This blog is intended to help A-level students to understand and appreciate World War One poetry. To read more about the background of the blog, please read my Welcome to readers.
I lead the A-level English Literature course at Southfields Community College.
In a previous life I gained an MA in literary studies at Royal Holloway, University of London; incredibly, they even let me study for a doctorate on H.G. Wells there. I’m not an academic expert in First World War literature, but I hope that I can pass on what I do know– and, when I’m in the dark, I’ll point you in the direction to those who know more.
Do you have a question that I can help with? Join in by commenting on any post or email me.
November 27, 2010 at 15:53
hi sir,
i was wondering whether you could maybe set up a poetry competition on this blog…just for us students and there must not be a price but it would be rally fun to see what the young students come up with. if you think its not a good idea then thats all right!
December 9, 2010 at 14:26
It’s a neat idea, Stacy- I’ll certainly consider it. Have another look in the new year.
Your enthusiasm is great!
G
December 8, 2010 at 20:25
likingg the snowwww thingg sir
December 9, 2010 at 14:28
Ha ha. Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Fits with the season…!
February 6, 2011 at 16:19
Hello sir,
I have got a few questions and would be delighted if you could help me.
1. ‘When you see millions of mouthless dead’ by Charles Sorley: in the second line it says “Across your dreams in pale battalions go,” what does pale mean here? Also, why is this poem a sonnet, what’s Sorley expressing love for?
2. What is anaphora? You talked about this technique in “All the hills and vales along” by Charles Sorley but I didn’t understand.
Thanks (the notes you provide are really GOOD).
February 7, 2011 at 11:31
Hi Maria. Thanks for being so kind! I hope I can help you.
1. ‘Pale’ is simply a word used to describe the ghosts of the dead. They’re pale because all the colour of life and blood has gone out of them. Why is ‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead’ a sonnet? A good question. I guess it’s poetic covention to write a sonnet about love, but a sonnet doesn’t have to be explicitly about love (though remember that this is a poem about lost loved ones).
2. Anaphora is simply the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of a line. You find it in speeches a lot. Think of Churchill’s famous Second World War address: “We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and on the streets…”. Interestingly, when you get the same kind of repetition at the end of lines, it is known as antistrophe.
February 7, 2011 at 11:48
Thank’s sir you did help though I am not quite sure why you ignored the second question
February 7, 2011 at 21:15
I didn’t realise that I had! What question?
February 8, 2011 at 20:01
wow, thanks allot!!
February 13, 2011 at 12:14
hello sir,
have you uploaded the death of a soldier?
I think you missed it by accident!!
February 14, 2011 at 10:59
Give me time, Maria!
I’ve got to write these notes, you know!
March 4, 2011 at 18:29
wow, this is a great blog a bit neeky but really good….it’s really helpful, thanks and keep it up:):)
March 5, 2011 at 16:45
Neeky is good, Kate. Neeky is fun!
I’m guessing, given the lingo, you are a South Landanah. You are most welcome here.
March 10, 2011 at 20:25
What was Benjamin Peret trying to relay in his poem The Staircase of a Hundred Steps?
March 13, 2011 at 20:33
I couldn’t tell you John; I haven’t read it. Though it sounds like a rather large staircase.
May 5, 2011 at 22:17
Hi sir,
amazing website you got here 8)
i was just wondering do you have anything on Futility by Owen, i couldnt seem to find anything on this on the website
thankyou
May 7, 2011 at 22:49
Ironically, not yet Kam.
I’m trying to make my way through the Jon Stallworthy anthology poem by poem– and ‘Futility’ is still around 10 poems away! Sorry.
Glad you find the website useful, though.
May 13, 2011 at 15:47
sir, are you going to upload “on receiving news from the war” ?
May 14, 2011 at 23:57
Have a look at my May 9th posting Kate!
Sorry to all who want notes for poems after Rosenberg in the anthology before the 23rd: it looks like I’m not going to get that far! It’s an ongoing project, and these things take some time to produce. Good luck to all of you in the upcoming exams.
October 14, 2011 at 11:51
Hello Mr Griffiths-Thanks for making this blog available-my students love it.
Right now I’m using it in a lesson to show the value of disagreeing- what my students are getting towards though not in these words is that in your view ‘when you see million..’ shows a lack of pity/ bleak world of identity lost etc.
Briefly what we are exploring is the possibility that though notionally the poem appears to say that the emotional effect of the imagery- whether his assumption that the reader will dream about them, the emotive effect of mouthless, etc, the inferred conventional response of the reader, the gashed head, not only suggests pity, it creates it in the reader- look at the responses of some of the students.
So there’s a disjunction of apparent intention and actual effect-and I would say the effect wins-perhaps explained by the conflicting emotions necessitated by coming to terms with surviving the experience.
It’s just another way of looking!
SJT
October 19, 2011 at 21:14
Thanks, Mr. Tanner. I’m glad your students find it useful– and in many ways I hope that it inspires more arguments about poetic meaning than agreement!
I’m not ashamed to say that mine is necessarily a limited understanding of many of these poems, and my notes are sometimes simplistic or perhaps a little literal. It sounds like your class are approaching the poems in an interesting and subtle manner.
And, to be honest, I think I am inclined to agree with your students; Sorley’s chilly tone in the poem seems to me to refuse easy sentimentality, but is certainly not without heart; like a satirist, I think he depends on the reader’s ability to understand the irony of statements like “It is easy to be dead”. It seems to me to be quite a moral poem in that sense.
November 11, 2011 at 12:58
Sir, your analysis of ‘Epitaph For an Army of Mercenaries’ is missing a point: it was written in retaliation of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s description of the BEF as “a contempible army of mercencaries”. While the poem highlights the fatal price that was paid for defending the British realm, the intention was clearly to poke fun at the idea that anyone would fight for their country in the manner that the BEF did for pay.
November 15, 2011 at 09:54
Hello Mr. Griffiths: concerning Sospan Fach, surely these are not nonsense rhymes. I was struck by the beautiful evocation of the strangely fickle passing of time; how you wish it would pass quick one moment and the next you find that the years have flown by, and how in repeated choruses time goes back and forth. Anyway, thanks for the Robert Graves poem, which I think uses that flexible quality of time. All the best, Ted Clarke.
February 3, 2012 at 14:28
Hi Ted: you’re right, there is a kind of narrative that runs through the first two verses of ‘Sospan Fach’, but, personally, I can’t help but feel making sense out of it isn’t really the point. Then again, as a Llanelli man, its *meaning* perhaps is a little occluded for me… for me, its a song that *means* community!
January 19, 2012 at 16:51
Hello, can you help with, ‘A Memory’ by Margaret Sackville please? would very much appreciate it. Thankyou in advance.
January 22, 2012 at 16:38
I’m afraid, Buharj, I haven’t read ‘Memory’. Sorry.
February 3, 2012 at 10:28
Your website has helped me so much throught the course! I’ve read the previous posts, but is there any way you’d be able to put up the E.E Cummings analysis?
February 3, 2012 at 14:11
I’m so glad the website has helped you, Chloe. I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you though! I’m working through the anthology poem by poem– though this has stalled a bit recently. I’ve got a disabled daughter and a six month old, so I haven’t been able to find much time for poetry analysis! You should find some more poetry notes coming online in the next fortnight, though.
All the best!
February 22, 2012 at 19:12
Hey, I’m wondering if you’re going to upload an analysis on T.S Eliot’s ‘Triumphal March’? I’m very interested in this one, it’s one of my personal favourites, and I have my own analysis. I’m just looking for another opinion to compare it with
February 28, 2012 at 21:54
Not before I get through the rest of the anthology, but ultimately I’ll be interested. I love a lot of Eliot’s poetry. ‘Prufrock’ is one of the greatest poems of the Twentieth century, I think. The natural journey for a student of English literature who has read World War I literature at A-level is to move on to study ‘The Wasteland’ at university…!
February 29, 2012 at 23:08
Hi,
I cannot explain enough how much your website has helped me!
I am so so so so grateful!
Thanks!
March 15, 2012 at 22:30
Hiya;
I was wondering if you could shed any light on the line: “Charm, smiling at the good mouth” in the poem ‘These fought in any case’ by Ezra Pound. I would really appreciate it, as my AS teacher doesn’t have a clue as to what it means!
Thanks in anticipation!
April 7, 2012 at 23:50
Hi Rachel– sorry I wasn’t able to reply promptly!
I’ll read the extract from ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ in detail sometime in the future, but your question has intrigued me since I received it. Frankly, I’m not surprised that your AS teacher is flummoxed by the lines– they’re certainly difficult! I’ve put together a kind of reading, however, which I really would welcome being shot down in flames by someone more learned than I am (not difficult).
So the passage comes here, between the lines:
“There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.”
What’s striking about these lines concerning charm is that they seem only slightly connected to what comes before and after– they present a kind of odd, fragmentary image that seems to disrupt or interrupt the other lines that make a heavy judgement on European civilisation. ‘Charm’ seems a peculiar thing to mourn amidst the images of death and decay that hem it in– as if the poet, present at the apocalypse, chose to bemoan a lack of good cocktail party conversation.
What makes these lines difficult for the contemporary reader is that ‘charm’ means, in its most familiar form, “pleasing, delightful, attractive”. To bemoan the loss of such charm might seem superficial, though of course the loss of charm is no such thing: isn’t life a joy precisely for the charm we find within it? The people, the things that please and delight us? Yet given the vehemence and anger in the adjacent lines, this seems a poor objection. Pound, however, lost many friends in the war: to miss the charm of friends seems to me the most natural thing in the world.
Yet I think charm has another meaning that is important here, of ‘charm’ meaning a magical object or spell (it’s this ‘charm’, incidentally, that gives us our modern meaning). If we read the lines as saying something about enchantment and disenchantment the lines perhaps make more sense. These are, after all, lines that express deep disenchantment with European civilisation. A continent and an entire generation were laid waste by this civilisation’s inventions, and the lines seem to me to express the doubt that any of it was worth ‘saving’. Perhaps the image here suggests that the enchanting spell cast by this previous world has been broken: I think of Charm personified here as a woman, her face half buried in the earth, her “good mouth” broken and battered like the statues and books. It seems to me to be something Pound feels as a terrible loss nonetheless– the smile and the quick eyes gone forever. In a world with enchantment and magic gone, you are left with a horribly disenchanted material world– a truly unpleasant place in which to live (Eliot would call it a ‘Wasteland’).
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Take them or leave them! Thanks for asking such a thoughtful question.
April 6, 2012 at 17:43
Hi sir.
I love this blog ! It helped me a lot with my AS English literature course !
I have a question if you could help me with analysis of ‘Magpies in Picardy’ by T.P. Cameron Wilson. I have some rough notes on this poem, but I don’t really understand it. I understand that the birds that are in this poem represent different types of people… [and] I know this poem presents a magpie who is a voice of knowledge, who observes the war and shares with us his ideas. I found a few literary devices, made connections to war, but I don’t understand the idea of ‘folklore superstition- idealistic magpies’. I would be glad to see what you might tell me about this poem.
Thank you
May 4, 2012 at 14:06
I’m glad the site is helping you with your revision- but I’m afraid, Polipek, that I haven’t read this poem.
All the best next Monday.
April 11, 2012 at 14:26
This is really superb, I am studying edward thomas at the moment. I know it is hard to analyse a poem, but could you please outline ‘Aspens’ by Edward Thomas? I know it isnt strictly a war poem. However my teacher has not really taught this well to me and it would be incredibly helpful if you could. If not that is fine. The notes on ‘Rain’ are awesome!!!
Max Brown
May 4, 2012 at 14:07
I’m afraid I don’t know this poem, Max. Glad the notes for ‘Rain’ were useful!
April 16, 2012 at 15:22
Thanks for the thoughts on Sorely and Brooke’s poems – very helpful for my current essay!
Keep it up, and whenever I come across other poems, I’ll look them up here and see if you’ve written anything about them!
April 22, 2012 at 07:22
Hello sir,
Could you give me a list of all the poems that we need to know for the exam?
I’m concerned that we haven’t been taught all of them….:S
May 4, 2012 at 14:21
A good question, Jonathan. My thoughts are that your teacher has probably chosen to teach only the key poems in the Stallworthy anthology– those which AQA may chose to base questions on in 1b.
Have a look at the front page for the full story. Thanks for bringing up the issue!
April 24, 2012 at 19:46
Hi sir, is there any chance of wilfred owen notes coming up soon?
May 4, 2012 at 14:15
I really don’t know, Shannon. Owen’s poems in the Stallworthy anthology are next after Rosenberg’s, but I think it’s unlikely I’ll tackle any before the AS exam on the 16th.
May 16, 2012 at 18:47
It’s interesting how I saw the AQA correction that any poem can be pulled out two days before the exam, then they go ahead and pull out a question about Kipling’s Epitaphs! I mean, wow. Anyway, the other question was good, so I attempted that instead.
June 18, 2012 at 20:43
Hey,
absolutely love this blog, its saved me so much with revision! was just wondering if you happened to have any notes on any more of the ‘here to eternity’ anthology?
Thanks for all your help!
December 11, 2012 at 16:59
How come you haven’t done ‘Futility’ I thought you would have, considering the title of your blog?……
xx
thanks
February 24, 2013 at 15:45
Dear Mr Griffiths,
Your notes on the Edward Thomas poems ‘AS the Team’s Head Brass’ and ‘Rain’ have been such an enormous help to me- I cannot thank you enough!
I am studying OCR AS english literature which includes a large collection of Edward Thomas poems, and I was wondering whether you could do notes on the following poems? ‘March’, ‘Old Man’, ‘Tears’, ‘But these things also’, ‘Melancholy’, ‘The Glory’, ‘Words’, ‘Aspens’, ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’, ‘No one so much as you’, ‘The sun used to shine’, ‘Gone, gone again’ and ‘Lights out’
There’s a website called ‘Great War Literature’ that has in depth notes on all these poems available for download for £20 but your notes are so much better because the website takes a wholly war interpretation which is not what the exam board are looking for! I know i’m asking a lot, but I know many people who would happily pay for your notes, they are so great!!
Please reply!
Regards and thanks- Isabella Smith
March 22, 2013 at 10:04
Thanks for the kind words, Isabella. I’m hoping to go through the WWI verse in Stallworthy’s Oxford Book of War Poetry before I tackle anything else- and unfortunately I’m very much snowed under by work at the moment! The blog has had to take a backseat for a little bit, but I’m hoping this summer to have the time to begin writing study notes again.
February 26, 2013 at 14:47
Dear Mr Griffith,
I am an AS student currently studying WWI Literature including John Stallworthy’s anthology of War Poems. I find myself quite puzzled on a poem I most recently have been set to annotate, it is ‘Triumphal March’ by T.S. Eliot. I would be very greatful for some assistance with this if possible and you are able to.
Many Thanks.