“Never Such Innocence Again” The poetry of the Great War
The first world war is symbolic in English culture. It is representative of the end of innocence and was unprecedented for the level of terror which it created. Inevitably, it was recorded not just in photography and journalism but in poetry and prose as well. This essay, due to its length, will be restricted to the poetry of the war itself and will not venture into other mediums. The poetry of the war is very personal and conveys through its language and imagery much of the terror, pain and emotion associated with loss, death and suffering. The war poets, as they have come to be known, were common men. They were not scholars with impressive curricula vitae from Oxford and Cambridge. They were painters, musicians and doctors. Much of the poetry was written directly in the trenches in France and in Belgium. Or in the recovering moments after the battle in relief hospitals throughout western Europe. Much like the one where Siegfried Sassoon spent the latter part of the war. The poetry of the war, because of the pain and suffering conveyed through it, represents an end of innocence and shows a move into experience - conveying images of horror and true terror which had never been seen before. This essay will explore the poetry of the Great War and will also look into a poem by Philip Larkin which follows this same thematic approach. Siegfried Sassoon was a second lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, enlisting a few days before the war began in August of 1914. Sassoon and his regiment were deployed to France. Serving with him in the regiment was fellow poet Robert Graves. Sassoonʼs early poetry is very zealous and reads with the excitement and patriotism that turned up on both sides, at the beginning. But as the war continues Sassoon becomes more and more disheartened by the way things were turning out. In 1917, because of severe shell shock, Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart, a hospital for soldiers in Scotland. It was here that Sassoon was introduced to Wilfred Owen, a fellow poet and wounded soldier. It was at Craiglockhart that Sassoon composed one of his most famous poems, “Repression of War Experience,” which does much to capture the utter randomness of the war. “Youʼre quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home; / youʼd never think there was a bloody war on! / O yes, you would ... why, you can hear the guns. / Hark! Thud, thud, thud, –quite soft ... they never cease– / Those whispering guns–O Christ, I want to go out / And screech at them to stop–Iʼm going crazy; / Iʼm going stark, staring mad because of the guns.(Sassoon, 391)” The war, as depicted here by Sassoon, is one which is constantly present in the lives of everyone involved. Through his poetry Sassoon makes it clear that the experience of war is one which is nearly impossible to repress. “When thoughts youʼve gagged all day come back to scare you; / And itʼs been proved that soldiers donʼt go mad / unless they loose control of ugly thoughts.(Sassoon, 391)” Once a soldier has experienced war there is no going back; it is a transformation which is unlike any other; it is a complete alteration of reality. Sassoon was eventually returned to the line in France where he was wounded a second time. After the war was over Sassoon returned home where he began to write more poetry. In this verse from a sonnet he wrote called “dreamers” Sassoon describes a longing to go back but it is all hopeless. “And mocked by the hopeless longing to regain / Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,/ and going to the office in the train. (Sassoon 389)” To Sassoon war is an experience which is not forgotten it is one which modifies the mind completely. The desire to
return to a world without war is hopeless. The lessons of the great war as described by Sassoon transformed the world out of naiveté into experience. Another soldier who served on the front lines of france was Issac Rosenberg. Like Sassoon, Rosenberg was poet who captured the essence and terror of the war through poetry. Issac Rosenberg, unlike Sassoon, served as a private in the infantry; also unlike Sassoon, he did not live to see the end of the war. Rosenberg, before enlisting in October of 1915, had studied to be an artist. His voice in his poetry is that of a soldier, not of an officer, it is much more honest when speaking of the realities of trench warfare. As a result, his poetry touches depths of human suffering and utter madness that Sassoon himself cannot even begin to imagine. In “Break of Day in the Trenches”, Rosenberg observes the carnage of "no mans land" staring out across the expanse of wasted, destroyed land. “Sprawled in the bowels of the Earth,/ The torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes / At the shrieking iron and flame / Hurled through still heavens?/ What quaver – what heart aghast? / Poppies whose roots are in manʼs veins / Drop, and are ever dropping; / But mine in my ear is safe– / Just a little white with the dust."(Rosenberg, 505) Through this Rosenberg shows the gruesomeness of the war and with it shows that any beauty that could come out is tied to death and destruction. The poppies, which are very much an idealized image from the First World War, are here transformed as an image of death. They grow all through the mounds of decomposing and decaying soldiers, gleaning their dark red colour from the blood that once pulsed through human veins. This is the reality in which Rosenberg writes poetry. In one of his longer poems “Dead Manʼs Dump”, Rosenberg goes farther to describe the war experience and attempts to deal with the reality of being surrounded by corpses. “The air is loud with death,/ the dark air spurts with fire / The explosions ceaseless are. / Timelessly now some minutes past / These dead strode time with vigorous life, / Till the shrapnel called ʻan endʼ (Rosenberg, 508)” At this point all hope of erasing the memories of death and decay are lost the smells of the rotting corpses and burned into the memories of each and every soldier. Through poetry Rosenberg effectively conveys this as an end to all that once was. The war very much was an end to the innocent past etching memories which would be locked in the subconscious of all those involved for an eternity. Rosenbergʼs continuing reality of death takes the reader father from innocence in the following stanza. In this reality death is constant. As such the reader as well as it seems Rosenberg have become desensitized by it; bombarded by the wickedness of senseless destruction. “A manʼs brains splattered on / A strecher-bearerʼs face; / His shook shoulders slipped their load, / But when they bent to look again / The drowning soul was sunk too deep / For human tenderness.(Rosenberg, 508)” In this Rosenberg goes even farther to desensitize his reader from death. So when at the end of of this stanza the stretcher bearerʼs lose the wounded soldier they are carrying they do not attempt to save him they merely go on to search for another person to save. The metamorphosis out of innocence is one which is permanent and from which there is no return. The poemʼs final lines show just how desensitized by death one can be and demonstrate more fully the horror of the war. “With his tortured upturned sight, / So we crashed round the bend, / We heard his weak scream, / We heard his very last sound, / And our wheels grazed his dead face. (Rosenberg, 509)” Because of the constant presence of death and decay Rosenberg and his other comrades are able to ignore the cries of the dying man. They do not even notice; it is as though they are passively abhorring the violence which constantly surrounds them. From this it is incredibly clear that all of their innocence is gone and they are no longer conscious of death. This is not because they do not care, quite the contrary, it is because of over exposure. Everything around them is dead, their friends, their leaders, even the earth
upon which they are sitting is dead, death is a constant presence. They know that they also are likely going to die. It is a part of their lives and they have accepted it. In this acceptance they have completely lost their innocence and moved beyond it. Ivor Gurney, like Rosenberg, was a common soldier and his poetry speaks with the same passive abhorrence to death. Ivor Gurney like many of Britain's young men driven by the zeal of patriotism attempted to join up in 1914, however due poor eyesight he was initially rejected. In 1915, he was finally allowed to enlist in the infantry with a regiment out of Gloucester. He, like Rosenberg was a merely a private and also like Rosenberg saw his fair share of violence and destruction. In 1917, while fighting on the front lines in France near the revered town of Ypres, Gurney fell victim to a gas attack which injured him so severely that he had to be sent home. His poetry is rife with the same tremendous experience that is seen in Rosenberg although when it comes to his description of his war experience he is closer to Sassoon. What he does do well is capture the personal experience of a soldier the friendship and grief at being away from home missing loved ones. Gurneyʼs poetry, like Rosenberg's is very much fraught with the desire to leave the battle with a forgetfulness of why they were fighting in the first place. In “To His Love” Gurney approaches the more personal side of war writing a letter to the lover of a fallen friend. “ His body was so quick / Is not as you know / knew it, on the Severn River / Under the blue / Driving our small boat through.(Gurney, 496) This from the second stanza of the poem harkens back to England, back to a much more innocent time in which all things were simpler. It is in this way that Gurney deals with the loss of innocence. Any time before the war in Gurneyʼs poetry seems to be a life time away due to this loss. In the third stanza he elaborates on this idea a little further. “You would not know him now ... / But still he died / Nobly, so cover him over / With violets of pride / purple from Severn side. (Gurney, 496)” Just the first line of this is in itself quite telling in the transformation out of innocence. “you would not know him now” for he has been changed so severely that to those who once knew him so well he would be unrecognizable transformed not just physically because of injury but mentally and spiritually by war. No longer can he claim to be innocent of death or of senseless aggression; he is changed forever, mangled by hatred and is in essence utterly transformed by the experience of war. In “First TIme In” Gurney attempts to process through poetry the life of a soldier on the front line. This experience in and of itself is one where all innocence is lost. The other thing at play in this poem is the strange beauty of war which is a part of innocence because before war has effected a soldier personally, before they have left their childhood innocence behind it all must be a game, a game that is played with friends. In these last lines of the poem Gurney seeks out the beauty of innocence through the chaos and destruction of war. “ ʻDavid of the White Rockʼ , the ʻslumber songʼ so soft, and that / Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys / Are sung–but never more beautiful then under the gunsʼ noise."(Gurney, 496) The music is of home describing times much more innocent then these. However, the songs which Gurney has selected and alluded to are deliberately chosen. “David of the White Rock” is the story of an innocent man who plays the harp so beautifully that God calls him to travel through the gates of death. And in so doing leaving everything of his innocent life behind. “The Slumber Song” is a lullaby about the Virgin Mary rocking the Christ child to sleep in her arms. These folk songs serve as an escape from the madness and the chaos which is erupting all around them. Through these songs, which are both centered on innocence and other beautiful things, the soldiers in Gurneyʼs poetry are able to deal with where they are as Gurney describes in his last line “– but never more beautiful the under the gunsʼ noise.” Through music the soldiers are able to temporarily regain their innocence as it masks the reality of experience from which there is no escape.
Finally from a poet who was not a soldier and who was not yet even born when the war took place. Philip Larkin attempts to commemorate the war and to at the same time imagine what it must of been like in August of 1914, when the war began. In the last stanza he remarks “Never such innocence, / Never before or since, / As changed itself to past without a word–the men/ Leaving the gardens tidy, / The thousands of marriages lasting a little while longer: / Never such innocence again (Larkin, 218)” This is the utter definition of the transformation out of innocence. Larkin even though he never experienced any part of the Great War perfectly imagined how the soldiers of Great Britain would have their homes and their perfectly normal lives to be changed utterly by the chaos of war. Larkin is exactly right, “Never Such Innocence Again.” The men who leave their homes to go to Europe in 1914, are not same men who returned in 1918. They are changed, transformed completely by war. The poetry of war poets such as ones the mentioned here: Gurney, Sassoon, and Rosenberg, as well as the poetry of other war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves is incredibly important because it captures the essence of humanity in its most desperate and painful moments. The Great War is a symbolic moment in world history and as is shown through the poetry described here as an end to innocence an end to a simple existence. The war through poetry represents the end of all things that could be understood - the world after the war is not the same and it never will be like it once was ever again “Never Such Innocence Again” Works Cited 1. Gurney, Ivor. “First Time In.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani. 3rd edition. Vol. 1 New York: Norton 2003. 2. Gurney, Ivor. “To His Love.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani. 3rd edition. Vol. 1 New York: Norton 2003. 3. Larkin, Philip. “MCMXIV.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani. 3rd edition. Vol. 2 New York: Norton 2003. 4. Rosenberg, Issac. “Break of Day in the Trenches.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani. 3rd edition. Vol. 1 New York: Norton 2003. 5. Rosenberg, Issac. “Dead Manʼs Dump.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani. 3rd edition. Vol. 1 New York: Norton 2003. 6. Sassoon, Siegfried. “Dreamers.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani. 3rd edition. Vol. 1 New York: Norton 2003. 7. Sassoon, Siegfried. “Repression of War Experience” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani. 3rd edition. Vol. 1 New York: Norton 2003.