A Dead Boche was not the poem I expected to finish up the semester with. I wasn’t especially drawn to it when I first read it for class, and the grotesque description felt jarring and off-putting. Ultimately, however, I found that the grotesque, upfront nature of the poem is rather the point. War is ugly, and horrifying, and monstrous, and A Dead Boche does what so many poets of the era are so unwilling to do by describing, in abject detail, how truly disgusting it is. There is no honor in war, nor in the stinking, swollen body of a dead German whose blood has crusted black and thick down his beard. Conversely, there is horror, grotesque and vivid descriptions of the immediate aftermath of what war can take. Robert Graves takes the viewer by the chin and forces them to see what he has seen: death, ugly and honorless and purposeless, and it is brutal.
I went into this class thinking I was prepared for the horror of the war, but poems like this always succeed in catching me off guard. No amount of beautiful prose can convey, I feel, what Graves has done so eloquently in two stanzas. This poem resonates with me because it is honest in a way that very little literature of the time is, and I adore it for the fact.
I also went into this class thinking I was prepared for the horror of war and being completely wrong about it. We were like draftees heading happily off with no true knowledge of what the trenches were like. I love how you changed your mind about the piece after thinking about how true it is to the experience we read about.
When you say it’s honest in a way that very little literature of the time is, though, I have to disagree with you. While many of the texts we read were published years after the war, we’ve encountered many honest and grisly works this semester. Didn’t Borden write The Forbidden Zone during the war but wait to publish it until she saw All Quiet’s success?