Escape

Robert Graves’ poem Escape is about a soldier pondering death. There is an AABB rhyme scheme. There is a mythological and surreal element in the poem, “Cerberus stands and grins above me now, wearing three heads—lion, and lynx, and sow.” Cerberus is from Greek mythology and is the creature that guards the under world. It’s a three-headed dog but Graves changes this to the head of a lynx a lion and a sow. I’m not sure why Graves alludes to Greek mythology rather than the bible when referring to death and afterlife. It could show losing faith in God and Christianity which many poets did at this time but I still don’t understand why he would refer to the Greeks. Graves also juxtaposes mythic figures with common ones “After me roared and clattered angry hosts, Of demons, heroes, and policeman-ghosts.” The policeman amongst the powerful creatures has interesting effects, it brings everyday authority into his punishment it makes the other things seem mundane and not as powerful. The heroes and villains stand along side each other, the policeman the source of authority is dead, and they are all after the narrator. The clear-cut notions of good and evil and trustworthy authority are degraded. The narrator portrays Cerberus as nothing more than a domestic dog “Good Cereberus!..Good Dog…Stay” this has a biting humorous quality, with all the death this man has seen the gatekeeper of hell seems like nothing more than a dog that he tries to train. And the man dupes the dog,” Then swiftly Cerberus’ wide mouths I cram with army biscuit smeared with ration jam.” The jam and biscuit are very significant, as they relate to wartime and soldiers and imply how dying in war morphs the notion of death and afterlife. He uses what gave him the army to escape hell. There is an old notion that if you die in battle you automatically goes to hell so maybe Graves could be showing how this shouldn’t be true.

Anthem for Doomed Youth and Them

Wilfred Owen anthem for doomed youth and Siegfried Sassoon’s They both discuss church or faith related subjects. However Owen's is more to do with mourning at a church community rather than religion is self, unlike Sassoon who specifically discusses loss of religious faith.
Sassoon’s poem commences with a bishop talking and we can immediately see the confusion created by the mix of truth and lie “they will not be the same, for they’ll have fought for a just cause.” It’s true that they will be changed, but the bishop implies that they have been improved by fighting for a cause.  He paints a heroic image of the soldiers through phrases like “challenged Death and dared him face to face” which makes it seem like they bravely stood up for their own honor and their country. The capitalization and personification of “Death” makes it seem like a deity, as one would capitalize “God.” The Bishop also refers to the enemy as “Anti Christ” which has obvious religious implications but also demonizes the enemy they didn’t even see. Despite the religious implications provoked from the bishop and his speech there is no mention of God or even the goodness of a God. He mentions the evil “Anti Christ” and deifies Death, undermining his attempt at being inspirational. In the second stanza the boys who fought, list ways they’ve been changed and they are all discussing physical injury. For example “ Bills gone stone blind” the change isn’t enlightening it’s crippling. Also unlike the first stanza when the soldiers were portrayed as very active men who “lead” and “dared” now describe themselves as if they were just objects damaged in war. “George lost his legs” and “Jims shot through the lungs” just shows the men as victims of war. They don’t mention a cause, what they were fighting for when they got hurt, because it really didn’t matter. Unlike the capitalization of “Death” and “Anti-Christ” in the first stanza in the second stanza the names of the men are capitalized, showing the more personal level that they were on, but also that with lack of a cause and lack of faith the men depended on each other a lot and developed true comradely. The bishop chips in again saying, “The ways of God are strange” in response the men’s suffering, which is a really awful excuse for what happened. Also his name is no longer capitalized showing that he’s lost his credibility at least in the eyes of the veterans. Through out the poem the veterans are referred to as “boys” signifying the way they feel emasculated after the war. Overall this a Sassoons style in this poem is satiricle commentary on religous authority trying to comfort and justify the public and returning soldiers.

Wilfred Owen's poem anthem for doomed youth also discusses the suffering of the soldiers in the war and uses church imagery to convey how the soldiers cant receive a proper funeral. Like Sassoon’s poem it shows how the soldiers have been reduced by the war, however Owen creates the idea that they have been dehumanized and subordinate to war machinery where Sassoon implies more of emasculation. Owen compares the men to “cattle” which shows how they were treated like animals up for slaughter. Other poems discuss dehumanization but they refer more to loss of moral code amongst the soldiers who survived the war, Owen is referring to those who died pretty much immediately unlike Sassoon who refers to the veterans. Owen specifically refers to the war machinery where Sassoon does not “Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” Like Sassoon personifies death Owen personifies the guns by giving them emotions. The choice to use anger to create personification is interesting.   Owen being an ex soldier during this time it wasn’t really acceptable to be angry or upset after the war, he felt like the soldiers had been deprived of this right to be angry. The guns overall seem more powerful and tyrannous over the soldiers. There is lots of church diction but more specifically funeral diction, “passing-bells,” “choirs,” “candles,” “mourning” this describes the families at home unable to mourn the soldiers and give them proper burials. Although it is church diction it is not really undermining God and the authority of religion as Sassoon does but that might be implied by “. No mockeries. No prayers” in the same line, but is mostly sympathetic to the loss of the families. They also show the families hope and eventual loss of hope for their soldiers to come home, we first see hope with the “patient minds” and then loss of hope “drawing down blinds.” The poem is straightforwardly tragic but has a few hints of bitterness and sarcasm seems in the title “anthem for doomed youth.” An anthem is supposed to inspire and galvanize and is usually associated with nationalism. The youth refers to the young people that get slaughtered in war but why not refer to all the men? The youth were specifically targeted by propaganda to join the war, they were the ones who were most suckered into the notion of being a war hero. Also a lot of nationalistic organizations have youth groups. The title overall could show bitterness for how nations took pumped their minds with dignity them let the young men go to die. Like Sassoon, Owen has a bitter tone angsty towards people trying to glorify what happened in the war, seen in the title, predominantly. But Owen paints tragedy in those that died in war not those who were crippled. So there is more of a greiving tone in this poem  than Sassoon's, as "Them", whilst tragic, conveys  bitterness and rightful anger of the war vets.

Trench Duty

Siegfried Sassoon’s poem trench duty portrays an account from a soldier taking his shift to watch the trenches during the night. The soldier was falling asleep on trench duty and then was awakened by a shot, and the scene erupts in destruction.

Sassoon uses alliteration to create a sense of desperation and spontaneous action occurring in the trenches. The “big bombardment” and “candle-chinked” builds tension in the scene, and creates action. The soldier is waking up to violence

 

The rhyme scheme in this poem follows an AABB structure but it breaks to rhyming every other line for when describing an attack on the enemies emplaning this part. He makes the enemy look quite pathetic “crawling on their bellies” during this part. The aabb rhyme scheme had previously added quite a lot of build up making the enemy look quite threatening, but the enemy doesn’t seem quite as dangerous and evil we expected. They seem just as frightened as the soldier who was “shaken” awake. This might relate to how soldiers suffered no matter what side they were on and there were no heroes.

After the rude awakening the soldier looks to the sky. He describes the stars as “blank," which is an unusual description. Usually the stars have spiritual or enlightening connotations. However here, there is no divine light that radiates from the stars. They are just there looking back at him; he receives no answers from the heavens. This could show the soldier losing his faith. This idea is enhanced, in the sentence “I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead.” Death becomes mundane; he juxtaposes it with feeling wide-awake, as if the death was nothing more than an alarm clock. There isn’t any reason for this given to him by God; it just is the reality of war.

 

Greater Love and Before the Mirror

Both poems discuss love and mention roses. However greater love discusses warfare where before the mirror is just about love. I thought that since we are doing WW1 poetry that the “maiden rows” would be platoons or trenches, but the poet of before the mirror died before the war began. The general theme from this poem is love has died; they use the winter to signify loss of love. The girl looking in the “gleaming glass” is not really unhappy but it seems she has missed out on love and she knows not why. There is some confusion in the poem, “art thou the ghost my sister… am I the ghost who knows,” the poem is full of disconnect. Also ‘is there sorrow hidden? Is their delight” shows the bitter sweetness of love lost. But greater love has none of this bitter sweetness, greater love just bitter. In war people lost their humanity, they were surrounded by death and went in expecting to be heroes. They couldn’t go back to their normal lives and fall in love because no one understood them, they were really disconnected. Many critics say greater love is a response to before the mirror and that makes sense. I think Owen was sort of saying in response to before the mirror, that people had a greater opportunity to find love than WW1 veterans did. And unlike the woman in the poem who doesn’t really know why she couldn’t find love, the war vets know exactly why, because they were severely damaged from war.

Love just isn't enough

This poem is focused around romantic love destroyed by warfare and how love just isn’t enough. The first line “Red lips are not so red As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.” Memories of the girl he left behind are just simply not enough to forget the bloodshed of the war, or get a soldier through the war. At this point we aren’t sure where the soldier is if its during the war or after the war and the soldiers home, but we understand that he’s been changed by the bloodshed, and regardless of if he’s home recovering or still in the trenches, his love in his past life no longer matters very much. It won’t keep him safe in the trenches or if he is home the girl he loves wont understand what he’s been through. Looking at the title of the poem and the comparison of the lips to the blood of the soldier, it seems like the narrator is choosing the war over the girl. The way the blood is redder than the lips, it almost seems like the war is the “hotter” one. When talking about a woman in seductive manner red lips evoke seductive connotations not really profound romantic love connotations, this kind of undermines the love discussed. The mix of lust imagery with battle imagery relates to the thirst to be the heroic warrior that many young men had when they volunteered for war. The sarcastic and ironic juxtaposition of the lips and the blood suggests that this idea was completely stupid as the men were slaughtered. I think this poem intends to undermine both the “love” that’s supposed to get soldiers through war and war recovery, but also the desire to go to war.

The stanzas of the poem all start by discussing the girls lips, attitude, voice and heart, and shows how they have been undermined by a soldiers injuries and war experience. I think as we progress through we enter increasing phases of attraction. The lips show beauty and seduction, which I mentioned, prior. I wasn’t exactly sure what was meant by attitude I think it referred to posture and maybe her body, it might show confidence and poise that would seem attractive, and its something you would notice about some one after you notice their beauty. After is the voice, after seeing the pretty girl who walks confidently, a man would talk to the girl and increase his attraction to her and gets to know her. After that the heart, which signifies love and passion, shows that the girl loves the boy back and there is mutual attraction. At each level the love grows but at each stanza it is undermined with a physical injury, showing how extensively the war caused damage and love lost. At the last line “Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not” it is implied that the soldier are dead because cannot be touched, they cannot be with their lovers let alone be given a proper burial. I’ve also thought about looking at this poem through the perspective of the girl, who is losing a man to war, as if the war was the “other woman.” In the poem the guy would sort of be breaking up with her, and he would just be explaining that he just had a “greater love” for war and he showed that dedication through his death, that he prefers “limbs knife-skewed” to her “slender attitude”. This comparison of the war to another woman seems very childish and laughable, simply seems like nothing more than a bad break up, very mundane compared to war, it’s a sarcastic portrayal of what war was like and implies how loved ones really just didn’t get it.

Sassoon Poem Commentary

The poem Repression of war memories illustrates the society-pressured denial of the atrocities of war.

The diction describing the moth dying towards the candle is unpleasant “blundering and scorching” which are violent and not pleasant imagery but, it becomes relative to the war experience with ”glory.” In warfare there is always some attempt to romanticize losses as dying for a cause, the image becomes more than the suffering moth it becomes a suffering soldier. The narrator realizes this and tries to correct his thought. Repressing the war experience the narrator sees war in everyday actions like the moth.

We also see social perception of dealing with war. “And its been proved that soldier don’t go mad” the proof adds some scientific and social perspective on the issue, the proof also feels as confining as the repression of the thoughts of war.  “Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts that drive them out to jabber among the trees.” The fear the soldier has developed of his own mind is additionally burden to the violence he is witnessing. The pressure on the mind increases with harsh diction “jabber” and “ugly” and the threat of lunacy.  Additionally the tone of the “Unless” is quite judgmental and matter of fact, it creates a sensation that there’s a clear expected order to dealing with a war that no one has seen before, which is clearly ridiculous. We sense the narrators fear of judgment but we also sense he has bitterness and opposition to repressing war trauma.

The pressure is temporally relieved with the “Now light your pipe steady hand” the narrator seems to have everything under control and using a mundane activity to distract himself. This stanza sounds a bit like a list of instructions to follow in order to deal with the war, and the narrator seems to reassure himself with the “as right as rain” but the cleansing imagery of rain quickly turns destructive when the narrator starts asking for a thunderstorm that would “make the roses hang their dripping heads.” This imagery shows beauty being stifled and broken down by violent rain, which ironically was supposed to help it grow. This relates to how he feels about the war, showing again how war invades his thoughts. His abrupt change to books as a topic show that he is again trying to divert his attention anything that reminds him of war, which in this case is even something as natural and purifying as a rose and rain.  He talks about books in a pseudo positive manner “I tell you all the wisdom of the world Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet You sit and gnaw your nails” the humanities as well as nature cannot make the narrator forget the war showing that he cannot distract himself in anyway, he is forced to live with his own fear.

His attempts to distract himself become more desperate, “You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home; You’d never think there was a bloody war on!...  O yes, you would ... why, you can hear the guns.” the repetition of  "you" creates a faster rhythm which creates a greater sense of urgency and fear, which is Ironic as he is trying to calm himself down.  In his last attempt he realizes that he cant hide from his thoughts any more the word “why” brings back this painful yet rational recognition of his dire situation. 

Graves

I must admit I am a bit confused by this poem bough of nonsense, but there is a clear morbid and absurdist notion. The first image of the bird’s nest made of skulls and flowers provokes this. The choice of the nest is an interesting one, it creates this idea of nurturing, it could be referring to the pre war environment that made people believe in the war or it could be the post war environment that the next generation has to grow up in. there are also references to exotic and colorful things like monkeys Bright Pink birds and banana trees. The references to the exotic could refer to the colonies that Europeans possessed which is an extension of their nationalism, was a factor that started world war one but also national pride became useless once the men got into the trenches. But primarily this use of the exotic I think is sarcastic and absurdist, contrasting to the death in the poem. The people in the story have this sort of sarcastic false happiness about them that their aware of  “before this quaint mood fails” that their trying to deal with the tragedy, since the death it self had little purpose or meaning the life after is just as ridiculous. There are references to the Galatians in this poem, which I wasn’t familiar with before but I found that they were people from the New Testament that Paul wrote letters to and were one of the first people to accept Christianity. The description of the temple they built crushing them creates the sensation that they chose to believe the Christians too quickly and the their faith had no foundation so it ended up destroying them in the end. Also their faith didn’t prevent the nations from starting world war one, and certainly didn’t give soldiers any dignity in their death. Another thing I find interesting about this poem is that it’s a homing journey, shared by an elder and a man who is presumably young to mid age. Traditionally I would think that the poem would be advice given by the elder to the younger man but they seem to be on about the same level here, which shows that in battle sometimes these social orders can be transcended into brotherhood, this might relate to how Jake and bill are close because of their mutual veteranship. The journey home by soldiers is usually considered to be a positive thing, I would have expected this poem to be filled with nostalgic memories of family to return too, but that’s the opposite of what was done. The poem described things in the present through an absurdist lens, because the war undermined the entire foundations of values and sense of home that they had previously known and home just wouldn’t be the same when they returned because of the atrocities they had seen.

bulls and steers

Steers signify castrated bulls, which relate to the theme of emasculinity. The two more obvious steers are Jake and Cohn, Jake for his injury and Cohn for his weak character and naiveity.jake signifies the steer that rejoined the group and Cohn was the one that didn’t rejoin the group. But Jake seems to have an independent mind he seems to understand more than the other characters things about the realities of war and life and he paid for this knowledge heavily, he may follow his friends around but he thinks independently however he cant turn his wisdom into anything. Jake is also steer like the way he wants he leads people into the group and tries to keep polite relations between them. But as we also know that the Bulls only want to kill when there alone, and I think Jake has this quality in his narration we see this repressed anger, and Jake avoids solitude to keep himself at a distance from his anger, he’s calm as long as he’s with the herd. Brett is a bull as she is dominant sexually, which seems ironic seeing as she’s the girl, who has the masculinity of a bull. It shows the paradigm shift of the time, where women gained more rights and power and men lost masculinity during the trench warfare of the First World War. With Brett and Romero there is an interesting shift, Romero as the bullfighter almost seduces the bull when he fights it, but he becomes the bull when Brett seduces him and she the bullfighter. When the bullfighter becomes the bull, its seems so paradoxical and corrupt, this shows how the ideals (or lack of) of the lost generation corrupt the Romero. This also shows the difficult position that the lost generation puts themselves in; they admire Romero but simultaneously corrupt him. They travel and experience new culture but they still cant help but destroy what they seek, they are stuck in themselves.

You want to be Jake becuase...

1. You like to silently insult others to feel better about yourself.

2. You only relate to ex-soldiers.

3. You want to get what you pay for.

4. You like to keep your friendships on convenience.

5. You want to enter the friend zone.

6. You want to observe but not participate.

7. You need to feel like a man.

8. You love bull-fighting.

9. You like to passively socialize in order to remain detached from yourself and others.

10. You like to actively pursue not doing anything.