World War One Poetry: Rupert Brookes The Soldier and Wilfred Owens Mental Cases - Essay Example

World War I Poetry A great deal of the emotion of war up to World War I has been learned through the words and expressions of poets who experienced it first-hand. During the First World War, there were no movie cameras to capture the action as it happened and no television film crews to enter the fields following the battle and capture images of the true carnage that had taken place. It was a war that had no precedent and served to bring about a great deal of disenchantment with the ways of the modern world. “Then, brave men rushed to fight for what they saw as a great and honourable cause, only to find themselves in a quagmire of mass murder. The world became suddenly more uncertain, more out-of-control, more dangerous, more godless that it had ever seemed before; and at the centre of the problem was modern man himself, unleashing power and destruction which he could neither understand nor handle” (Roberts, 1996). The poets serving in the front lines, in the medical tents, in the kitchens and elsewhere recorded this disenchantment in poignant detail. The images presented, their choice of rhyme and metre, the sentiments included and the scenes described by these poets all contribute to our understanding of what the war was like from down in the trenches. Through the words of these poets, we are able to trace the early optimism and belief in the cause, in a greater good and a higher purpose. We are also able to see how the experiences of the war served to change these ideas as men became more and more aware that they were mere pawns in an elaborate political game that had little of benefit for the common people on the ground. The sheer force of will required to bring about such destruction took a heavy toll on these men and they shared this experience with their readers. By comparing early war poetry such as Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” with later poetry such as Wilfred Owens’ “Mental Cases,” one can see the significant shift in perception regarding the nature of war that occurred in this time period. Rupert Brooke is sometimes considered one of the greatest war poets of his time and sometimes considered more a pre-war poet. “Brooke’s entire reputation as a war poet rests on only five ‘war sonnets’ (six if you count ‘Treasure’ – unnumbered in his short sonnet cycle).” (Means, 2005). He was born in 1887, the son of the Rugby housemaster and a strong mother who strongly influenced him. His European travels resulted in the thesis John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama, which earned him a fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge. He also spent a good deal of his early youth traveling around North American and the South Seas while working for the Westminster Gazette. “Brooke was an energetic aesthete skilled at playful, irreverent satire and not afraid to shock his audience with graphic descriptions” (Means, 2005). The narratives and poems he sent back home gained him an early reputation back home, making him already a popular poet by the time war broke out across Europe. Britain entered the war the day after Brooke’s 27th birthday, but Brooke’s experience of it was quite short-lived. “Brooke’s war experience consisted of one day of limited military action with the Hood Battallion during the evacuation of Antwerp” (Means, 2005). He suffered a very minor wound that did not receive proper treatment and he died of blood poisoning in April of 1915 in the Aegean Sea. As a result of this very limited war experience, Brooke’s war poetry is full of “sentiments of the most general kind of the themes of maturity, purpose and romantic death – the kind of sentiments held by many (but not all) young Englishmen at the outbreak of the war” (Means, 2005). His poem “The Soldier” is a prime example of this. In “The Soldier,” Brooke speaks from the point of view of a young soldier going into war. He seems to view his impending experience from a very romantic point of view, seeing in himself something honourable and noble because of what he is about to do for the sake of his homeland. His patriotic pride can be heard in his opening lines “…think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England …” (1-3). Dead or alive, he considers himself always a product of a more noble, more responsible and culturally more advanced society. This attitude is expressed in the idea that he will be represented as a richer earth than any of the rich earth he might end up buried in (4). “In his poem, Brooke uses repetition of the word England in a very patriotic style. … [his] poem would inspire young men to enlist and would bring comfort to the families of the victims of war” (Emma, 2004). This love of his home country is expressed lyrically in line 8: “Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home”, with the play on the word ‘sun’ to describe the boys going off to war with him to defend their country’s honour and morality, so that “Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; / And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, / In hearts at peace, under an English heaven (12-14), where ‘she’ is referring to a personified England, can continue to exist thanks to their sacrifice. Brooke’s poem is written in the traditional sonnet format, which means it is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter and containing a specific rhyme scheme, typically abbaabba or abbacddc (Everett, 1995). The rhyme scheme for this poem breaks out of the traditional mold however, and follows a variation on the Shakespearean sonnet with abab cdcd efgefg. Because of his lack of experience in war and his early death, Brooke’s only expression of war, as is exemplified in this poem, remains idealistic and influenced by traditional war expectations. By contrast, Wilfred Owen was well-versed in the nature of the war by the time he wrote his poem “Mental Cases.” Born in 1893 in Oswestry, he was the oldest of four children and raised as an evangelical Anglican. “For an evangelical, man is saved not by the good he does; but by the faith he has in the redeeming power of Christ’s sacrifice” (Laermans, 2001). Like Brooke, Owen’s early experience is marked by affluence working as a private teacher for a wealthy family living in the Pyrenees in 1914. After Britain entered the war, Owen enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles, trained for a little longer than a year in England and was serving in France by 1917, “the worst war winter” (Laermans, 2001). Also like Brooke, Owen spent an incredibly short period of time actually fighting in the war. Of his four months in active duty, five weeks were spent on the line. “After battle experience, thoroughly shocked by horrors of war, he went to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh” (Laermans, 2001). Although known as a fairly conventional writer prior to the war, Owen’s association with Siegfried Sassoon at the Craiglockhart War Hospital opened his eyes to a new writing style. “Owen’s new work first imitated Sassoon’s fiercely ironic and colloquial style, attacking upon the consciences of those civilians who were still in favour of the war, but he soon fashioned his own style and approach to the war. His most mature works were all created in the very short space between August 1917 and September 1918” (Laermans, 2001). In another striking parallel to Brooke, Owen returned to France in that month and died an early and meaningless death one week prior to the cease fire on 11 November 1918 in one of the final battles of the war. Owen’s poem “Mental Cases” is typical of his war poetry in its vigorous “condemnation of the horrors of war” and strong use of “pararhyme, alliteration and assonance” (Laermans, 2001). He opens the poem with questions, immediately engaging the reader in the dialogue: “Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?” (1). We find out these people he’s referring to rock themselves and are mere shadows of what they were, “purgatorial shadows” that drool as a result of their preoccupation with the horrors racing through their minds. “That damage to men’s mind, through war, was not more shameful than bodily wounds didn’t always find ready acceptance at that time, and ‘Mental Cases’ is both a powerful poem and a propaganda document. Owen’s aim is to shock, to describe in stark details the ghastly physical symptoms of mental torment” (Simcox, 2000). This mental torment is evident in their eye sockets that have had chasms gouged round them (6) and whom “Ever from their hair and through their hands’ palms / Misery swelters” (7-8). “These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished” (10). What makes this poem even more powerful is when we realize that our speaker has been one of these men, he knows what they see. “Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander, / Always they must see these things and hear them, / Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles, / Carnage incomparable, and human squander” (13-16). They are no longer capable of enjoying anything. Even simple sunlight appears to them as a “blood smear” (21) and nighttime is little more than “blood-black” (21), dawn opening like “a wound that bleeds afresh” (22). “Owen wrote from Ripon on 25th May 1918, ‘I’ve been busy this evening with my terrific poem (at present) called The Deranged.’ Two months later at Scarborough it was revised and retitled. Owen having himself been a Mental Case, it will have been a painful poem to write” (Simcox, 2000). The poem utilizes trochaic metre, characterized by stressed then unstressed rhythm pattern, to create a falling beat, one that hits us as depressed and heavy, and he avoids the use of comforting rhyme schemes that might put us at ease. “Where there’s alliteration – ‘multitudinous murders” (12), ‘blood-black’ (21), ‘hilarious, hideous’ (23), the evil seems to inflate. Where the grammar crumbles as in ‘Memory fingers in their hair of murders’ (11), the distortion corresponds to minds and bodies wrenched out of shape” (Simcox, 2000). There are several other places in which the words break down and language conveys its horror in its simple inability to remain on track, further setting our senses on edge as we read through the poem. “We sense the terror implicit in ‘slow panic’ (5) – an oxymoron; a state of fear intensified” (Simcox, 2000). Another fearful image placed before us with startling contrasts is the idea that “their heads wear this hilarious, hideous, / Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses” (23-24). These men have not placed these expressions on their faces willingly, nor are they faces of benign good-will. Instead, they are frozen into grimaces of horror that are hideous for their seeming hilarity. “Finally, irony gives language an edge, and the condition of these men, besides inducing pity, is beset with irony; that reason should be lost while memory remains, the falseness attach to a smile or wickedness to a leer when both are voluntary” (Simcox, 2000). Thus, through these two poems, both written by men who had limited experience of war and limited time in which to express their thoughts in the form of poetry, we are able to learn of both the optimism going into the war and the horror coming out of it. Through this comparison, we are able to more fully appreciate the complete destruction of the human soul as it experienced the atrocities that were committed in the trenches. Through the loss of these poets and their incredible talent to meaningless injuries and death, we are able to appreciate some of the magnitude of what war managed to steal from us. References Emma (Ilusvm). (15 December 2004). “Three World War I Poems.” Poetry Analysis. Retrieved 6 June 2006 from < http://www.ciao.co.uk/Poetry_Analysis__Review_5476922> Everett, Glenn. (1995). “A Guide to the Sonnet.” University of Tennessee at Martin. Retrieved 6 June 2006 from < http://www.utm.edu/departments/english/everett/sonnet.htm> Laermans, Eric. (1 February, 2001). “Short Biography.” Wilfred Owen. Retrieved 6 June 2006 from Means, Robert. (22 July 2005). “Biography.” Rupert Brooke. Bingham Young University. Retrieved 6 June 2006 from < http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/brooke> Roberts, David. (1996). Minds at War: The Poetry and Experience of the First World War. Sussex: Gardners Books. Simcox, Kenneth. (2000). “Mental Cases.” Wilfred Owen Association. Retrieved 6 June 2006 from Read More