Insensibility -- Wilfred Owen

(Poem #232) Insensibility I Happy are men who yet before they are killed Can let their veins run cold. Whom no compassion fleers Or makes their feet Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers. The front line withers, But they are troops who fade, not flowers For poets' tearful fooling: Men, gaps for filling Losses who might have fought Longer; but no one bothers. II And some cease feeling Even themselves or for themselves. Dullness best solves The tease and doubt of shelling, And Chance's strange arithmetic Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling. They keep no check on Armies' decimation. III Happy are these who lose imagination: They have enough to carry with ammunition. Their spirit drags no pack. Their old wounds save with cold can not more ache. Having seen all things red, Their eyes are rid Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever. And terror's first constriction over, Their hearts remain small drawn. Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle Now long since ironed, Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned. IV Happy the soldier home, with not a notion How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack, And many sighs are drained. Happy the lad whose mind was never trained: His days are worth forgetting more than not. He sings along the march Which we march taciturn, because of dusk, The long, forlorn, relentless trend From larger day to huger night. V We wise, who with a thought besmirch Blood over all our soul, How should we see our task But through his blunt and lashless eyes? Alive, he is not vital overmuch; Dying, not mortal overmuch; Nor sad, nor proud, Nor curious at all. He cannot tell Old men's placidity from his. VI But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns, That they should be as stones. Wretched are they, and mean With paucity that never was simplicity. By choice they made themselves immune To pity and whatever mourns in man Before the last sea and the hapless stars; Whatever mourns when many leave these shores; Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity of tears. -- Wilfred Owen

[Commentary]

The Longman Book of Poetry, 1900-1975, has this to say about today's poem:

"This is Owen's greatest poem and one of the great poems of the cntury. The
argument is complex and ambivalent. It seems to distinguish between the
necessary insensitivity of men who have to survive in conditions so appalling
that they might go mad, and the unawakened insensibility of people who have
never been confronted with the hard facts of what war is really like. Owen
recognises and gives full value to the toughness and self-control of the soldier
who has lived through the horror and found some means of withstanding its full
impact on the senses. At the same time he sees the pity of this. Nevertheless,
he knows that he as a naturally over-sensitive man can only do his job properly
in the war if he too can get a grip on himself. To be able to feel compassion,
and yet not be overcome by it, seemed to Owen the great virtue in the war and by
implication the great virtue in human affairs. Like Keats, who wanted to be a
surgeon, Owen honoured and admired the infantry officer who had the insight to
feel and at the same time the will-power to control his feelings in the interest
of his men...

... part of the poem's power comes from its amazing simplicity and abstraction.
We seem to be reading not about the problems of English soldiers on the Western
Front in 1917 but about the problems of the damned in hell."

    -- George MacBeth

[Links]

Siegfried Sassoon's introduction to Owen's Poems can be found at
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/7086/owenintro.htm

There's a brief bio and some analysis of Owen's poetry as a whole at poem #132

Requiem (excerpt) -- Anna Akhmatova

Guest poem sent in by Vikram Doctor

(Poem #231) Requiem (excerpt) In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody 'identified' me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): "Can you describe this?" And I said: "Yes, I can." And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face. 1 April, 1957, Leningrad Epilogue II Again the hands of the clock are nearing The unforgettable hour. I see, hear, touch All of you: the cripple they had to support Painfully to the end of the line; the moribund; And the girl who would shake her beautiful head and Say: "I come here as if it were home." I should like to call you all by name, But they have lost the lists.... I have woven for them a great shroud Out of the poor words I overheard them speak. I remember them always and everywhere, And if they shut my tormented mouth, Through which a hundred million of my people cry, Let them remember me also.... And if in this country they should want To build me a monument I consent to that honour, But only on condition that they Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born: My last links there were broken long ago, Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens, Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me, But here, where I stood for three hundred hours And where they never, never opened the doors for me Lest in blessed death I should forget The grinding scream of the Black Marias, The hideous clanging gate, the old Woman wailing like a wounded beast. And may the melting snow drop like tears From my motionless bronze eyelids, And the prison pigeons coo above me And the ships sail slowly down the Neva -- Anna Akhmatova

This is an unbearably moving moving poem. It comes at the end of Akhmatova's
great Requiem sequence, which she wrote during the oppression of rhe Stalin
years. During those years she was harassed a great deal, and her son was
taken away by the police. It was for him that she stood in the lines outside
the prison gates. But any comments are irrelevant with such a poem.

Don't have exact biographical details about Akhmatova with me at the moment.
Is there anything on the Net?

[Yes - from [broken link] http://www.poets.org/LIT/poet/aakhmfst.htm

  Anna Akhmatova

  Anna Akhmatova, who changed her name from Anna Gorenko at the
  age of seventeen, was born into a noble family in Odessa, Ukraine, in
  1889. She attended law school in Kiev and married Nikolai Gumilev, a
  poet and critic, in 1910. Her second book, Rosary, published in 1914,
  was acclaimed and established her reputation. With her husband, she
  became a leader of Acmeism, a movement which praised the virtues of
  lucid, carefully-crafted verse and reacted against the vagueness of
  the symbolist style which dominated the Russian literary scene of the
  period.

  Nikolai Gumilev was executed in 1921 by the Bolsheviks, and, though
  Akhmatova and he were divorced, she was still associated with him. As a
  result, after her book Anno Domini was published in 1922, she had great
  difficulty in finding publishers for her work, and at one point went
  seventeen years without a publisher. Changes in the political climate
  finally allowed her acceptance into the Writer's Union, but following the
  Second World War, she was thrown out of the Union and her son was
  arrested. She began writing and publishing again in 1958, and eventually
  her membership to the Union was reinstated.

  Though Akhmatova was frequently confronted with official goverment
  opposition to her work during her lifetime, she was deeply loved and
  lauded by the Russian people, in part because she did not abandon her
  country during difficult political times. Her most accomplished works,
  Requiem (which was not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987) and
  Poem Without a Hero, are reactions to the horror of the Stalinist Terror,
  during which time she endured artistic repression as well as tremendous
  personal loss. She was awarded an honorary degree from Oxford University
  in 1965 and died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of life, in 1966.

The site also has a picture of her. -- m.]

pity the poor spiders -- Don Marquis

We've not had one of these in a while...

(Poem #230) pity the poor spiders i have just been reading an advertisement of a certain roach exterminator the human race little knows all the sadness it causes in the insect world i remember some weeks ago meeting a middle aged spider she was weeping what is the trouble i asked her it is these cursed fly swatters she replied they kill of all the flies and my family and i are starving to death it struck me as so pathetic that i made a little song about it as follows to wit twas an elderly mother spider grown gaunt and fierce and gray with her little ones crouched beside her who wept as she sang this lay curses on these here swatters what kills off all the flies for me and my little daughters unless we eats we dies swattin and swattin and swattin tis little else you hear and we ll soon be dead and forgotten with the cost of living so dear my husband he up and left me lured off by a centipede and he says as he bereft me tis wrong but i ll get a feed and me a working and working scouring the streets for food faithful and never shirking doing the best i could curses on these here swatters what kills off all the flies me and my poor little daughters unless we eats we dies only a withered spider feeble and worn and old and this is what you do when you swat you swatters cruel and cold i will admit that some of the insects do not lead noble lives but is every man s hand to be against them yours for less justice and more charity archy -- Don Marquis

  with a charming accompanying illustration at
  [broken link] http://www.sfo.com/~batt/archy/poem4.html

Marquis is a poet of whom I never tire - his Archy and Mehitabel poems, in
particular, are some of the most delightful pieces of poetry I have
encountered. As usual, I recommend going through the previous Archy poems in
the archive first, or at least the first one, for context.

Today's poem adds an extra twist - Archy is moved to break into song, with
results that are nothing short of hilarious. I laughed out loud several
times at the sheer audacity of the verse, and the deadly accuracy with which
he pinpoints the tone of voice.

The other striking thing about the poem is how smoothly and naturally
Marquis has introduced a second 'voice' for Archy; we, the readers, have no
problem believing that the (fictional) author of the song and the monologues
are one and the same, and that it is Archy writing in the voice of the
spider rather than Marquis doing so. And Marquis not only carries it off, he
does so with consummate ease.

m.

Links:

Go the the archive at <[broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstre;s> and sort on
Poet name; there have been several of Marquis' poems run in the past.

In particular, see poem #36 for background info and context.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow -- William Shakespeare

(Poem #229) To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. -- William Shakespeare

From Macbeth, Act V, Scene v.

Passages like this have led many critics to conclude that Shakespeare was a
profound pessimist. I tend to disagree; why is it that these critics never cite
his more lyrical passages as evidence of a gay and cheerful optimism? Nay; I
think that the truth of the matter is this: Shakespeare's genius was such that
he could plumb the depths and soar the heights of human character with equal
ease; his plays are the most exquisite craftsmanship imaginable.

(Needless to say,  I do not subscribe to the view that Shakespeare's works
necessarily mirrored events in his own life, no matter what the perpetrators of
a recent Oscar-winning movie would have you believe :-)).

Notice the many phrases from the above short speech which have passed into
common speech - 'all our yesterdays', 'the way to dusty death', the 'brief
candle' of life, a 'tale told by an idiot', 'full of sound and fury'... as I've
mentioned many times before, Shakespeare was the greatest of them all when it
came to enriching the language (for more on this theme, read my comments to
Faust's great speech 'Was this the face that launched a thousand ships',
Minstrels poem #75, at poem #75 )

[Context]

These words are spoken by Macbeth on hearing of the death of Lady Macbeth. For
all her flaws, he loved her deeply, and his immediate response is one of abject
despair - once the most honoured of Duncan's generals, he is now a man despised
and reviled, under siege in a rotting castle, his servants craven and fearful,
his once-proud wife driven to madness and death by her own guilt. No wonder
Macbeth sounds so sick of it all; he says a few lines later:
    "I [be]gin to be aweary of the sun
    And wish the estate o' the world were now undone."
It's a measure of the man's courage, though, that he doesn't stop there; he
continues:
    "Ring the alarum-bell! Blow, wind! come, wrack!
    At least we'll die with harness on our back."
Defiant till the end, and proud in defeat.

[Previous Poems]

It's no surprise that we've run quite a bit of Shakespeare in the past; it's
only to be expected of the greatest poet the English language has ever known
[1]. We've covered bits of The Tempest (Poem #16 and Poem #126), Julius Caesar
(Poem #48), King Lear (Poem #200) and of course several sonnets (Poem #44,
Poem #71 and Poem #219). You can read all these (and much more) at the
Minstrels website: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/

thomas.

[1] Yes, I _like_ Shakespeare. However did you guess? :-)

The Rolling English Road -- G K Chesterton

And who better to follow Belloc than Chesterton... (thanks to Vikram Doctor
for the suggestion)

(Poem #228) The Rolling English Road Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire, And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire; A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head. I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire, And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire; But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made, Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands, The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands. His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun? The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which, But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch. God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier. My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage, Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age, But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth, And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death; For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green. -- G K Chesterton

Another poet who has been conspicuous by his absence. Chesterton is slightly
better known for his prose, including many highly acclaimed works of
criticism, and the magnificent Father Brown stories, which rank among the
all time classics of detective fiction. However, his poetry is well worthy
of notice, being almost uniformly excellent (no easy feat, even for the
better poets), and almost always enjoyable. Like most of my favourite poets,
Chesterton displays a rare mastery of versification - the rhythms of speech
blending smoothly and easily into the rhythms of the poem, with not a
syllable out of place.

As for today's poem, it's probably the best known of his poems, and my
favourite for several reasons. Firstly, as I have mentioned before, I'm
predisposed to like poems about roads, and this is an excellent example,
with the easy flowing rhythm and the alliteration reinforce the image of the
rolling, rambling road. The language is an intriguing blend of the informal
- almost colloquial - and the high poetic. The mood likewise ranges from
humorous[1] to thoughtful, and in the end, serious. But it is not necessary
to analyse the poem in order to enjoy it - simply read it, not quite aloud,
but shaping your lips over the syllables, and let the verses wash over you
as you follow, with Chesterton, the rolling English road.

[1] see http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/0529.htm

Notes:

 baggonet: obs. or vulgar form of bayonet

 Kensal Green: A famous English cemetery - see
 <http://www.xs4all.nl/~androom/dead/kensal.htm>

 Interestingly, there's a pub called Paradise, or in full Paradise, by way
 of Kensal Green (that being the nearest Tube stop). Almost certainly
 post-facto, but it made me laugh.

Biography:

  Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith)

   b. May 29, 1874, London
   d. June 14, 1936, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, Eng. English critic
   and author of verse, essays, novels, and short stories, known also for
   his exuberant personality and rotund figure.

   Chesterton was educated at St. Paul's School and later studied art at
   the Slade School and literature at University College, London. His
   writings to 1910 were of three kinds. First, his social criticism,
   largely in his voluminous journalism, was gathered in The Defendant
   (1901), Twelve Types (1902), and Heretics (1905). In it he expressed
   strongly pro-Boer views in the South African War. Politically, he began
   as a Liberal but after a brief radical period became, with his Christian
   and medievalist friend Hilaire Belloc, a Distributist, favouring the
   distribution of land. This phase of his thinking is exemplified by What's
   Wrong with the World (1910).

   His second preoccupation was literary criticism. Robert Browning
   (1903) was followed by Charles Dickens (1906) and Appreciations and
   Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911), prefaces to the
   individual novels, which are among his finest contributions to
   criticism. His George Bernard Shaw (1909) and The Victorian Age in
   Literature (1913) together with William Blake (1910) and the later
   monographs William Cobbett (1925) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1927)
   have a spontaneity that places them above the works of many academic
   critics.

   Chesterton's third major concern was theology and religious argument.
   He was converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1922.
   Although he had written on Christianity earlier, as in his book
   Orthodoxy (1909), his conversion added edge to his controversial
   writing, notably The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), his
   writings in G.K.'s Weekly, and Avowals and Denials (1934). Other works
   arising from his conversion were St. Francis of Assisi (1923), the essay
   in historical theology The Everlasting Man (1925), and St. Thomas Aquinas
   (1933).

   In his verse Chesterton was a master of ballad forms, as shown in the
   stirring "Lepanto" (1911). When it was not uproariously comic, his
   verse was frankly partisan and didactic. His essays developed his
   shrewd, paradoxical irreverence to its ultimate point of real
   seriousness. He is seen at his happiest in such essays as "On Running
   After One's Hat" (1908) and "A Defence of Nonsense" (1901), in which
   he says that nonsense and faith are "the two supreme symbolic
   assertions of truth" and "to draw out the soul of things with a
   syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook."

   Many readers value Chesterton's fiction most highly. The Napoleon of
   Notting Hill (1904), a romance of civil war in suburban London, was
   followed by the loosely knit collection of short stories, The Club of
   Queer Trades (1905), and the popular allegorical novel The Man Who Was
   Thursday (1908). But the most successful association of fiction with
   social judgment is in Chesterton's series on the priest-sleuth Father
   Brown: The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), followed by The Wisdom .
   . . (1914), The Incredulity . . . (1926), The Secret . . . (1927), and
   The Scandal of Father Brown (1935). Chesterton's friendships were with
   men as diverse as H.G. Wells, Shaw, Belloc, and Max Beerbohm. His
   Autobiography was published in 1936.

                -- EB