LEST WE FORGET
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Laurence Binyon - For The Fallen (4th Stanza)
A poem by Peter Kocan
Sometimes in the homes of the elderly, among the shabby, cherished possessions
You will find a framed photograph of a young man in a quaint uniform.
Slouch-hatted, posing with a full gaze. 'My brother Jim. He went to the War...'
And something in the aged voice conveys the unspoken `and didn't come home.'
One sees a troopship thronged at the wharf; Jim's parents being cheerful, hugging their boy;
Younger brothers vowing to follow soon; a little sister not understanding.
Tumultuous months follow, with excited gatherings to hear Jim's letters read aloud,
Until an official telegram makes something die in all of them.
Yet life goes on. The family faces the long future, strife, Depression,
Accident, illness, another war, the casualty lists of the commonplace.
And Jim has acquired an aura forever tragic and beautiful,
Growing not old as those who remain grow old...Till gradually
The minds wherein he is enshrined as son, brother, neighbour, friend, grow fewer.
Those brief, sliding minutes on the wharf have become sixty years.
Now, in a musty room somewhere, an old person makes a cup of tea
And a not-yet-anonymous soldier stares out of the photograph.
Peter Kocan
Words of Remembrance
The following was written by Pericles well over two thousand years ago, only a stone’s throw from Gallipoli:
"Each has won a glorious grave - not that sepulchre of earth wherein they lie, but the living tomb of everlasting remembrance wherein their glory is enshrined. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of heroes. Monuments may rise and tablets be set up to them in their own land, but on far-off shores there is an abiding memorial that no pen or chisel has traced; it is graven not on stone or brass, but on the living hearts of humanity.
Take these men for your example. Like them, remember that prosperity can be only for the free, that freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it."
As November 11th fast approaches let us take time to re-evaluate our own lives and to try to consider life as it was in 1914 not just for those who went away from home to fight but for those left behind, working in steel and iron industries, munition factories, taking care of families and farms to keep their lives as normal as possible for when their loved ones came home and to deal with the inevitable when they didn't.
~~~
The Great War (1914 – 1918) reflects not only the personal tragedy which attends all war, but the debacle of the West discarding the principles and values which had made it great by engaging in a senseless, conflict, the effects of which are still being realised. Reading the poetry of that period, one grieves not only for the individual soldier, but for the world he represented, a liberal realm of reason beset by forces which would bring about the death of that world as surely as the trench bomb would take the lives of both men and boys. Personal tragedies of the men in the trenches mirrored the larger disaster of the end of the world of the mind. Moreover, while the trench-poet saw only the death of his civilisation, we see two things he could not: the greater tragedies that followed in the wake of the war, and, in many cases, the death of the poet himself.
With thanks to:
www.worldwar1.com/heritage/wpoets.htm
LEST WE FORGET!
For the Fallen
oldpoetry.com/poetry/24934
by Robert Laurence Binyon
Dulce et Decorum Est
oldpoetry.com/poetry/3336
Wilfred Owen
Wind on the Downs
oldpoetry.com/poetry/50172
Marian Allen
In Memoriam
oldpoetry.com/poetry/34257
E A Mackintosh
Two Julys'
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48753
by Charles John Beech Masefield
Lament
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48778
by F S Flint
Lament
allpoetry.com/poetry/48776
by Wilfred Wilson Gibson
A Moment's Interlude
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48775
by Richard Aldington
Now That You Too
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48764
by Elanor Farjeon
Præmaturi
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48762
by Margaret Postgate Cole
Requiem for the Dead of Europe
oldpoetry.com/poetry/47629
by Yvan Goll
Untitled
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48758
by Patrick Shaw-Stewart
Here Dead we Lie
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48760
by A.E. Housman
Courage
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48754
by J E Stewart
The Working Party
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48261
by Siegfried Sassoon
Thiepval Wood
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48661
by Edmund Blunden
The Dead Soldier
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48772
by Sydney Oswald
My Company
oldpoetry.com/poetry/48771
by Sir Herbert Read
Adding your comment:
Is there a particular Owen poem you would liketo see included?
