion.


The verbs used are dynamic and violent, even where you wouldn't expect it, as with the hair 'lashing' and the grin as it 'smears'. This makes the poem rather sadistic, representing the twisted nature of terrorist preaching. Even the narrator's 'passion' is destructive, as it is likened in a simile to 'fire'. The glory of success is conveyed through the use of the adjective 'personal', which is ironic as terrorists remove their identity and also treat others in the same way, as if we are all the same, or should all be.


have you ever done something that you know you shouldn't have but enjoyed doing it for that very reason? In the eyes of a terrorist this is the same feeling, just multiplied, and I suppose they take this feeling as one given by god. if you are told that that is what it is and you are not given another option then you are going to believe this is true. You have to have human sympathy for these people, as with any child who is part of a religion purely because their parents were, because they are not given their individual choice but their whole life begins and grows around the one concept your parents have convinced you of, so by the time someone tries to argue differently, it is too late for you to give up such a great part of your life. just food for thought, these people are fundamentally no different from all others.

From one Eliot to another

Yes, today we are moving on to T.S. Eliot. Like Wordsworth, he believed in writing poetry as close to the forms of natural spoken language as possible. Hence, the poem below is one stanza without metre (it is in prose) or lines per say.

The poem would be rather ruined by any more introduction, in my opinion, and so I shall let you take a look at it before I say more.

Hysteria

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: “If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden ...” I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

I can hear your mental 'okaaaaay' from my study. I hope that somewhere in your mind there is also a little person struggling to compute the events which just unfolded before your squinting eyes. Let us therefore take the poem bit by bit to create a more rounded picture.

Firstly, the word 'hysteria' is derived from the Greek word for 'womb', so until recently (and even still today it would be odd to hear of a 'hysterical man') could only be applied to female madness, supposedly caused by the imbalance of hormones. So T.S. Eliot is targetting the seductive nature of a woman who has gotten a little excited - at the time (first half of the 20th Century) a woman could be called hysterical for acting in any way passionate and most women were considered to have the 'disease'.

So we have the paradox of men wanting women to be seductive but if they were they could be labelled as hysterical and therefore be devalued in society (I am really restraining my inner angry feminist right now). All that the woman in this poem is doing is laughing. And because she laughs for a long time (and because she is a woman) she is seen as mad. The imagery of the 'squad-drill' depicts her laughter as becoming uniform (due to its ongoing nature) and thus unnatural.

However, when the 'elderly waiter' becomes repetitive in his speech no such label is given. If we assume the waiter is male then he is merely shocked in the eyes of the poet and could not be hysterical as he is but male.

So he finds this laughter attractive because he thinks it is hypnotic and enjoys laughing himself (as anyone should be allowed!). Yet he thinks this expression of joy is superfluous; he is attracted by colour in the cloth and table and synaesthesia occurs when he next hears the repeated request, and therefore he fights to maintain self-control. And the only way in which he finds he can do this is to concentrate on her 'breasts'.

Don't misinterpret me, it is a very good poem, what with its asyndetic, complex sentences and vivid imagery. But my blood does rather boil at the notion of a female trying to enjoy herself only to be objectified sexually for it, whether or not the writer's tone is jocular. 'I decided' gives the male the cognitive power and reduces her to a problem of society which needs solving.

As always there is much more to be said about this poem and there are far more interpretations than my feminist criticism. Whatever the case, I hope you can extract a reading that suits you and also pleases you, as I have.

Mary Ann Evans A.K.A George Eliot

This week I was talking about poetry to a group of people, my mother included, and she made the comment that it took her years to find out that George Eliot was a woman. I, being ignorant, did not know that this was all but a joke. So today I thought I'd study the woman who gave up her name for the sake of literary acclaim, as many did in the 1800s (the Brontes included).

This is a simple enough poem but I like the pure message.

Count that day lost

If you sit down at set of sun
And count the acts that you have done,
And, counting, find
One self-denying deed, one word
That eased the heart of him who heard,
One glance most kind
That fell like sunshine where it went --
Then you may count that day well spent.

But if, through all the livelong day,
You've cheered no heart, by yea or nay --
If, through it all
You've nothing done that you can trace
That brought the sunshine to one face--
No act most small
That helped some soul and nothing cost --
Then count that day as worse than lost.

I have immediately come across the problem of which name to call the poet. I shall choose Evans in the recognition of her true identity, methinks. I hope she would have preferred that, although I have noticed that even ingrained within this poem is the male mind-set; 'him who heard' uses the masculine pronoun in order to encompass both genders, giving male priority and superiority.

So, Evans is not asking much of the reader; the tricolon of 'one...' reinforces the fact that she believes a little kindness can go a long way, both for the recipient and for the soul of the giver. The tricolon is in fact descending, asking but a 'deed...word...glance', which evidences this belief.

The order of the stanzas aids the message the narrator is giving. By placing the positive stanza first, she praises those who act well in the world and they need not read on. The second stanza is therefore more strongly represented as bad as it comes as a clear contrast to the first stanza, especially with all the negatives ('but', 'no', 'nothing', 'worse', 'lost'). Even by placing 'nay' after 'yea' in the second line the negative tone is highlighted.

The last line is the only ambiguous line in the poem. How can a day be 'worse than lost'? Well, by ruining it, I suppose. One cannot just count the day as if it did not exist, it actually had a negative impact upon the world. She was clever to title the poem with the more simple 'count that day as lost' because the final line expands this unexpectedly, making the reader think more about her message. The imperative in 'count' is authoritative as well, truly making the reader feel bad if they have done no good that day, encouraging them to want to improve the next.

Overall, the poem reads as if advice given to a child which is nevertheless still applicable to any adult. The simple lexis and singsong rhyme make the poem accessible by all, whilst also being memorable, a constant reminder each day to be good to someone in some way. The 'sunshine' image is common, again making the poem read more universally as it is less complicated to decipher (she is capable of more complex writing, as in 'The Choir Invisible'). The use of this image in both stanzas creates an anaphoric reference to more clearly show what is good and bad.