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  #1  
Unread 06-14-2022, 01:23 AM
R. S. Gwynn's Avatar
R. S. Gwynn R. S. Gwynn is offline
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Default Sigfried Sassoon Benediction

This film about one of my favorite poets is out this week. I don't think it will play many theaters, but it has been getting resoundingly good reviews.

One of my favorites by S. S.

Dreamers
BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON
Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

Last edited by R. S. Gwynn; 06-14-2022 at 01:36 AM.
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Unread 06-14-2022, 01:56 AM
Carl Copeland Carl Copeland is offline
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Thanks for this, Sam. A film to look for and a brilliant poem I don’t recall reading.

Carl
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Unread 06-14-2022, 04:54 AM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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Really? He always seemed like one of the weakest poets of the war to me, just above Brookes. I often wonder whether we like him because his poetry is actually good (a lot of it, including that poem you quoted, seems like prose put into rhyme and metre) or whether he spouted the morally- "correct" views about war. Owen did abject "pity" for the soldier in more interesting language, and easily out-mastered Sassoon; Isaac Rosenberg wrote better than both of them; and David Jones made them all look quite weak and old-fashioned. But then again, Sassoon and Owen were middle-class officers, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised that it is there poetry we weep over.
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Unread 06-14-2022, 06:12 AM
E. Shaun Russell E. Shaun Russell is offline
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Personally, I care far less about mastery than resonance. Brooke, Owen, and Sassoon were all strong war poets, and to quibble about which is better seems to me to miss the point.

The ending of Sassoon's "Glory of Women" has stuck with me since I first read it in high school. The poem is irredeemably misogynistic, but few sonnets have a more powerful volta than:
O German mother dreaming by the fire,

While you are knitting socks to send your son

His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
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Unread 06-14-2022, 06:47 AM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by E. Shaun Russell View Post
Personally, I care far less about mastery than resonance. Brooke, Owen, and Sassoon were all strong war poets, and to quibble about which is better seems to me to miss the point.

The ending of Sassoon's "Glory of Women" has stuck with me since I first read it in high school. The poem is irredeemably misogynistic, but few sonnets have a more powerful volta than:
O German mother dreaming by the fire,

While you are knitting socks to send your son

His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Moral sentiment is nice; mastery is eternal. Pity is unforgivable.

If moral sentiment is more important than "skill" then why read poetry? Prose will do just as well for that.
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Unread 06-14-2022, 08:28 AM
Carl Copeland Carl Copeland is offline
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Wisdom

When Wisdom tells me that the world’s a speck
Lost on the shoreless blue of God’s To-Day ...
I smile, and think, ‘For every man his way:
The world’s my ship, and I’m alone on deck!’
And when he tells me that the world’s a spark
Lit in the whistling gloom of God’s To-Night ...
I look within me to the edge of dark,
And dream, ‘The world’s my field, and I’m the lark,
Alone with upward song, alone with light!’
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Unread 06-14-2022, 09:21 AM
E. Shaun Russell E. Shaun Russell is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by W T Clark View Post
Moral sentiment is nice; mastery is eternal. Pity is unforgivable.

If moral sentiment is more important than "skill" then why read poetry? Prose will do just as well for that.
You speak as though poetry can be measured purely objectively, and that what you call "mastery," which it seems you equate with technique (a false equivalence, in my view) is far more important than the emotional impact on a reader or the moral takeaway. What I've always loved about formal poetry is that the best formal poems strike a balance between the objective and the subjective. Technique can be learned, but if you're not using that technique to produce something that is interesting, redolent, emotionally engaging, moral, or any number of other subjective metrics, what's the point for writing a poem? Case in point is with Sam's last thread on Wordsworth. Most of these lesser-known Wordsworth sonnets are technically masterful. But they're absolute bores.

This isn't a Musing on Mastery thread, so I won't go much further down this road here, but just for the sake of argument... You mention that "pity is unforgivable." Would you argue that Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" isn't a masterful poem with pity at its core?
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Unread 06-14-2022, 10:41 AM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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If you mean technique as metrical or sonic skillfulness then that is only the beginning. With the best poems, the emotional effect is produced from the inventiveness of language, the evocation in words itself, that is what I mean by "mastery". Sassoon, and to a lesser extent Owen, slop an emotional sentiment onto a skeleton of rhyme and metre. That is why most of Sassoon's poems seem like rhyming, iambic prose to me, often mannered. Brookes doesn't even have the right emotional sentiment, and is downright clichéd.

Pity is a terrible emotion that debases its subject. That Yeats' poem is great; but I wouldn't say there is an Owenian pity, there is imaginative empathy, that is great, that is what is required. But there has never been such a lie as "The poetry's in the pity". To resist pity is a moral imperative; poetry thrives off imaginative empathy.

Shaun Russell;480604]You speak as though poetry can be measured purely objectively, and that what you call "mastery," which it seems you equate with technique (a false equivalence, in my view) is far more important than the emotional impact on a reader or the moral takeaway. What I've always loved about formal poetry is that the best formal poems strike a balance between the objective and the subjective. Technique can be learned, but if you're not using that technique to produce something that is interesting, redolent, emotionally engaging, moral, or any number of other subjective metrics, what's the point for writing a poem? Case in point is with Sam's last thread on Wordsworth. Most of these lesser-known Wordsworth sonnets are technically masterful. But they're absolute bores.

This isn't a Musing on Mastery thread, so I won't go much further down this road here, but just for the sake of argument... You mention that "pity is unforgivable." Would you argue that Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" isn't a masterful poem with pity at its core?[/quote]
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  #9  
Unread 06-14-2022, 06:03 PM
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R. S. Gwynn R. S. Gwynn is offline
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Ancient History
BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON
Adam, a brown old vulture in the rain,
Shivered below his wind-whipped olive-trees;
Huddling sharp chin on scarred and scraggy knees,
He moaned and mumbled to his darkening brain;
‘He was the grandest of them all—was Cain!
‘A lion laired in the hills, that none could tire;
‘Swift as a stag; a stallion of the plain,
‘Hungry and fierce with deeds of huge desire.’

Grimly he thought of Abel, soft and fair—
A lover with disaster in his face,
And scarlet blossom twisted in bright hair.
‘Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace? ...
‘God always hated Cain’ ... He bowed his head—
The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead.

I can't see any rhymed and metered prose here, but Sassoon did write excellent prose.
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