WWI POETRYBy: Jeemin Han, Sangwoo Song, Staci Shon

Poetry Characteristics

Before WWI: Based on imaginations Made to entertain readers Exotic endings

Poetry Characteristics

Immediate experiences in poetry (what they have render and whitnessed)

Poets inherit poetic voices Soldiers wrote it for enjoyment and re-

veal their emotions had no tradition to draw upon (as back-

ground sources) poorly equipped (short with resources

during war)

Giuseppe Ungaretti

Greatest Italian poet in 20th century served an infantryman with the 3rd Army

from 1915-1918 he was transferred to the Western Front

where Italian forces fought with distinc-tion

pure style was achieved by condensation to essentials and is in the tradition of the French Symbolists

Vigil by. Giuseppe Ungaretti

A whole night long

crouched close

to one of our men

butchered

with his clenched

mouth

grinning at the full moon

with the congestion

of his hands

thrust right

into my silence

I've written

letters filled with love

 

I have never been

so

coupled to life

Georg Traki

Trakl was sent as a medical official Trakl suffered frequent depression by the

horror he tried to shoot himself from the strain After hospitalized and placed under close

observation Trakl lapsed into deeper depression Trakl had committed suicide from an

overdose of cocaine.

Klage

Dreamless sleep - the dusky Eaglesnightlong rush about my head,man's golden image drowned

in timeless icy tides. On jagged reefshis purpling body. Dark

echoes sound above the seas. 

Stormy sadness' sister, seeour lonely skiff sunk down

by starry skies:the silent face of night.

Isaac Rosenberg

young poet filled with hopes to make his living as a portrait artist and had moved to South Africa

He returned to England in 1915, enlisted in 1916 and was killed at the front on April 3, 1918.

Dead Man's Dump

The plunging limbers over the shattered track

Racketed with their rusty freight,

Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,

And the rusty stakes like sceptres old

To stay the flood of brutish men

Upon our brothers dear.

 

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead

But pained them not, though their bones crunched,

Their shut mouths made no moan.

They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,

Man born of man, and born of woman,

And shells go crying over them

From night till night and now.

 

Earth has waited for them,

All the time of their growth

Fretting for their decay:

Now she has them at last!

In the strength of their strength

Suspended--stopped and held.

Dead Man's DumpWhat fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?

Earth! have they gone into you!

Somewhere they must have gone,

And flung on your hard back

Is their soul's sack

Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.

Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

 

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,

Or stood aside for the half used life to pass

Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,

When the swift iron burning bee

Drained the wild honey of their youth.

 

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,

Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,

Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,

Immortal seeming ever?

Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,

A fear may choke in our veins

And the startled blood may stop. 

Dead Man's DumpThe air is loud with death,

The dark air spurts with fire,

The explosions ceaseless are.

Timelessly now, some minutes past,

Those dead strode time with vigorous life,

Till the shrapnel called `An end!'

But not to all. In bleeding pangs

Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,

Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

 

Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel

Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,

The impetuous storm of savage love.

Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,

What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul

With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,

Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers loosed? 

Dead Man's Dump

A man's brains splattered on

A stretcher-bearer's face;

His shook shoulders slipped their load,

But when they bent to look again

The drowning soul was sunk too deep

For human tenderness.

 

They left this dead with the older dead,

Stretched at the cross roads.

 

Burnt black by strange decay

Their sinister faces lie,

The lid over each eye,

The grass and coloured clay

More motion have than they,

Joined to the great sunk silences.

 

Dead Man's Dump

Here is one not long dead;

His dark hearing caught our far wheels,

And the choked soul stretched weak hands

To reach the living word the far wheels said,

The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,

Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels

Swift for the end to break

Or the wheels to break,

Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

 

Will they come? Will they ever come?

Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,

The quivering-bellied mules,

And the rushing wheels all mixed

With his tortured upturned sight.

So we crashed round the bend,

We heard his weak scream,

We heard his very last sound,

And our wheels grazed his dead face.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Well-known french poet "My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity" “The Show” published on January 16th,

1917 Before the war, known for optimistic and

cheerful personality After war, became gloomy and dark, his

poem turned depressing and grotesque Can be seen in “The Show”

The Show

My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,As unremembering how I rose or why,And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.

Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,There moved thin caterpillars, slowly un-coiled.It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugsOf ditches, where they writhed and shriv-elled, killed.

By them had slimy paths been trailed and scrapedRound myriad warts that might be little hills.

From gloom's last dregs these long-strung creatures crept,And vanished out of dawn down hid-den holes.

(And smell came up from those foul openingsAs out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening.)

On dithering feet upga thered, more and more,Brown strings towards strings of gray, with bristling spines,All migrants from green fields, intent on mire.

Those that were gray, of more abundant spawns,Ramped on the rest and ate them and were eaten.

I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten,I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flat-ten.

Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean,I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather.

And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hidIts bruises in the earth, but crawled no fur-ther,Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.

Unkown German poet

Thought to be written by a sapper (engi-neer combat soldier)

Nationalistic feeling Hatred towards France Emphasize how strong German is

Arogonne Forest at Midnight

Argonne Forest, at midnight, A sapper atands on guard. A star shines high up in the sky, bringing greetings from a distant homeland. And with a spade in his hand, He waits forward in the sap-trench. He thinks with longing on his love, Wondering if he will ever see her again.

The artillery roars like thunder, While we wait in front of the infantry, With shells crashing all around. The Frenchies want to take our position.

Should the enemy threaten us even more, We Germans fear him no more. And should he be so strong, He will not take our position.

The storm breaks! The mortar crashes! The sapper begins his advance. Forward to the enemy trenches, There he pulls the pin on a grenade.

The infantry stand in wait, Until the hand grenade explodes. Then forward with the assault against the enemy,

And with a shout, break into their position.

Argonne Forest, Argonne Forest, Soon thou willt be a quiet cemetary. In thy cool earth rests much gallant soldiers' blood.

Nikolay Stepanovich Gumi-lyov Influential Russian poet two St. George Crosses Married to Anna Akhamatova

A noble poet as well Contributed to Russian economic durin WWI The Quiver (1916). Isolation, and grotesque

The Lost Tram

I walked an unfamiliar street

And suddenly heard a raven's cry,

And the sound of a lute, and distant thunder,-

In front of me a tram was flying.

How I jumped onto its foot board,

Was a mystery to me,

Even in daylight it left behind

A fiery trail in the air.

It rushed like a dark, winged storm,

And was lost in the abyss of time...

Tram-driver, stop,

Stop the tram now.

Too late. We had already turned the corner,

We tore through a forest of palms,

Over the Neva, the Nile, the Seine

We thundered across three bridges.

 

And slipping by the window frame,

A poor old man threw us an inquisitive glance-

The very same old man, of course,

Who had died in Beirut a year ago.

 

Where am I? So languid and troubled

The beat of my heart responds:

"Do you see the station where you can buy

A ticket to the India of the soul?”

A sign...Blood-filled letters

Announce: "Zelennaya,"-I know that here

Instead of cabbages and rutabagas

The heads of the dead are for sale.

 

In a red shirt, with a face like an udder,

The executioner cuts my head off, too,

It lies together with the others

Here, in a slippery box, at the very bottom.

 

And in a side street a board fence,

A house three windows wide, a gray lawn...

Tram-driver, stop,

Stop the tram now.

Mashenka, you lived here and sang,

You wove me, your betrothed, a carpet,

Where are your voice and body now,

Is it possible that you are dead?

 

How you groaned in your front chamber,

While I, in a powdered wig,

Went to introduce myself to the Empress

Never to see you again.

 

Now I understand: our freedom

Is only an indirect light from those times,

People and shadows stand at the entrance

To a zoological park of planets.

 

And a sudden, familiar, sweet wind blows,

A horseman's hand in an iron glove

And two hooves of his horse

Fly at me over the bridge.

Come Over (WW1 song)

Over thereOver there

Send the world Send the world

Over there

Come Over

That the yanksare comingThe yanksare comingThe drumsDrumming Everywhere

Come Over

So prepareSay a prayer

Send the wordSend the word

To beware

Come Over

We’ll be overWe’re coming over

And we won’t come backTill it’s overOver there

So prepare say a prayerSend the wordSend the word

To beware

Come Over

We’ll be over wereComing over

And we won’t comebackTill it’s over,Over there