Charles Hamilton Sorley’s haunting poem of WWI: an analysis
The Scottish war poet Charles Hamilton Sorley was just 20 years old when he died in 1915 at the Battle of Loos. He was the youngest of the major war poets, having been born in 1895. He left this poem, probably his most famous, untitled at his death. For Robert Graves, in his war memoir Goodbye to All That, Sorley was, along with Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, ‘one of the three poets of importance killed during the war.’ Sorley’s poems would be published posthumously as a book, Marlborough and Other Poems, in 1916. ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead’ is the most popular poem by this still underappreciated and unpopular poet.