"Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?"
Yes! Do you!?
The character, Anne Shirley's, inspirited musing gives voice to my own - though minimal - experience with poetry.
With that said, it is with great felicity and flourish that I present to you a series of posts that will forthwith feature some of my favourite poems (I'm on an alliteration role!)!
They are just a smattering of verses; poems that I can read time and again without becoming immune to their profundity and the captivating beauty of their words - the way they dance on the end of my tongue, and create a mosaic of colour and emotion in my mind's eye.
The first poem I shall share with you deals with the agonies and horrors of the First World War, and is written by leading British war poet, Wilfred Owen, who was killed at the age of twenty-five on the Front, only a week before the Armistice. The majority of his work was published posthumously.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
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 tired, 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 flound’ring 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
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| Close up of a gas victim in a painting I saw at the Canadian War Museum (2013). |
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.*
* "It is sweet and right to die for your country." A Latin phrase from an Ode by Horace, often quoted during the War.
If you're interested in delving deeper into this gripping and haunting poem, feel free to peruse some of the sites I've included here below...
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