And salted' was my food, and my repose, flavored (as with salt) Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice 15 Speaking for all who lay under the stars, Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
Feb. 1915 1917
Rain1
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks For washing me cleaner than I have been Since I was born into this solitude. Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon: But here I pray that none whom once I loved Is dying tonight or lying still awake
10 Solitary, listening to the rain, Either in pain or thus in sympathy Helpless among the living and the dead, Like a cold water among broken reeds, Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
15 Like me who have no love which this wild rain Has not dissolved except the love of death, If love it be towards what is perfect and Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
Jan. 1916 1917
The Cherry Trees
The cherry trees bend over and are shedding On the old road where all that passed are dead,
1. Cf. Thomas's account of an English walking so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the tour, The Icknield Way (1913): 'In the heavy, black grave when my ears can hear it no more. . . . Black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invis-and monotonously sounding is the midnight and ible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age? the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The for it is all one?I shall know the full truth of the midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, of nature, in the days before the rain: 'Blessed are and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters the dead that the rain rains on.' ' and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even
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THOMAS: AS THE TEAM'S HEAD BRASS / 1959
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding This early May morn when there is none to wed.
May 1916 1917
As the Team's Head Brass1
As the team's head brass flashed out on the turn The lovers disappeared into the wood. I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm That strewed an angle of the fallow,2 and
5 Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square Of charlock.0 Every time the horses turned wild mustard Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned Upon the handles to say or ask a word, About the weather, next about the war.
10 Scraping the share he faced towards the wood, And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed Once more.
The blizzard felled the elm whose crest I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole, The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away?'
15 'When the war's over.' So the talk began? One minute and an interval of ten, A minute more and the same interval. 'Have you been out?' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps?' 'If I could only come back again, I should.
20 I could spare an arm. I shouldn't want to lose A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so, I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone From here?' 'Yes.' 'Many lost?' 'Yes, a good few. Only two teams work on the farm this year.
25 One of my mates is dead. The second day In France they killed him. It was back in March, The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.' 'And I should not have sat here. Everything 30 Would have been different. For it would have been Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though If we could see all all might seem good.' Then The lovers came out of the wood again: The horses started and for the last time 35 I watched the clods crumble and topple over After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.
May 1916 1917
1. Also known as horse brass: a decorative brass 2. Ground plowed and harrowed but left uncropmedallion or emblem attached to a horse's harness. ped for a year or more.
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1960
SIEGFRIED SASSOON 1886-1967
Siegfried Sassoon was educated at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge (which he left without taking a degree). His father came from a prosperous family of Sephardic Jews, his mother from Anglican English gentry. As a young man he divided his time between literary London and the life of a country gentleman. These worlds and the brutally different one of the trenches, in which he found himself in 1914, are memorably described in his classic Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and its sequel, Memoirs of an Infantry1 Officer (1930).
He fought at Mametz Wood and in the Somme Offensive of July 1916 with such conspicuous courage that he acquired the Military Cross and the nickname Mad Jack. After a sniper's bullet went through his chest, however, he was sent back to England at the beginning of April 1917, and he began to take a different view of the war. Eventually, with courage equal to any he had shown in action, he made public a letter he sent to his commanding officer: 'I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.' Sassoon continued: 'I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.' (For the full text, see 'Representing the Great War' at Norton Literature Online.) The military authorities, rather than make a martyr of him, announced that he was suffering from shell shock and sent him to a hospital near Edinburgh, where he met and befriended Wilfred Owen.
