The End of War Poetry
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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.
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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!”
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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!”
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion.
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@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.
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@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.
