WITH rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
"Remember you must die..."
As banal as it is, I think that one lesson that everyone should take from an event like 9/11 is that life is short, and you never know when your's is going to end.
And, for the police and firemen: "Their shoulders held the sky suspended./They stood, and earth's foundations stay./What God abandoned, these defended/And saved the sum of things for pay."
An excerpt from that Housman poem is the most appropriate verse you could think of?
Y81's excerpt from "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" is a little better, though still not quite apposite.
How about Frederick Seidel, from his "War of the Worlds"?:
Or from his "December"?:
Fred, was the intent of your introductory question to predispose one to dislike your preferences? It worked on me.
Robert,
I'm crushed; the fact remains that they are more relevant to 9/11.
Y81's reference to "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" though could spark an interesting blog post about a different topic: the change in media attitudes toward war and patriotism from WWI to today.
Well Fred, if the only important criterion of relevance was plot-- the dramatic subject matter-- than you might be right. I believe what Megan (and most others) assume is that thematic and emotional relevance are equally important.
I do like the lines you quoted.
For me, I'll stick with "September 1, 1939". That should satisfy both.
It is a good tribute, Megan.
James
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields
-John McRae
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
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 disappointed shells 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 floundering 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
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.
-Wilfred Owen
I've come to think of these two as a matched set. Seeing one without the other is somehow incomplete.
Well done, Jonathan. Just as important, the Wilfrid Owen poem was dedicated to a pro-war propagandist of the day. Sadly, Owen died in battle a week before the armistice.
Freddie:
"The unmentionable odor of death offends the September night".
Good choice. That Auden poem got a lot of circulation after 9/11. Interestingly, Auden regretted writing the poem later. IMO, he was the best poet of the last century.
Charles Giacometti:
Owen actually died a month before the armistice, if memory serves. That poem is his most well-known, but IMO, not his best. He was a phenomenal poet. The last couple of lines always raised a question for me: certainly it's not "dulce" to die for one's country, but what about the "decorum" part? If Owen thought that part was a lie too, why did he volunteer and fight so zealously?
Hi Fred,
I always read it that Owen fought honorably and believed it was his duty, but that he resented people beating the drums for war, especially an outsider. Like McRae's poem, Owen's poem was reacting to a comrade dying, and his anger was perhaps the more dominant feeling at the moment.
The Wikipedia entry on Owen has his death as "a week before the war ended." But a month or a week is less important than the poignancy of his death, so either works for me.
Sad poems for a sad day.
Frederick Seidel's "December" may well be the worst poem ever written.
Charles,
Perhaps my memory didn't serve too well there. Looks like you were right.
NDM,
How can you use the phrase "worst poem ever written" in a sentence that doesn't contain "Maya Angelou"? Remember her inaugural poem for Clinton?