The Rage Diaries: National Poetry Month: Sassoon

2006.04.27

National Poetry Month: Sassoon

The poetry of the early 20th century has always interested me more than anything that came later. I think it's because the really great poets evoke time and place with extreme poignancy and specificity: you can read the turmoil that came from increasing awareness of a shrinking world, the encroachment of technology, the fomenting currents of social change.

You all know I love Wilfred Owens and T.S. Eliot. Here's a piece by a compadre of theirs that's a most angry and eloquent query. I think it'd make a fine political protest piece.

HAVE you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man reprieved to go
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same,—and War's a bloody game....
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?"

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack,—
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads, those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget.

-- "Aftermath," Siegfried Sassoon.

Posted at 11:23 in National Poetry Month | Permalink

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2006.04.27

National Poetry Month: Sassoon

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