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The pain, the pangs, the tragedy and the valour are best expressed in verse. War poetry, be it about the celebration of the heroic feats of soldiers and warriors or about the irony of loss of young lives, has moved hearts down the ages. Here are excerpts from classics:
Iliad
Poet: Homer
Year: 8th century BC
Excerpt:
Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.
In Flanders Fields
Poet: John McCrae
Published: 1915
Excerpt:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Dulce et Decorum est
Poet: Wilfred Owen
Published: 1920
Excerpt:
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
The Man He Killed
Poet: Thomas Hardy
Published: 1902
Excerpt:
"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."
The Soldier
Poet: Rupert Brooke
Published: 1914
Excerpt:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a
foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
The Shield of Achilles
Poet: W. H. Auden
Published: 1952
Excerpt:
Column by column in
a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring
a belief
Whose logic brought them,
somewhere else, to grief.
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