War Poetry – Page 3 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Alun Lewis’s ‘All Day It Has Rained’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Like Edward Thomas’s ‘Rain’, Alun Lewis’s ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is a rain poem that is also a war poem – although Alun Lewis was a poet of the Second World War rather than the First.

Indeed, Lewis was an admirer of Thomas’s poetry and ‘All Day It Has Rained’ might be considered his tribute to Thomas’s rainy war poem (Thomas is even mentioned by name at the end of the poem). The mention of ‘celebrities’ and ‘refugees’ (uneasily rhymed on purpose here) makes this a curiously modern poem – a poem for our times as well as of its time.

All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
And from the first grey wakening we have found

No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap,
All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly

A Short Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘New Heaven and Earth’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Although he is better-known as a novelist, D. H. Lawrence also wrote a great deal of poetry. ‘New Heaven and Earth’, a long poem he wrote in 1917 during the First World War, captures Lawrence’s anger and despair over the destruction of the war, and might be regarded as a forerunner to greater (and longer) poems written by Lawrence’s fellow modernists, such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

New Heaven and Earth

And so I cross into another world
shyly and in homage linger for an invitation
from this unknown that I would trespass on.

I am very glad, and all alone in the world,
all alone, and very glad, in a new world
where I am disembarked at last.

I could cry with joy, because I am in the new world, just ventured in.
I could cry with joy, and quite freely, there is nobody to know.

A Short Analysis of Marjorie Pickthall’s ‘Marching Men’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Marjorie Pickthall (1883-1922) was Canadian, although she was born in London. She was regarded by some as the greatest Canadian poet of her generation, and her short poem ‘Marching Men’ is a moving religiously inspired response to the sacrifice being made by thousands of men every week in the First World War.

Marching Men

Under the level winter sky
I saw a thousand Christs go by.
They sang an idle song and free
As they went up to Calvary.

Careless of eye and coarse of lip,
They marched in holiest fellowship.
That heaven might heal the world, they gave
Their earth-born dreams to deck the grave.

A Short Analysis of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ or, to give the phrase in full: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, Latin for ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’ (patria is where we get our word ‘patriotic’ from). The phrase originated in the Roman poet Horace, but in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) famously rejects this idea.

Arthur Newberry Choyce: Leicestershire’s Forgotten War Poet

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle heads to Leicestershire in search of that county’s finest poet of the Great War

Arthur Newberry Choyce (1893-1937) is not a famous name, even among readers of WWI poetry. The Wikipedia page for his birthplace says nothing about him. His poetry is not widely known or read. Yet Choyce is perhaps Charnwood’s great forgotten poet of the First World War – maybe, even, Leicestershire’s greatest poet of WWI.

Choyce was born in Hugglescote, a small village near Coalville and located some ten miles to the west of Loughborough, in 1893, the same year as Wilfred Owen. As a young man he joined the Leicestershire Regiment (known as ‘The Tigers’), and became a Second Lieutenant in the 9th Battalion. At the outbreak of war, the regiment appointed Choyce their official war poet. In 1917, he published the first of several volumes of poetry, Crimson Stains, which carried the subtitle Poems of War and Love.

Crimson Stains shuttles between life in the trenches and the world back home for which Choyce was fighting. Several of the poems mention