Verses

From-a-babe, I've felt a spiritual affiliation with WWI dead and mourning (likely past life residue). So this morning (nostalgic?), I returned to my collected Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon has never impacted me like Wilfred Owen, never appeared to be as fine and musical a poet (or as tragic a figure). But he was certainly more prolific and . . . journal*istic? The war poems are best taken whole; severed from the pack, they are sort of naive, the satirical diary entries of a well-educated boy encountering misfortune for the first time, reactionary and freshly political. When read one after another, they impress with honesty, render one incapable of cynicism for their earnestness and for the trauma through which they were penned. That said, here are two, set aside, both on the subject of rough amusements, a persistent grotesque (I hope they haven't been criminally airlifted from context . . . they're definitely Brit-priggish):

"When I'm among a Blaze of Lights"

8 January, 1917

When I'm among a blaze of lights

With tawdry music and cigars

And women dawdling through delights,

And officers in cocktail bars,

Sometimes I think of garden nights

And elm trees nodding at the stars.

I dream of a small firelit room

With yellow candles burning straight,

And glowing pictures in the gloom,

And kindly books that hold me late.

Of things like these I choose to think

When I can never be alone:

Then someone says, 'Another drink?'

And turns my living heart to stone.

"Blighters"

4 February, 1917

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin

And cackle at The Show, while prancing ranks

Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;

'We're sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!'

I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to ragtime tunes, or 'Home sweet Home,'

And there'd be no jokes in Music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Baupaume.