I will start adding speeches along with poetry every few weeks. This one is an excerpt from President Obama at the 65th Anniversary of the Normandy Landings a few days ago on June 6th, 2009 at the Normandy American Cometary and Memorial overlooking Omaha beach.
We live in a world of competing beliefs and claims about what is true. It is a world of varied religions and cultures and forms of government.
In such a world, it is rare for a struggle to emerge that speaks to something universal about humanity.
The Second World War did that. No man who shed blood or lost a brother would say that war is good.
But all know that this war was essential. For what we faced in Nazi totalitarianism was not just a battle of competing interests. It was a competing vision of humanity.
Nazi ideology sought to subjugate, humiliate, and exterminate. It perpetrated murder on a massive scale, fueled by a hatred of those who were deemed different and therefore inferior.
According to an article by the United Kingdom’s Metro,
“Poetry is in danger of dying out. More than eight in ten Britons cannot recite a verse by heart, a study shows.”
In comparison with older generations the article states that:
In fact, it is only the over-60s who can remember verses – with 72 per cent able to deliver lines they learned as children. Two-thirds know entire poems – with Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est (It Is Sweet And Right) most popular.
DULCE ET DECORUM EST (It is sweet and proper)
by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Who doesn’t enjoy history, so much of it surrounds war. For some war might be enjoyable, for the unaccustomed it might even look entertaining. War, however, is not such the case. Perhaps Louis Simpson is in such a caliber to speak of war, as he fought in World War II during the Battle of the Bulge.
This poem presumed to have been written 10 years after the battle, “most clearly of that battle I remember the tiredness in eyes, how hands looked thin”. Right from the beginning you can feel a beat a rhythm. Similar to the poem Drum (Hughes). ”Helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat.”
The entire poem is bifurcated in that each line is split with either: and, comma, or period. This leads to a natural cadences for the reader, you can almost imagine a fast pacing drum that would be used to keep the troops at the correct pace. Helmet and rifle …pause… pack and overcoat is how it might be read.
If this poem was given popular culture treatment you might hear it being recited as a soldier walks through the woods in war time France, the sound of mortars or artillery off in the distance draws the soldier back to the trenches. With the sound of gunfire, the soldier drifts to sleep, and the camera fades to black. Starting from white, color fades in with ringing of the ears, corpses on the ground, and snow of black and red.
I could not decide as to what circumstance this poem might be heard or told. At first we thought maybe at the bar with his buddies, other veterans, and the like. However going back to the poem, the only use of pronouns is They, and Their. That language alone has to mean that this kind of poem had no audience at least not to those who were there and experienced it for themselves. (more…)
Copyright 2009 by James McGowan. Photos are Copyright by their respective owners, they are listed as Creative Commons, out of copyright, attributed, or my own.
