The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Read Free Page A

dull three score and ten.
    Lads, you’re wanted. Come and learn
    To live and die with honest men.
    You shall learn what men can do
    If you will but pay the price,
    Learn the gaiety and strength
    40             In the gallant sacrifice.
    Take your risk of life and death
    Underneath the open sky.
    Live clean or go out quick –
    Lads, you’re wanted. Come and die.
    E. A. Mackintosh
    Soldier: Twentieth Century
    I love you, great new Titan!
    Am I not you?
    Napoleon and Caesar
    Out of you grew.
    Out of unthinkable torture,
    Eyes kissed by death,
    Won back to the world again,
    Lost and won in a breath,
    Cruel men are made immortal,
    10             Out of your pain born.
    They have stolen the sun’s power
    With their feet on your shoulders worn.
    Let them shrink from your girth,
    That has outgrown the pallid days,
    When you slept like Circe’s swine,
    Or a word in the brain’s ways.
    Isaac Rosenberg
    Youth in Arms I
    Happy boy, happy boy,
    David the immortal-willed,
    Youth a thousand thousand times
    Slain, but not once killed,
    Swaggering again to-day
    In the old contemptuous way;
    Leaning backward from your thigh
    Up against the tinselled bar –
    Dust and ashes! is it you?
    10             Laughing, boasting, there you are!
    First we hardly recognised you
    In your modern avatar.
    Soldier, rifle, brown khaki –
    Is your blood as happy so?
    Where’s your sling, or painted shield,
    Helmet, pike, or bow?
    Well, you’re going to the wars –
    That is all you need to know.
    Greybeards plotted. They were sad.
    20             Death was in their wrinkled eyes.
    At their tables, with their maps
    Plans and calculations, wise
    They all seemed; for well they knew
    How ungrudgingly Youth dies.
    At their green official baize
    They debated all the night
    Plans for your adventurous days,
    Which you followed with delight,
    Youth in all your wanderings,
    30             David of a thousand slings.
    Harold Monro
    â€˜
I don’t want to be a soldier
’
    I don’t want to be a soldier,
    I don’t want to go to war.
    I’d rather stay at home,
    Around the streets to roam,
    And live on the earnings of a well-paid whore.
    I don’t want a bayonet up my arsehole,
    I don’t want my bollocks shot away.
    I’d rather stay in England,
    In merry, merry England,
    10             And fuck my bleeding life away.
    Soldiers’ song
    The Conscript
    Indifferent, flippant, earnest, but all bored,
    The doctors sit in the glare of electric light
    Watching the endless stream of naked white
    Bodies of men for whom their hasty award
    Means life or death, maybe, or the living death
    Of mangled limbs, blind eyes, or a darkened brain;
    And the chairman, as his monocle falls again,
    Pronounces each doom with easy indifferent breath.
    Then suddenly I shudder as I see
    10             A young man stand before them wearily,
    Cadaverous as one already dead;
    But still they stare, untroubled, as he stands
    With arms outstretched and drooping thorn-crowned
    Â Â Â Â head,
    The nail-marks glowing in his feet and hands.
    Wilfrid Gibson
    Rondeau of a Conscientious Objector
    The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous
    Â Â Â Â sands
    And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West.
    I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands;
    To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours I
    Â Â Â Â detest.
    I force my cart through the sodden filth that is pressed
    Into ooze, and the sombre dirt spouts up at my hands
    As I make my way in twilight now to rest.
    The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous
    Â Â Â Â sands.
    A twisted thorn-tree still in the evening