Candace Ward - World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others

If I should die, think only this of me:

That theres 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,

A body of Englands, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

When colour goes home into the eyes,

And lights that shine are shut again

With dancing girls and sweet birds cries

Behind the gateways of the brain;

And that no-place which gave them birth, shall close

The rainbow and the rose:

Still may Time hold some golden space

Where Ill unpack that scented store

Of song and flower and sky and face,

And count, and touch, and turn them oer,

Musing upon them; as a mother, who

Has watched her children all the rich day through

Sits, quiet-handed, in the fading light,

When children sleep, ere night.

Another poet writing in the early years of the war was Charles Hamilton Sorley. Sorley, the son of middle-class, intellectual parents, attended Marlborough College at Cambridge. From January to July 1914, Sorley traveled in Germany; he had intended to go to Oxford in the autumn of that year, but on August 6, two days after England declared war, he applied for a commission. Despite his early involvement in the war effort, Sorleys was not an unquestioning patriotism, nor did he experience the intense anti-German sentiment pervading England. Indeed, his letters reveal an early and deep skepticism about the war effort, and he was critical of the kind of attitude expressed in Brookes sonnets. Writing to a friend about The Soldier, Sorley criticized the self-important stance he read there:

[Brooke] is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) by the turn of circumstances, where non-compliance with this demand would have made life intolerable. It was not that they gave up anything ... but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude.

The attitude that Sorley exhibited in his own poetry was unsentimental and tragically ironic. Killed at the age of twenty at the Battle of Loos, Sorley saw more actual combat than Brooke, and experienced the horror of the first poison-gas attacks.