Reading list

[brdgt]

I decided to start Robert Graves "Goodbye to All That" in honor of the start of war.
Graves was a poet, war hero, and anti-war protester (along with Siegfried Sassoon). He was a very angry man.



"To the Warmongers" by Siegfried Sassoon

"I'm back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.

Young faces bleared with blood
sucked down into the mud,
You shall hear things like this,
Till the tormented slain

Crawl round and once again,
With limbs that twist awry
Moan out their brutish pain,
As the fighters pass them by.

For you our battles shine
With triumph half-divine;
And the glory of the dead
Kindles in each proud eye.

But a curse is on my head,
That shall not be unsaid,
And the wounds in my heart are red,
For I have watched them die.''

"Dulce et decorum est" by Wilfred Owen

"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of fired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And floundering like a man in fire or lime
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
-My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."

"When I'm Killed"by Robert Graves

"WHEN I’m killed, don’t think of me
Buried there in Cambrin Wood,
Nor as in Zion think of me
With the Intolerable Good.
And there’s one thing that I know well,
I’m damned if I’ll be damned to Hell!

So when I’m killed, don’t wait for me,
Walking the dim corridor;
In Heaven or Hell, don’t wait for me,
Or you must wait for evermore.
You’ll find me buried, living-dead
In these verses that you’ve read.

So when I’m killed, don’t mourn for me,
Shot, poor lad, so bold and young,
Killed and gone—don’t mourn for me.
On your lips my life is hung:
O friends and lovers, you can save
Your playfellow from the grave."

Comments

[blue-lotus.livejournal.com]

There's a good book of anti-war fiction about Siegfried Sassoon. "Regeneration" by Pat Barker. It's quite good.

[brdgt.livejournal.com]

I loved that book! I took a class on Tuberculosis, WWI, and literature as an undergrad and we read Regeneration. I asked for (and got) the other two in the Border Trilogy (Ghost Road and the Eye of the Needle) for xmas this year, but haven't read them yet. Sassoon's "Memoirs of a Fox hunting man" and "Memoirs of an Infantry Officer" are also really good.