Everything is the War. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is a result of World War Two, the catalyst for which was the pointless conflict of World War One. The TV shows I watch, the music I listen to, even the train station I go home through: all things are steeped in the history of the War. This semester, I have encountered the War so many times in my daily life that I find it both comedic and deeply troubling. My cousin talked about All Quiet on the Western Front at Thanksgiving. I’ve even encountered the War in questions for an exam outside of this course.
The War, according to my therapist, is one of the two things I’ve encountered this year that has destroyed my innocence. I had no idea that this much death and destruction was around me constantly. I had no true understanding of the pain and fear that comes from war. I felt pity for those in conflicts around the world today, but I could not truly emphasize with them until this class. I now know that evil, pain, and suffering control our world far more than I thought.
The question, now, is how do I live with this understanding? This semester, I’ve slowly disintegrated into avoidance and panic, leading to my lack of participation in the blog. I’ve cried. I’ve had nightmares. I’ve ranted to my therapist, to my mother, to my roommates; my friends are careful to warn me before loud noises that might resemble the sounds of shelling. I want to crawl into bed with a warm, fuzzy blanket and forget that the War ever happened.
I don’t think it’s possible for me to forget. Even if it was, it isn’t right. Instead, I should channel this despair into activism. I have no idea how, but when the opportunity arises, I know now that I will do what I can. I encourage you all to do the same. In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be out by the trees, thinking about Kemmerich’s boots.
As someone who is a current novice in poetry, all of these poems really opened my eyes for the better. In an act of standout, I ultimately chose the poem For a Girl by May Wedderburn Cannan because not only does it take place on the day of Armistice, but it also is painted from the view of a woman at home. Many of our stories touched on Armistice, but here it is a headline. I frequently held a wish to see our characters in a time of peace, and For a Girl gives a little insight to this life. While this poem provides a look into the celebration of Armistice, it also sheds light on the conjoining grief for those who cannot celebrate. For a Girl does a great job at showing the emotion of conditional happiness; yes, the end of war is a time of joy, but it is also a time of sorrow for those lost–and a plea they won’t be forgotten. Additionally, I always found interest in the life of those at home. This interest started with Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington and how they viewed the war, so this poem provided a contrast to their encouragement. To look at the war with a different definition of a home-front, the ones left behind, is something very thought provoking.
I found For a Girl to be very moving for me as a reader. The poem provided the raw felt emotions of sadness, celebration, anger, and mourning all into one piece. A life after the Armistice was similarly taken from the speaker. Furthermore, the poem can be vague in who it is addressing: a father, a lover, a friend? This curiosity gives a meaningful interpretation to the poem; the vagueness provides a blanket understanding of grief, since death is now a uniter. In the end, I believe this poem was an appropriate choice because it opened my eyes to the complexity of the end of war. While this was a day to celebrate, many did not have someone to celebrate with. For a Girl provides a look at the people, specifically women, who stayed behind. I am ever curious about the women in war-time, and this poem gave me a small peek into the sorrow-stained curtain.
Happy snow say. Enjoy working on projects, go grinding, eat soup, peoplewatch, do anything before doomday of this website nuking itself on the 7th! I just haharzardly got into the grove for snow somehow who knows… 🙂
look at this German Solider peeping out from blood, mud, and snow fortress!Marching soliders in the coldest winter during WWI (1916-17)wow, sleepy soliders and rifes in the snowy trenches
Happy snow day guys, if you are sledding, or locking in on that one project and making it so unhindged. :).
“Thirteen Black Martyrs of Houston” was a poem published in The Messenger in April 1923. It was written in reference to the execution of Black soldiers following the Camp Logan Riot in Houston during World War I. The riot began after Black soldiers were harassed and insulted with racial slurs by the Houston police. Rising tensions between the Black troops stationed there and local authorities eventually led to mutiny in the downtown area, resulting in the deaths of civilians, police, and Black soldiers.
The army held three separate court-martials, finding most of the 118 charged guilty. Nineteen Black soldiers were hanged, and sixty-three received life sentences, making it the largest murder trial in U.S. history (Haynes). Following the imprisonment and the earlier publication of the event by White author Archibald Grimké in his 1919 poem, an anonymous author expanded on the tragedy in this African-American literary magazine, revering thirteen of the executed soldiers as martyrs. The poem addresses a wide audience, appealing to those who might heed the warnings of the “White Voices” (White authority/US Army), listen to their own conscience, or reflect on the moral teachings of Christianity. While published for a broad readership, it likely spoke most directly to the Black community in the United States, affirming their dignity and condemning the injustices that occurred in Houston.
The poem carries a mournful, reverent, and accusatory tone, reflecting both grief for the soldiers’ deaths and moral outrage at the injustice they endured. The author highlights the innocence of the “black boys” and the courage and valor they displayed in service to their country, while acknowledging that they died in a world that denied them freedom and justice. I also found the imagery of the soldier’s blood powerful, as the blood spilled in the riots was red with vitality, rather than yellow with cowardice. In the first stanza, the poet questions the values and supposed ethos of the United States, a nation that “boasts” of freedom and justice, only to have those ideals abridged for Black soldiers. The author writes passionately, expressing that Lincoln’s goals were undermined as attempts at unity were suppressed and further foiled. As a reader, particularly a Black one from a military family, I find that the author reinforces the honor of a Black soldier fighting for the country, when it can result in death on both the home and foreign front, from enemies nearer than Germany.
Regarding World War I specifically, the poem and the 1917 Camp Logan Riot highlight the starkly different experiences of White and Black soldiers. While Black soldiers served courageously in the Great War, they received little respect or recognition at home; the fight to defend the ideals of “freedom and democracy” was not extended to them. I chose this poem in particular because it thematically encapsulates many of the central themes of WWI literature studied this semester: it reflects the heroism of Black soldiers, conveys grief over their execution, critiques the irony and hypocrisy of American ideals, invokes faith, and underscores the senselessness of their deaths. I particularly appreciate how this poem serves as a case study of Black American experiences during WWI and examines the aftermath in a way that few authors address, due in part to the scarcity of surviving testimony. For example, Victor Daly’s Not Only War: A Story of Two Great Conflicts reflects many similar themes through the story of Montie Jason’s service. I felt moved and enlightened by this poem, as I had not previously known about this history, and I was particularly impressed by how clearly dissenting writers highlighted injustice when it was obvious to African-Americans indicted.
Below is my reading and breakdown of a couple terms found within the text. Have a wonderful break!
Haynes, Robert V. “TSHA | Houston Riot of 1917.” Www.tshaonline.org, 1 Nov. 1995, www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/houston-riot-of-1917. Accessed 4 Dec. 2025.
The poem I picked to reflect on was the poem “Glory of Women” written by Siegfried Sassoon. This poem stood out to me because it focuses on the relationship between women who were at home during the war. When reading Not So Quiet, one of my favorite aspects was the relationship between Helen and her mother. In the novel, Helen harbored a lot of resentment towards her mother’s positive and ignorant attitude towards the war. In this poem, I can feel that same resentment in this soldier. The first line of the poem discusses how they love soldiers visiting on leave, and near the end of the poem, he writes how they don’t approve of soldiers retiring. These women believe an honorable soldier should never cower from the war. However, Siegfried does a wonderful job in showing their ignorance. He follows the line about their disbelief with a description of a battle. These two lines are haunting, with him describing the battle as “hell’s last horror” and “trampling terrible corpse-blind with blood” (Sassoon lines 10-11). Like in Not So Quiet, by contrasting the two viewpoints of the people at the front and the women back home, it does a good job of showing the disconnect between the soldiers and their homes. How, even when the war is over, they still feel isolated by society, as no one other than the people at the front will understand the horrors they went through.
I chose this poem first because I find the life, and work, of Wilfred Owen deeply fascinating. In this class, we have read many stories that have been against the war because of its horrors and the impact it had on peoples’ lives. But when we get to Owen’s poetry, the anger and emotion he puts behind his work is palpable. This war ruined not only his life, but those he knew, and those he didn’t know, and it moved much of his work. The fact he was also killed after returning to the front a week before the armistice is so tragic to me, too. His life, his death, and his legacy are all centered around a war he despised and wrote against, and one has to wonder if that’s what he wanted. Did he want to be known for more? What life could he have lived if it weren’t for the war? Or would he be glad knowing that his work and his words have captured the horrors of the war well enough that he’s discussed to this day? We can’t know.
I also chose this poem because it focuses less on the action happening in the war, and more on the tragedy of the deaths it caused. The opening line describes the boys as cattle, you don’t get more anti-war than that, really (also mind that he refers to them as boys and girls, not men and women). There’s no great battle or sacrifice to be spoken of in this poem. The deaths he writes of are of the “cattle”, and the fact he writes about how the last things they will ever get to hear are the sounds of the battlefield is haunting. This one specifically resonated with me because of the times we live in right now. To me, it feels like we, as a society, are nothing but cattle to be sacrificed and used by those in power. Of course, we live in a time that is very different from World War I era Europe, but as a society, we’ve never moved out of the dehumanisation of industry, of the working class. In the poem, and in much of Owen’s work, those who are fighting on the front are the ones doing all of the hard, dirty work for the elite who are waging the fights. The ones who fight didn’t ask to be part of this, and even if they did, they had no way of fully knowing what they were signing up for. And that is almost identical to how the heads of corporations and even our own government act. They pick fights and dole out these massive consequences that don’t affect them, but that affect everyone beneath them. We may not live in an active world war right now, but we do live in a world that enables those in power to treat everyone beneath them like shit. That’s why this poem resonated so much with me.
For this project, I picked Wilfred Owen’s poem Disabled. At first, I thought I was going to do his Anthem for Doomed Youth, because that one has always spoken to me, but in thinking about how my perspective of World War One has changed over the course of taking this class, I thought Disabled spoke to me more. The primary reason is that my own health and ability status has changed over the past year, though obviously not due to war, so I could relate to the speaker. He thinks about the past things he used to be able to do and can do no more, which is relatable as someone who found that my own developing disability has limited some things I can do that I used to be able to do with no limitations. As well, the speaker of this poem seems to me to have an undercurrent of anger at the pity he’s receiving from others now that he’s disabled instead of the healthy, attractive young man he used to be. I can also relate to that– for example, I started using a cane as a crucial mobility aid for the first time this semester, and, while I know they had the best intentions, the pity and occasional condescension I received from people asking about why I was using it or even praising me for getting an accessibility aid, made me quite mad at times. So, overall, I found the speaker of Disabled’s perspective really spoke to me based on my own disability status and changes in that status over the course of the past semester, changes which coincided with learning more about the experience of WWI soldiers and veterans.
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Friends, I can’t express how grateful, touched, and overwhelmed I am by the gift I received today. But I know the greater gift is getting to spend a semester with curious, smart, interesting people seeking to understand something that is almost incomprehensible, and to process it with empathy and grace. So, for all of that, thank you, LGW. If you need me, I’ll be out by the trees feeling gratitude.
These two poems of Sassoon’s stuck out to me the most for their descriptive and conceptual power.
I find Christ and the Soldier particularly fascinating because it mirrors my own thoughts about religion in tandem with the war. I’m not a religious person myself, and I always thought that using Christianity and God as motivators for fighting in the war was a little strange because if the British believe God to be on their side, but the Germans believe God to be on theirs, then which is true? Ultimately, because Christ doesn’t answer the soldier’s question, I think Sassoon conveys that God has no place in this war and cannot be relied upon. I mean, why would so many soldiers have to die in such horrific ways if God was on their side? Why does an innocent mother have to grieve simply because her son was 18 and loved his country (or was pressured)? I would think when the circumstances are that senseless, faith would be quite hard to sustain.
I thought Counter-Attack had a very disturbing but vivid description to it. The last 4-5 lines in particular stuck out to me because they reminded me of the Owen poem we talked about in class, Dulce et Decorum Est. Both poems describe a soldier dying, but in different ways. One dies from gas, and the other from a shell explosion of sorts. Both poets chose to say these soldiers are drowning. I think this fits with the physical sensations of Owen’s soldier in Dulce et Decorum Est, but there must be a deeper meaning. Sassoon’s uses of ”smothering gloom” and ”blurred confusion” make me realize the trauma of dying in his soldier’s manner. Not being able to stop your own death or receive help must be an extremely suffocating feeling, worsened by the fact that he is lying in the middle of the terrible chaos. I liken it to the fact that if you’re actually drowning, it’s also a chaotic experience that is out of your control. Applying that idea generally, every soldier, including Sassoon himself, is drowning more as the war goes on.
Wilfred Owens’ “The Last Laugh” was an easy choice for me when it came to finding the poem that stuck and spoke to me the most. The graphic scenes, strong use of language, and the personification of weapons, which made them the main focus of the moan rather than the dying men, really shook me as I read through it the first, second, third, and even fourth time. It truly shows the human suffering against the machines and weaponry of war, and it does it in a way that differs from other poems completely. Not only this, but the detailed imagery through the very graphic words and phrases can make it truly gruesome to read.
I think this poem really puts into perspective how quickly a life can be taken away and how quickly lives were taken away during this war. So many stories ended much too early, all at the hands of the machines and ever-turning gears of war. This poem truly spoke to me with every line that I read, from the onomatopoeia that Wilfred Owen used all the way to the graphic and violent imagery that found itself imbedded in the poem as well. There were many great poems all throughout this semester, but this one specifically spoke to me the most by quite a bit.
I fully believe that poem is the perfect way to end and summarize the semester with its imagery and powerful use of language, very similar to some instances that we saw in “All Quiet on the Western Front”, and I was very happy that it came up in class Tuesday so we could all experience it together. It really was tough to pick just one poem at the end of all of this, but ‘The Last Laugh” was certainly it.
