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  3. The End of War Poetry

The End of War Poetry

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  • Aqua LetiferA Offline
    Aqua LetiferA Offline
    Aqua Letifer
    wrote on last edited by Aqua Letifer
    #1

    Great article.

    https://quillette.com/2022/05/17/the-end-of-war-poetry/

    I picked up a book of WWI war poetry outside a bookshop in Australia. After hours, they'd have an Honor Box: basically, you slip two dollars into the coin slot for every book you took out of the box. The book of war poetry I picked up is an amazing collection.

    Robert Leckie of Helmet for My Pillow and The Pacific fame, was a newspaperman and knew this tradition. He contributed to it during his time overseas. [Here's the link ] to the poem that spawned the book title, (http://johnjudyc.blogspot.com/2010/05/memorial-day-is-set-aside-to-remember.html)but let's take a deeper dive.

    A helmet for my pillow,
    A poncho for my bed,
    My rifle rests across my chest-
    The stars swing overhead.

    Settin' the scene, establishing the metre. But about the metre. He's got an abcb quatrain, often with internal rhymes in the third line.

    Remind you of anything?

    "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea."

    Leckie's channeling Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the long, beautiful tradition of Romantic-era ballads. But he's more rigid with his stanzas than Coleridge is, and he's not as loose with the embellishments, making his less sing-songy and more formal.

    Leckie's a beast of a writer.

    The whisper of the kunai,
    The murmur of the sea,
    The sighing palm and night so calm
    Betray no enemy.

    Hear! river bank so silent
    You men who sleep around
    That foreign scream across the stream-
    Up! Fire at the sound!

    Look at this. Usually the lines are iambic: duh-DUM, duh-DUM etc. "You MEN who SLEEP aROUND."

    But he changed the opening foot here to a spondee: two stressed beats together, which is very unnatural to say. Makes you slow down, and phonetically it forces you to linger on "Hear!" because the transition is awkward. So you read "Hear!" followed by a short rest. And you hear nothing, because you're reading to yourself. But then he says, "river bank so silent," so he manipulated the phonetic structure of the line itself to get you to experience what he's experiencing. It's a trick with a point to it. Excellent.

    Sweeping over the sandspit
    That blocks the Tenaru
    With Banzai-boast a mushroomed host
    Vows to destroy our few.

    Into your holes and gunpits!
    Kill them with rifles and knives!
    Feed them with lead until they are dead-
    And widowed are their wives.

    Sons of the mothers who gave you
    Honor and gift of birth
    Strike with the knife till blood and life
    Run out upon the earth.

    Marines, keep faith with your glory
    Keep to your trembling hole.
    Intruder feel of Nippon steel
    Can't penetrate your soul.

    Closing, they charge all howling
    Their breasts all targets large.
    The gun must shake, the bullets make
    A slaughter of their charge.

    Red are the flashing tracers,
    Yellow the bursting shells.
    Hoarse is the cry of men who die
    Shrill are the woundeds' yells.

    God, how the night reels stricken!
    She shrieks with orange spark.
    The mortar's lash and cannon's crash
    Have crucified the dark.

    Falling, the faltering foemen
    Beneath our guns lie heaped.
    By greenish glare of rocket's flare
    We see the harvest reaped.

    Now has the first fierce onslaught
    Been broken and hammered back.
    Hammered and hit, from hole and pit-
    We rise up to attack!

    This is an important point: rhymed poetry is harder today than it was in the Romantic era. Then, you could get away with inverted constructions like:

    The harmless phantoms on their errands glide

    "Glide" is the end line here, but reading this, you immediately know it's poetry. Because nobody talks or writes like that today, it sounds old-timey. Were you or I to say this naturally it'd be "harmless phantoms glide on their errands."

    It sounds old-timey the other way because it is old-timey. So SOV (subject-object-verb) constructions aren't really available to us anymore unless you want to sound like a ponce.

    Even so, if you want your rhyming to sound more natural and have more potency, never rhyme a noun with a noun, or an adjective with an adjective. Rhyme different parts of speech together. But God help you if you try to use a rhyming dictionary for this, it's going to fail you.

    That's why "Hammered and hit, from hole and pit-" is a little more satisfying than it really ought to be. That and he's employing a little Anglo-Saxon hemistich action with "Hammered, Hit, Hole, PIT." Which, nice.

    Day bursts pale from a gun tube,
    The gibbering night has fled.
    By light of dawn the foe has drawn
    A line behind his dead.

    Our tanks clank in behind him,
    Our riflemen move out.
    Their hearts have met our bayonet-
    It's ended wit a shout.

    "Cease fire!" -the words go ringing,
    Over the heaps of the slain.
    The battle's won, the Rising Sun
    Lies riddled on the plain.

    St. Michael, angel of battle
    We praise you to God on high.
    The foe you gave was strong and brave
    And unafraid to die.

    Speak to the Lord for our comrades,
    Killed when the battle seemed lost.
    They went to meet a bright defeat-
    The hero's holocaust.

    False is the vaunt of the victor,
    Empty our living pride.
    For those who fell there is no hell-
    Not for the brave who died.

    Another verb-noun internal rhyme. Great for the last stanza.

    And by the way, what you do if you want to write like this is read a shitload of this stuff and deconstruct it so you understand it, but you don't sit down and say, "I'm going to make this line an SOV inversion and rhyme a noun and a verb together," that would be ridiculous. You've just got to be fluent in the tools available to you and try to say something.

    Again, Leckie was one hell of a writer. Not at all bad for a newspaperman.

    Please love yourself.

    Catseye3C 1 Reply Last reply
    • MikM Offline
      MikM Offline
      Mik
      wrote on last edited by
      #2

      POTY. Wow.

      “I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill

      1 Reply Last reply
      • JollyJ Offline
        JollyJ Offline
        Jolly
        wrote on last edited by
        #3

        Aqua, do you Kipple?

        “Cry havoc and let slip the DOGE of war!”

        Those who cheered as J-6 American prisoners were locked in solitary for 18 months without trial, now suddenly fight tooth and nail for foreign terrorists’ "due process". — Buck Sexton

        Aqua LetiferA 1 Reply Last reply
        • JollyJ Jolly

          Aqua, do you Kipple?

          Aqua LetiferA Offline
          Aqua LetiferA Offline
          Aqua Letifer
          wrote on last edited by
          #4

          @Jolly said in The End of War Poetry:

          Aqua, do you Kipple?

          Eh?

          Please love yourself.

          1 Reply Last reply
          • JollyJ Offline
            JollyJ Offline
            Jolly
            wrote on last edited by
            #5

            A surprising amount of soldiers can quote many of Kipling's poems from memory. When two or more soldiers are trading his poems or reciting them in unison, it's called kipling, or a soldier is said to kiple (kipple).

            “Cry havoc and let slip the DOGE of war!”

            Those who cheered as J-6 American prisoners were locked in solitary for 18 months without trial, now suddenly fight tooth and nail for foreign terrorists’ "due process". — Buck Sexton

            Aqua LetiferA 1 Reply Last reply
            • JollyJ Jolly

              A surprising amount of soldiers can quote many of Kipling's poems from memory. When two or more soldiers are trading his poems or reciting them in unison, it's called kipling, or a soldier is said to kiple (kipple).

              Aqua LetiferA Offline
              Aqua LetiferA Offline
              Aqua Letifer
              wrote on last edited by
              #6

              @Jolly said in The End of War Poetry:

              A surprising amount of soldiers can quote many of Kipling's poems from memory. When two or more soldiers are trading his poems or reciting them in unison, it's called kipling, or a soldier is said to kiple (kipple).

              I gotta say I'm not familiar. That's great. When you say, "a surprising amount of soldiers," do you mean today? Please tell me people still do this.

              Please love yourself.

              JollyJ 1 Reply Last reply
              • Aqua LetiferA Aqua Letifer

                Great article.

                https://quillette.com/2022/05/17/the-end-of-war-poetry/

                I picked up a book of WWI war poetry outside a bookshop in Australia. After hours, they'd have an Honor Box: basically, you slip two dollars into the coin slot for every book you took out of the box. The book of war poetry I picked up is an amazing collection.

                Robert Leckie of Helmet for My Pillow and The Pacific fame, was a newspaperman and knew this tradition. He contributed to it during his time overseas. [Here's the link ] to the poem that spawned the book title, (http://johnjudyc.blogspot.com/2010/05/memorial-day-is-set-aside-to-remember.html)but let's take a deeper dive.

                A helmet for my pillow,
                A poncho for my bed,
                My rifle rests across my chest-
                The stars swing overhead.

                Settin' the scene, establishing the metre. But about the metre. He's got an abcb quatrain, often with internal rhymes in the third line.

                Remind you of anything?

                "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea."

                Leckie's channeling Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the long, beautiful tradition of Romantic-era ballads. But he's more rigid with his stanzas than Coleridge is, and he's not as loose with the embellishments, making his less sing-songy and more formal.

                Leckie's a beast of a writer.

                The whisper of the kunai,
                The murmur of the sea,
                The sighing palm and night so calm
                Betray no enemy.

                Hear! river bank so silent
                You men who sleep around
                That foreign scream across the stream-
                Up! Fire at the sound!

                Look at this. Usually the lines are iambic: duh-DUM, duh-DUM etc. "You MEN who SLEEP aROUND."

                But he changed the opening foot here to a spondee: two stressed beats together, which is very unnatural to say. Makes you slow down, and phonetically it forces you to linger on "Hear!" because the transition is awkward. So you read "Hear!" followed by a short rest. And you hear nothing, because you're reading to yourself. But then he says, "river bank so silent," so he manipulated the phonetic structure of the line itself to get you to experience what he's experiencing. It's a trick with a point to it. Excellent.

                Sweeping over the sandspit
                That blocks the Tenaru
                With Banzai-boast a mushroomed host
                Vows to destroy our few.

                Into your holes and gunpits!
                Kill them with rifles and knives!
                Feed them with lead until they are dead-
                And widowed are their wives.

                Sons of the mothers who gave you
                Honor and gift of birth
                Strike with the knife till blood and life
                Run out upon the earth.

                Marines, keep faith with your glory
                Keep to your trembling hole.
                Intruder feel of Nippon steel
                Can't penetrate your soul.

                Closing, they charge all howling
                Their breasts all targets large.
                The gun must shake, the bullets make
                A slaughter of their charge.

                Red are the flashing tracers,
                Yellow the bursting shells.
                Hoarse is the cry of men who die
                Shrill are the woundeds' yells.

                God, how the night reels stricken!
                She shrieks with orange spark.
                The mortar's lash and cannon's crash
                Have crucified the dark.

                Falling, the faltering foemen
                Beneath our guns lie heaped.
                By greenish glare of rocket's flare
                We see the harvest reaped.

                Now has the first fierce onslaught
                Been broken and hammered back.
                Hammered and hit, from hole and pit-
                We rise up to attack!

                This is an important point: rhymed poetry is harder today than it was in the Romantic era. Then, you could get away with inverted constructions like:

                The harmless phantoms on their errands glide

                "Glide" is the end line here, but reading this, you immediately know it's poetry. Because nobody talks or writes like that today, it sounds old-timey. Were you or I to say this naturally it'd be "harmless phantoms glide on their errands."

                It sounds old-timey the other way because it is old-timey. So SOV (subject-object-verb) constructions aren't really available to us anymore unless you want to sound like a ponce.

                Even so, if you want your rhyming to sound more natural and have more potency, never rhyme a noun with a noun, or an adjective with an adjective. Rhyme different parts of speech together. But God help you if you try to use a rhyming dictionary for this, it's going to fail you.

                That's why "Hammered and hit, from hole and pit-" is a little more satisfying than it really ought to be. That and he's employing a little Anglo-Saxon hemistich action with "Hammered, Hit, Hole, PIT." Which, nice.

                Day bursts pale from a gun tube,
                The gibbering night has fled.
                By light of dawn the foe has drawn
                A line behind his dead.

                Our tanks clank in behind him,
                Our riflemen move out.
                Their hearts have met our bayonet-
                It's ended wit a shout.

                "Cease fire!" -the words go ringing,
                Over the heaps of the slain.
                The battle's won, the Rising Sun
                Lies riddled on the plain.

                St. Michael, angel of battle
                We praise you to God on high.
                The foe you gave was strong and brave
                And unafraid to die.

                Speak to the Lord for our comrades,
                Killed when the battle seemed lost.
                They went to meet a bright defeat-
                The hero's holocaust.

                False is the vaunt of the victor,
                Empty our living pride.
                For those who fell there is no hell-
                Not for the brave who died.

                Another verb-noun internal rhyme. Great for the last stanza.

                And by the way, what you do if you want to write like this is read a shitload of this stuff and deconstruct it so you understand it, but you don't sit down and say, "I'm going to make this line an SOV inversion and rhyme a noun and a verb together," that would be ridiculous. You've just got to be fluent in the tools available to you and try to say something.

                Again, Leckie was one hell of a writer. Not at all bad for a newspaperman.

                Catseye3C Offline
                Catseye3C Offline
                Catseye3
                wrote on last edited by
                #7

                @Aqua-Letifer "After hours, they'd have an Honor Box: basically, you slip two dollars into the coin slot for every book you took out of the box."

                Lovely idea!

                Thanks for this post, Aqua. 🙂

                Success is measured by your discipline and inner peace. – Mike Ditka

                1 Reply Last reply
                • Aqua LetiferA Aqua Letifer

                  @Jolly said in The End of War Poetry:

                  A surprising amount of soldiers can quote many of Kipling's poems from memory. When two or more soldiers are trading his poems or reciting them in unison, it's called kipling, or a soldier is said to kiple (kipple).

                  I gotta say I'm not familiar. That's great. When you say, "a surprising amount of soldiers," do you mean today? Please tell me people still do this.

                  JollyJ Offline
                  JollyJ Offline
                  Jolly
                  wrote on last edited by Jolly
                  #8

                  @Aqua-Letifer said in The End of War Poetry:

                  @Jolly said in The End of War Poetry:

                  A surprising amount of soldiers can quote many of Kipling's poems from memory. When two or more soldiers are trading his poems or reciting them in unison, it's called kipling, or a soldier is said to kiple (kipple).

                  I gotta say I'm not familiar. That's great. When you say, "a surprising amount of soldiers," do you mean today? Please tell me people still do this.

                  Today. Especially among officers. Tommy and The Sons of Martha are a couple of the favorites.

                  “Cry havoc and let slip the DOGE of war!”

                  Those who cheered as J-6 American prisoners were locked in solitary for 18 months without trial, now suddenly fight tooth and nail for foreign terrorists’ "due process". — Buck Sexton

                  Aqua LetiferA 1 Reply Last reply
                  • JollyJ Jolly

                    @Aqua-Letifer said in The End of War Poetry:

                    @Jolly said in The End of War Poetry:

                    A surprising amount of soldiers can quote many of Kipling's poems from memory. When two or more soldiers are trading his poems or reciting them in unison, it's called kipling, or a soldier is said to kiple (kipple).

                    I gotta say I'm not familiar. That's great. When you say, "a surprising amount of soldiers," do you mean today? Please tell me people still do this.

                    Today. Especially among officers. Tommy and The Sons of Martha are a couple of the favorites.

                    Aqua LetiferA Offline
                    Aqua LetiferA Offline
                    Aqua Letifer
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #9

                    @Jolly said in The End of War Poetry:

                    @Aqua-Letifer said in The End of War Poetry:

                    @Jolly said in The End of War Poetry:

                    A surprising amount of soldiers can quote many of Kipling's poems from memory. When two or more soldiers are trading his poems or reciting them in unison, it's called kipling, or a soldier is said to kiple (kipple).

                    I gotta say I'm not familiar. That's great. When you say, "a surprising amount of soldiers," do you mean today? Please tell me people still do this.

                    Today. Especially among officers. Tommy and The Sons of Martha are a couple of the favorites.

                    That's rad. I gotta look into this.

                    Please love yourself.

                    1 Reply Last reply
                    • LarryL Offline
                      LarryL Offline
                      Larry
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #10

                      I loved reading your post, Aqua.

                      Aqua LetiferA 1 Reply Last reply
                      • LarryL Larry

                        I loved reading your post, Aqua.

                        Aqua LetiferA Offline
                        Aqua LetiferA Offline
                        Aqua Letifer
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #11

                        @Larry said in The End of War Poetry:

                        I loved reading your post, Aqua.

                        Thanks, Larry. Anytime I'm told poetry's for pansies, I bring out my book of war poetry. 😁 I learned a hell of a lot more from those guys than any academic.

                        Please love yourself.

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