Wilfrid Owen's 'The Parable of the Old man and the Young'

Men of the Royal Irish Rifles in the opening hours of the battle of the Somme 1916

Wilfrid Owen (1893-1918)

The last of a short run of poems in which poets use familiar names and stories in their poems.

In the Book of Genesis ,Abraham is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead.
One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home.
Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride God offers him, and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed.
The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between Biblical sacrifice and the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men wearing belts and straps. I’ve always felt that he didn’t trust his readers to make that link

At the risk of being heretical, Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the same point more powerfully, and more effectively.

Jeremy Hooker's '1st of July 2016

Jeremy Hooker. (Born 1941)

I’m assuming this poem was written to commemorate the Hundredth Anniversary of the First Day of the Somme offensive in 1916. When i was at school we learnt the statistics; 60,00 casualties, 20, 00 of them dead. In one morning, between 7.30am and “lunch time”. By the end of the battle, which got them nowhere, when the snows closed it down in November, British, Empire and allied troops had suffered over half a million casualties.
While historians might debate the significance of the battle and the actual casuality figures, (57,470 of which 19,240 died). The image of men lined up in rows and ordered to advance into machine gun fire was a dark shadow on the collective imagination, made more terrible by the fact they were fighting in a ‘war to end wars’.

Hooker shows how effective a poem can be without the poet having to resort to distorted syntax, complex rhyme schemes or obscure allusions. The tragedy is summed up …’the old men/that we knew and the young men/we did not.’ The poem also deftly suggests a difference between then and now in its play on ‘divisions.’

The poem is taken from Hooker’s excellent ‘Word and Stone’ (Sheearsman 2019).

Charles Hamilton Sorley's 'When you see millions of the mouthless dead'

Charles Hamilton Sorley ( May 1895- October 1915)

Sorely was killed by a sniper in 1915 while serving on the Western Front. This poem, written in pencil, was found amongst his belongings.

The few poems he had written were collected and published in January 1916 as ‘Marlborough and other poems’. This is taken from the slightly enlarged second edition of February 1916.

Had Sorely lived and continued to write, most of the poems in the book would probably have been filed away as ‘Juvenilia’. As it was, he didn’t get to revise any of them for publication.

He has been particularly well-served by Jean Moorcraft Wilson who not only wrote a Biography but collected and edited his letters and his poems.

You can read more about Sorely here:

https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2017/05/charles-hamilton-sorely-footnote-poet.html

W.B.Yeats' 'An Irish Airman foresees his death'

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

I’ve met several people who identify this poem as the one that switched them on to poetry. So reading it aloud is a daunting proposition. If it’s one of your favourites, and you don’t like my reading, I apologise.

Paradoxically, the poem works so well because although it mentions specific places, you’d never know who the Irish Airman was or in which war he was fighting from the poem alone. It’s this delicate mix of the general and specific, combined with Yeats’ superb phrase making, that makes the poem so effective.

If you’re interested in technique you should compare this poem with its companion piece, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ written for the same Irish Airman.