John William Streets, 'Remembrance'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Remembrance

Sweet are the wind's soft kisses on the brow;
Sweet is the singing of the mated bird;
Sweet is the scent of blossom on the bough;
Sweet is a woman's singing voice when heard!

Happy recall of things remembered -
Life's happy hours, love's blooded ecstasy.
Youth's sanguine dreams whose tireless wings outsped
The light - now silhouettes of Memory!

E'en like a dawn whose flush outlives the day;
E'en like a star that lives beyond the night;
As maid's remembrance of her bridal-day;
Or as his cult to mystic acolyte -
So is the memory of these things to me
Here on the verge of death, eternity.

by John William Streets

John William Streets: The Undying Splendour

Comments

Here on the verge of death, eternity?

[pigshitpoet.livejournal.com]

how were they capable of romanticizing this?

i would be frozen in fear and wanting to lash out.

[duathir.livejournal.com]

They were frozen with fear and wanting to lash out, but there was no escape, and no way to lash out but to advance into battle as ordered. Many who survived went mad. But the soldiers of WWI on both sides believed in the holy righteousness of their cause, and in the life eternal awaiting them after death if they died in performance of their duty.

It could be proposed that such beliefs are an inoculative form of madness, without which the greater madness of war would be untenable.

There is an excellent article in the Atlantic today: 'The Lessons of the Somme' (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/07/somme-centennial/489656/):

"See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation. … This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. … All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I fled with Shelley"

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Shelley in the Trenches
(May 2nd. 1916)

Impressions are like winds; you feel their cool
Swift kiss upon the brow, yet know not where
They sprang to birth: so like a pool
Rippled by winds from out their forest lair
My soul was stir'd to life; its twilight fled;
There passed across its solitude a dream
That wing'd with supreme ecstasy did seem;
That gave the kiss of life to long-lost dead.

A lark trill'd in the blue: and suddenly
Upon the wings of his immortal ode
My soul rushed singing to the ether sky
And found in visions, dreams, its real abode-
I fled with Shelley, with the lark afar,
Unto the realms where the eternal are.

By John William Streets

Re: "I fled with Shelley"

[pigshitpoet.livejournal.com]

you reference streets. is he a favourite of yours?

i like his reference to shelley, fled with the lark afar, to the realms where the eternal are.. that's exactly what it's like taking a book by shelley off the shelf on a walk into the park afar and reading and dreaming...

[duathir.livejournal.com]

No, not a favorite. His attitude of resigned spirituality does not sit so well with me. If I have a favorite, it is probably Sassoon.

[pigshitpoet.livejournal.com]

example?

Siegfried Sassoon

[duathir.livejournal.com]

The Troops

Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom
Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals
Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots
And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky
Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down
The stale despair of night, must now renew
Their desolation in the truce of dawn,
Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.

Yet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,
Can grin through storms of death and find a gap
In the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.
They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy
Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all
Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky
That hastens over them where they endure
Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,
And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.

O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.


The Dug-Out

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadow’d from the candle’s guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head...
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.


I Stood With The Dead

I stood with the Dead, so forsaken and still:
When dawn was grey I stood with the Dead.
And my slow heart said, 'You must kill, you must kill:
'Soldier, soldier, morning is red'.

On the shapes of the slain in their crumpled disgrace
I stared for a while through the thin cold rain...
'O lad that I loved, there is rain on your face,
'And your eyes are blurred and sick like the plain.'

I stood with the Dead ... They were dead; they were dead;
My heart and my head beat a march of dismay:
And gusts of the wind came dulled by the guns.
'Fall in!' I shouted; 'Fall in for your pay!'


Wraiths

They know not the green leaves;
In whose earth-haunting dream
Dimly the forest heaves,
And voiceless goes the stream.
Strangely they seek a place
In love’s night-memoried hall;
Peering from face to face,
Until some heart shall call
And keep them, for a breath,
Half-mortal ... (Hark to the rain!)...
They are dead ... (O hear how death
Gropes on the shutter’d pane!)


Absolution

The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes
Till beauty shines in all that we can see.
War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,
And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.

Horror of wounds and anger at the foe,
And loss of things desired; all these must pass.
We are the happy legion, for we know
Time's but a golden wind that shakes the grass.

There was an hour when we were loth to part
From life we longed to share no less than others.
Now, having claimed this heritage of heart,
What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?

Re: Siegfried Sassoon

[pigshitpoet.livejournal.com]

on death and dying..

what have we to fear, but fear itself?

like a voice from the other side..

yet he wrote this when he was alive!

?

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Temporarily alive - in the thick of the slaughter, with his friends and his men dying like flies all around.

Dreamers

Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

By Siegfried Sassoon

in the trenches

[pigshitpoet.livejournal.com]

i think i too would be compelled to say my last words, anywhere..

last words of hassan sabbah old man of the mountain.. william burroughs




Last Words Anywhere (http://rr.www.cistron.nl/his/nothing.htm)

; )

[pigshitpoet.livejournal.com]

this poem inspired me..

http://pigshitpoet.livejournal.com/1376586.html

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Well done. The poet would have been pleased.