https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MoPj6301ymrn9dHLxcszJ7L6sntHudd6/view?usp=sharing

This poem is a representation of the frustration against the role of women at home in the war effort by those who had actively witnessed the horrors of war. Every word felt loaded with agonizing emotion and fury. If I had read this poem at the beginning of the semester without much context, I would have immediately shut it down as blind hatred and accusation for a scapegoat in what I saw as a manmade war, but after reading some of the stories we read during this semester, and feeling what I wonder if I can call empathy towards characters who would possibly have been in agreement of Sassoon’s frustration, I know more of what influenced such a generalized opinion. Added along with the anger and hatred I felt for who I saw as ignorant characters like Nelly and Roy’s mothers in Not so Quiet, who, just as Sasson emphasized, only seemed to care about using their children to fuel their pride, I, and uncomfortably so, felt a bit of remorse for those like Sassoon who had the risk of their lives used as fodder to boast about their patriotism. I think that is significant in showing how this class left me with more perspective and a bit of a new opinion on the frustrations of this war, and is almost haunting to think about how these books were so detailed and gruesome that they had moved me so strongly for a topic of war I had not felt so deeply about before.

I looked through the book, “Some Corner of Foreign Field” and chose a poem from that collection of poetry after it caught my eye after being showed in class. I chose the poem, “To His Love” by Ivor Gurney because it was actually the artwork that accompanied the poem that caught my eye at first. The image is titled, “Ready to Start” by William Orpen which is actually a self portrait that was painted in 1917. I thought that his expression was heavy, calm, and even a little bit somber that related to the tone of the poem itself. This writing resonated with me because I think that it represents grief and sorrow without overdoing it. I feel very thankful that I haven’t lost anyone close to me due to combat but I think that this poem still made me feel as if I could understand the sadness affiliated with it as I have lost a close relative who passed from Colon Cancer. I also lie that this poem is on the shorter side because poetry can often feel hard to follow and the shortness of these lines made me feel that they are compact yet heartfelt.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L9QDn_wPS6CK08ko_OfK11h-kUbYpsrW/view?usp=drive_link

As I read through Kendall’s anthology, Siegfried Sassoon’s Repression of War Experience was very interesting to me because it covers the glorification of war, blind patriotism, trauma, dissociation, and the different perspectives of civilians and soldiers. These were all important topics that we talked about throughout the semester. This poem was interesting because it featured the inner monologue of a soldier who was coping with the aftermath of war. The beginning of the poem starts with the speaker instructing himself to “light the candles; one; two;” as if it were a routine to force a sense of calmness. Although we have seen the perspective of soldiers before, it was interesting to see a soldier go through the actual steps of remaining grounded and calm to prevent triggers. When he begins to think about the war, he tries to shut the thoughts out by counting, thinking about the weather, lighting a pipe, or choosing a book to read to distract themselves. 

Even though he tries to control his thoughts to feel calm, the tone of the poem becomes angrier and bitter, which is completely different from the beginning. He claims that he can still hear the “whispering guns” and even explicitly admits that he is going crazy. These persistent “whispering guns” in the last stanza suggest that he can still hear the war even in silence after the war has ended. By the final lines, he can’t continue repressing his experience in war as he is screeching at the whispering guns to stop. Ultimately, the poem represents the psychological aftermath of war as we see a small glimpse into a soldier’s mind and his inability to escape the lingering psychological effects of the war. This poem made me think about soldiers (like Paul from All Quiet on the Western Front) returning to their lives to realize that they will never be the same person they were before the war. Even though they survived the war, they are always in a constant battle with themselves.  

Canva/Audio Link: https://www.canva.com/design/DAG6rg8YEVI/UMmVg7rW-Cfj7LLjaQm49w/edit?utm_content=DAG6rg8YEVI&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

Reflection:

I have not seen another war poem communicate detachment the way this one does, and I focused on conveying that feeling through the tone of my reading. What intrigued me most is how calmly the speaker talks about death, as if he has already accepted it, and how he describes rising “to the clouds above” with a strange sense of peace. While this kind of mentality is common in a lot of the literature we have read, something just felt different about it. The poem also brings attention to something often ignored in discussions of war. Soldiers did not usually hate their enemies, since both sides were made up of young men pushed into fighting strangers. Yeats goes further in this analysis by showing that the people soldiers were told they were protecting were also strangers to them, which removes any comforting idea of fighting out of love or loyalty for their homelands. That lack of personal connection on either side emphasizes the futility of the war and exposes how hollow war propaganda really is. The poem’s quiet and emotionally distant tone truly resonated with me. It stuck out to me as a reader and has many layers of sadness and emotion to it that are difficult to deal with.

I chose Wilfred Owen’s poem “Mental Cases” because it forces me to confront the psychological devastation of war in a way that feels immediately unsettling. Owen does not allow the reader to look away. He shows how soldiers carried the war inside them long after the fighting ended. The poem mattered to me now because I kept thinking about how impossible it must have been for anyone to truly “survive” an experience that reshaped their minds. Reading it at the end of the semester felt appropriate because many of our course materials asked us to examine the human cost of violence, trauma, and the war systems that rotted men from the inside out. This poem felt like a clear reflection of those themes. I paired it with an image of an empty No Man’s Land because that abandoned and ruined landscape mirrors the inner emptiness Owen describes. It becomes a visual version of the mental void the soldiers lived with.