Fostering Critical Literacy Through the Analysis of World War I Poetry
Hugo Dart, Adriana Nogueira Accioly Nóbrega, Brazil
Hugo Dart has been an EFL teacher since 1998, having worked at IBEU (Instituto Brasil-Estados Unidos), in Rio de Janeiro, since 2010. He began specializing in intercultural education during his 2012 course at NILE (Norwich Institute for Language Education), and he is a member of the board of the Braz-Tesol Intercultural Language Education SIG, where he participates in training and in the development of projects in the area. E-mail: hugo.dart@gmail.com
Adriana Nogueira Accioly Nóbrega is a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in the area of Language Studies. Her research projects focus on Applied Linguistics, mainly in pedagogical contexts, considering the interface between systemic-functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis; sociocultural theory; narrative and identity studies. E-mail: adriananobrega@puc-rio.br
Menu
Abstract
Introduction
Theoretical background
Methods
The poems
Analysis of the poems
The exploratory practice activity
Conclusions
References
This article aims at discussing how critical literacy can be fostered in EFL students by means of the linguistic analysis of poetry. With the use of concepts from the Appraisal system (Martin 2000b), we analyzed the World War I poems The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke, and Dulce Et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen. We then conducted an Exploratory Practice activity with students of a private language school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As learners were introduced to ways of understanding how Brooke and Owen pieces of poetry which stand to this day as powerful representatives of opposing points of view towards the idea of dying for one’s country, they were able to reflect on the social and historical aspects of literacy. The activity points to a macro way of reading, as the complex and active meaning-making process carried out by students requires them to go beyond their most immediate cultural references and try to incorporate into their understanding a multitude of perspectives.
Among all who enjoy reading poetry there are those like ourselves, who believe they are able to tell just when a certain poem speaks to them, and when it does not. Besides whatever feelings and idiosyncrasies may be at play at any given situation, the skill of the author in the use of linguistic features has an importance that may not be immediately apparent to some of us. Studying different aspects of language, such as the ones investigated by Michael Halliday (Halliday-Hasan 1989) and James Martin (Martin-White 2005), could help those readers enhance their understanding of the ways in which intended meaning are construed.
For a number of scholars, Rupert Brooke’s 1914 poem The Soldier and Wilfred Owen’s 1917 poem Dulce Et Decorum Est are highly representative examples of two opposing attitudes towards the sacrifice made by World War I soldiers – a sacrifice that the authors themselves would make, as poet soldiers who died during the War, not very long after producing their respective pieces. Brooke wrote at the beginning of the War, having been to it but unaware, as most people were at the time, of the true horrors that were about to arise. His Soldier is the ultimate celebration of how wonderful it is to die for one’s country. In stark contrast, Owen, who enlisted after Brooke’s death, experienced such horrors firsthand and eventually set as a declared goal to alert the people about the unmitigated tragedy of war, which he does in his poem.
This article discusses what semantic effects are created by means of the choices made by Brooke and Owen, and what happened as we investigated how the poems reach today’s readers – namely, a group of advanced English students from a language school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Through a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective – as developed by Michael Halliday (Halliday-Hasan 1989; Eggins 2004) – and resorting in particular to Appraisal analysis as explained in the work of James Martin (Martin-White 2005), each verse in the poems is examined. In addition, the results of an Exploratory Practice (EP) activity (Allwright 2001) suggest ways in which the two poems are read by the language students who were exposed to the texts in our research.
It may be difficult for people who were born decades after the end of the conflict to imagine what an important role poetry played in World War I Britain. According to David Roberts (1996), the short poetry of that time could be compared to television news bulletins that reported on later wars, in terms of the urgency with which poets let their countrymen know of the horrifying scenes that played out in the battlefield. Besides that, some of the best of those authors were also responding to lesser peers. That was the case of Wilfred Owen himself, in the poem that is analyzed herein (ibid.).
If Owen’s qualities as a poet – including his unique ability to translate his experiences as a soldier into verse – have some authors place him among England’s greatest, Rupert Brooke’s powerful rhetoric, while a reflection of his talent, hides a man who lacked some clarity in his ideas (ibid.). Going to war earlier than the other poet soldiers, Brooke responded to the threat of death by artillery fire with sentiments that evoked “thrill and patriotic duty to a mythical land that must have seemed remote, if beautiful, to most soldiers” (Egremont 2014, p.46). The impact of his words endures to this day.
The connection between the two poets can be traced with little difficulty. In November of 1915, just after enlisting, Owen bought a copy of a posthumously published edition of Brooke’s poems (ibid.). His enthusiasm for fighting for England would develop slowly, though, and the feeling that it was necessary to provide a counterpoint to pro-war poets would come even later, after he himself suffered from ‘shell-shock’, which we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
The poems by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen that are analyzed herein form a unique pair for a number of reasons. From a genre perspective, they are both World War I poems, written by Englishmen who were also combatants during the war. That shows us that they come from the same cultural background, as their authors shared some fundamentally identity-defining circumstances. As Miller (1984, 2015) points out, genre is a social action, and the two selected poems can be understood as the materialization of the social reality of the time they were written, that is, as the representation of the context in which they were embedded.
There is little room for controversy in this regard. The Soldier and Dulce Et Decorum Est were written and have always been read as war poems. So representative of the genre are they that excerpts from each have been used as titles of books about World War I poetry – A Corner of a Foreign Field (Croxley Green: Atlantic Publishing, 2007) from the former and Some Desperate Glory (Egremont 2014) from the latter
From a theoretical standpoint, this research drew on analytical tools from the Appraisal System developed by a group led by Professor James Martin, from the University of Sydney. The Appraisal System was formulated within the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) paradigm designed by Michael Halliday and his collaborators. According to Halliday, “a text is essentially a semantic unit”, an “instance of living language that is playing some part in a context of situation” (Halliday-Hasan 1989, p. 10). That context of situation comprises extralinguistic features of a text which make it what it is. It is always inserted in a context of culture, which can be described as “the sum of all the meanings it is possible to mean in that particular culture” (Butt et al 2000, pp. 11-12), and is responsible for the schematic or rhetorical structure of a text.
In this view, the use of language has the function of making meanings. Those meanings are connected with the contexts in which exchanges take place, and in which choices are made in the production of every utterance (Eggins 2004). In the words of Suzanne Eggins, understanding language as a social semiotic system makes it possible for us to focus on how each choice results in language that makes meanings and is appropriate or inappropriate in relation to its context (ibid.). That is an expression of the interdependent and dialectical relation that exists between text and context.
Three features of context are particularly relevant to language use. They are the register variables identified as “mode (amount of feedback and role of language), tenor (role relations of power and solidarity) and field (topic or focus of the activity)” (ibid., p. 9). Halliday also identifies three metafunctions, which correspond to the three main purposes for which language seems to have evolved and which relate to the register variables: Ideational (related to field) – to talk about what is happening, what has happened, what will happen – Interpersonal (related to tenor) – to interact and/or to express a point of view – and Textual (related to mode) – to organize the two previous meanings into a coherent whole (Butt et al 2000).
Martin focuses on the interpersonal metafunction of language and on how those who produce texts “approve and disapprove, enthuse and abhor, applaud and criticize, and with how they position their readers/listeners to do likewise” (Martin-White 2005, p. 1). Appraisal is made up of three domains which interact with each other – Attitude (“our feelings, including emotional reaction, judgments of behavior and evaluation of things”), Engagement (“sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse”) and Graduation (“grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred”) (ibid., p. 35).
The domain of Attitude, by its turn, is divided in the three regions of feeling with which this analysis concerns itself: Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. Affect has to do with how one feels; judgment, with attitudes according to which behavior is either admired or criticized, praised or condemned; appreciation, with evaluating semiotic and natural phenomena, which in any given field may be valued or not (ibid.). Linguistic choices made by the author of a given text may convey affect, judgment or appreciation which is either positive or negative, and which is stronger or – often by means of modalization – weaker.
Because we focused on the linguistic choices – as in verbs, adjectives and so on – that were made by Brooke and Owen in such a way that The Soldier and Dulce Et Decorum Est became powerful representatives of opposing points of view towards the idea of dying for one’s country, it was necessary to look at every part of speech and its meaning, and its intended effect on readers. The method was to analyze the poems, verse by verse, guided by Appraisal notions from Systemic Functional Linguistics. Identifying what instances of affect, judgment and appreciation are present in the poems led to an increased understanding of the texts, for those choices can make us aware of the authors’ positioning towards the experiences they narrate or upon which they reflect.
Our next step involved Exploratory Practice (EP), which is presented by Dick Allwright as a teacher development strategy that consists in action for understanding (Allwright 2001). It differs from Reflective Practice because it involves action, and from Action Research because it does not aim at making changes. Instead, the researcher simply collects or generates data which are to further their understanding of the chosen topic. Allwright is very clear on how EP is about developing situational understanding rather than producing practical solutions to practical problems (Allwright 2000). In order to reach the desired understanding, it is sometimes necessary to adapt or create potentially exploitable pedagogic activities (PEPAs). Allwright emphasizes the point that standard pedagogic activities rather than standard academic data-collecting techniques should be used at that stage (ibid.).
A cloze activity was carried out with a group of teenage advanced students at IBEU – Instituto Brasil-Estados Unidos, a major private language course in Rio de Janeiro. On October 26th, 2015, students were presented with the two poems, a few words removed from each one. We explained to the students from where the poems were, and that we were challenging them to come up with possible ways to fill in the gaps. We said nothing about our research at the time so that they would not be influenced by our own views or expectations. Because there were only eight students present and because we wanted them to have a chance to exchange ideas before getting to their final answers, the class was divided in three groups of two or three participants each, whose contributions are reproduced below.
The Soldier
Rupert Brooke
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;
A body of England’s, 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.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
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
Pro patria mori.
We performed a complete analysis, verse by verse, of the two poems in the light of Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Appraisal System. Because of space considerations, we do not reproduce here the entire analysis, but only a few excerpts which should illustrate the path we took.
The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
Brooke begins with the modalization expressed by should, by which the hypothesis of the narrator’s death seems to be deemed more remote than if he had said If I die. The death of a soldier that goes to war is always a possible outcome, but Brooke does not wish his reader to see it as an impending inevitability.
The imperative think in the second clause establishes the dialogic relationship between poet and reader as monoglossic, as the absence of a modal formulation such as you should think or you must think does not allow for an alternative possibility. It is a direct command, one which is immediately reinforced by the word only. Whatever follows the colon – and nothing else – is what the reader is to think of the narrator. The reader, by their turn, understands from the use of the imperative and lack of modality that no other option is given to them, and that they are about to be introduced to what the narrator wants them to think of him.
That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.
The reference to the site where the soldier will be buried contains a number of indications that the place is an undetermined one. Some corner is not a specific corner, but a random one. The choice of the noun corner is itself significant, as a corner is an unremarkable place, probably undistinguishable from the area that surrounds it.
What we also learn about the grave here is that it is not in England, but in a foreign field. The narrator apparently expects his death to occur overseas, as he is to be sent to fight in other countries. However, he does not seem to know, or wish to reveal, which one it is. A foreign field can be in any country where the war is being fought.
Brooke establishes the central image of his poem in saying that the narrator’s grave, although located abroad, is for ever England. His body, and later his corpse, is a piece of his homeland, as in the international diplomatic convention according to which a country’s embassy is considered part of its territory, rather than part of the territory of the country that hosts it. Here, however, there is no legal agreement between nations. Brooke is the one that affirms that the soldier’s dead body is part of England, and forever so. That notion is at the core of what the poet instructs his readers to think of him.
Brooke seems to be construing the strong sense of patriotism that is required from soldiers and citizens who love their country. The narrator is gradually revealed to be a soldier who is not only patriotic enough to die for his country, but one whose death may even be welcome, if it happens in the name of the country.
There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
That is what shall happen, and in that modality the author still distances himself from the future he predicts. What he describes is what he expects will happen, not something about which he is sure. For the reader, it is therefore a possibility, rather than a certainty, that there is to be richer dust in that rich earth.
Dead, the soldier becomes dust – “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” –, and is going to be buried in soil that is rich, fertile. His corpse, however, is even richer, because it is part of England. As the bodies of Union soldiers who died during the Battle of Gettysburg, in the American Civil War, had consecrated the soil in which they were buried far above President Abraham Lincoln himself could (as in The Gettysburg Address), so does the body of the English soldier make that rich earth even richer.
The use of the comparative form richer can be interpreted as establishing a continuum in which the soil of the land where the narrator’s body is buried is at an inferior degree than the organic material that is the corpse itself. In this case, the continuum might be one of moral worthiness or, in a more literal sense, of fertility, which would reinforce the notion that dying for England is worth it. Turned back into that richer dust, the corpse would symbolize not the end of a portion of the country, but its continuation – and even its expansion to that foreign land.
The notion of appraisal is at play here, as the positive value of the adjective rich and the intensification expressed by the use of the comparative form seem to tell the reader what is the point of view of the author about the land and about the dead body.
Fi
nally, here, it should be clarified that concealing does not seem to be associated with the intention of deceiving. The richer dust is concealed simply because it is underground, representing England.
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
The three verbs seem to illustrate, in chronological order, the very beginning of the narrator’s existence. There appears to be another continuum here, in which the successive steps of formation of the narrator are in a crescendo – the person is first born, then acquires the individualized shape of a recognizable human being that is distinct from all others, and then becomes self-aware and aware of what there is in the world that surrounds him.
The country itself is the agent. It was England, rather than his parents or any other entity, which gave birth to him, shaped him and gave him consciousness.
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
The use of the feminine pronoun to refer to the country is a marker of animacy which is in consonance with the author’s intention to present England as a benign entity, one whose generosity appears to be expressed by the verb give. The feminine entity would be the motherland, the mother who gives life itself and who teaches all that is essential.
Once could indicate an indeterminate time in the narrator’s life, when he was younger and could enjoy England’s flora and paths. As the reader is presented with the information that English flowers were to be loved and English ways to be roamed, appraisal analysis indicates how the positive character of the country’s features is highlighted. Both that flora and those paths are some of the nice, pleasant features of a beautiful nation.
A body of England’s,
The phrase that indicates that the narrator’s body belongs to England seems to reinforce the initial idea that his body will one day be a part of his homeland abroad. The ownership that is expressed in the verse tells the reader once again that the soldier and his country cannot be separated.
breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
Those three phrases may be seen as forming another continuum, one in which there is a progression of positive effects that certain features of England have had on the narrator. Firstly, there is the air that has been breathed by him. The action of breathing might not be seen as positive or negative itself, but the fact that it is English air appears to tell the reader that that air is special – positively appraised because it is from England. Then, there are the rivers, also special for being English, that have washed him, in an action containing a positive value associated with the cleansing of what is impure. Finally, the suns of home have blest the narrator, which is a lot more than simply warming him. In the continuum, blessing can be seen as holding the highest position. The reader is thus informed, again in a crescendo, of the positive impact of England on the narrator.
The plural in suns is not likely to be literal, but rather a reference to each new day that has been lived by the narrator while in England. However, another possible interpretation is that the verse also contains the same pun that is in the opening lines of William Shakespeare’s Richard III – “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York” – in which the title character is referring both to the sun in the sky and to his brother, the king, son of the York house. As the poem is read, the homophony could cause the reader to think also of the sons of England – the narrator’s countrymen, his friends and relatives, who have also blest him.
The semantic effect achieved by Rupert Brooke is a very powerful one. By expressing how thankful he is to England for all that the country has given him, he justifies his pride in the possibility of dying for it and then remaining forever a small piece of it abroad. The England that he describes is no ordinary country, but an idealized, mythical place for which it is worth dying.
Highly articulate, privileged, well-educated and very sensitive, Rupert Brooke was the most famous young poet of his time. In late 1914 and early 1915, after participating in a failed effort to defend Antwerp, he wrote a series of five sonnets, which included The Soldier. They were resounding, assertive poems that glorified England and the idea of dying for England (Roberts 1996). In terms of structure, The Soldier is in a Petrarchan sonnet form, with an opening octet and a closing sestet, written in iambic pentameter.
Writing at the beginning of the war, at a time when the horrors of 20th century warfare were still unknown and the national mood was that of admiration for military heroism, Brooke hadn’t been seriously affected by his time in Belgium. His sonnets express better than virtually any other literary piece of the time the identification between man and nation, and the ultimate glory that is dying for that nation – to the point that the third sonnet in the series, The Rich Dead (“There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old/But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold”), mirrors a speech Henry V makes to his soldiers in the eponymous play by Shakespeare (“For he to-day that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,/This day shall gentle his condition”).
Brooke sailed for the Mediterranean in March of 1915, on the way to what would be the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. In Egypt, he suffered from sunstroke and a mosquito bite that turned septic. With acute blood poisoning, he died on April 23rd, when his ship was anchored off the Greek island of Skyros, and was buried there, thus fulfilling the premise of The Soldier¬ – there is indeed “a corner of a foreign field that is forever England”.
The influence of The Soldier extends into outer space. The speech drafted by William Safire for President Richard Nixon, to be used if the first moon landing did not go as planned and Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin had been stranded on Earth’s satellite, read that “there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind” (Safire 1999).
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Throughout the entire poem, Owen uses figurative meanings in the intensification of processes. The first example is in the first verse, where the exhaustion felt by the group of soldiers has them walking bent double, and not upright as strong fighters would. There is a stark contrast with the traditional image of powerful young men in the first simile, like old beggars under sacks. The soldiers are in such a state that they look like beggars, and old ones at that – therefore even more frail –, and ones that are under heavy weights – under sacks.
In the continuum that can be seen in that image, the notion of appraisal seems to apply, as negative elements are progressively added on top of each other, thus creating for the reader an image of the soldiers as beings in a terrible condition. Those who walk are helpless like beggars; more than that, they are weak like old beggars; more than that, they are submitted to heavy loads like old beggars under sacks.
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
The soldiers’ legs are curved inward at the knees, which is another reason they cannot walk properly. They are also coughing like hags. In this second simile, the soldiers are compared to ugly old women. Their coughing seems to indicate they are sickened.
The subject pronoun we tells the reader that the narrator is telling his own story of suffering. He was one of the men in such a terrible state, the state of one who can barely walk, coughs from possible sickness, curses and moves along unwelcoming terrain.
The terrain is thick, wet mud, difficult to walk on. It is perhaps the very same rich earth in which Rupert Brooke’s soldier is to be buried, but seen in a rather different light. Owen and his comrades have to curse through it. The expression of their negative feelings towards their condition is part of what makes them go. As Andrew Barker (Mycroftlectures-b) points out, although ‘curse’ is not a verb of movement, it is made one by Owen. The reader might here imagine that the force of anger is in itself capable of driving the soldiers onwards.
In the choice of the noun sludge, there is negative appraisal, for one would rather walk on firm ground than on sludge, so the reader might consider that to be one more element that indicates how undesirable the situation of the soldiers is.
(…)
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
The narrator now tells the reader that the memory of the incident is always with him – in “all his dreams”, which is quite significant, as the totality of his dreams appear now to be nightmares about that day.
In those nightmares, he relives the scene helpless, unable to help the dying soldier, as he probably felt on the day of the attack. The reader seems to be presented here with the notion of the narrator’s impotence in face of the tragedy.
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
In the nightmare, the desperate, dying soldier thrusts himself onto the narrator, which could be the ultimate expression of his desperation, seeking for help. Yet the narrator is helpless himself.
The three verbs that follow seem to establish another clear continuum that allows the reader to imagine the moment of the soldier’s death. Guttering means to flow in rivulets, or the melting away of a candle – in either case, an image that is more delicate than dramatic. Choking is more serious, as the amount of fluid becomes too much for the man to handle. Drowning leaves no escape, for, because the soldier’s lungs have now collapsed, it is as if he was submerged in the “green sea”. The repetition of this last word, which also closed the previous section, only two verses before, could enhance the force of the idea, and make it more likely to stay on the mind of the reader.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
The final stanza of the poem begins with the poet addressing the reader directly for the first time, with the pronoun you. He seems to be ready to reach his conclusion. In fact, the entire stanza can be read as a statement in the second conditional.
The hypothetical begins with the imaginary situation of the reader finding themselves in the same situation of the narrator, walking behind the wagon that carried the dying soldier. That imaginary situation would take place “in some smothering dream”, which seems to present the reader with the condition of sharing the nightmares that the narrator has. The nightmare itself would be smothering, suffocating, in a possible parallel with the suffocation of the gas victim himself.
The soldier was flung into the wagon, which means it was not placed there with care, but in a sudden and forceful way. That could indicate to the reader that the situation did not allow for the victim to be treated with gentleness. In the middle of a war zone, moving a soldier who is inevitably going to die could not be a solemn procedure.
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
Besides walking behind the wagon, two more actions are described by the author as part of the hypothetical dream that the reader would share. The first one is to watch the man’s eyes twisting in pain. The reader can here imagine themselves looking at the man as he dies, and taking in the suffering.
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
This verse seems to contain a description of how deformed the soldier’s face was made by the effects of the gas. It was hanging, as if no longer properly attached to muscles and bone. The face is compared to that of a devil that is “sick of sin”. That could represent the highest level of disgust, as a devil who is sick of sin would be one who has experienced too much depravity, to the point of being repelled by it. As a devil would be a creature of sin themselves, such extreme depravity would have to be beyond any and every limit. Owen could be saying here that the evil of war is at such a level.
The reader can here imagine that the face of the dying soldier is therefore an expression of the most intense suffering.
(…)
My friend,
There does not seem to be much room for controversy regarding who that friend was. The poem was originally addressed to Jessie Pope, and later to ‘a certain Poetess’. Like Rupert Brooke, Pope was famous for writing patriotic verses and some of her ‘recruitment poems’ could be quite aggressive. Although the dedication was later removed so that the poem could reach a larger audience, Owen’s readers at the time of the War could have understood the reference.
you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The nucleus of the clause in the second conditional sentence that expresses the consequence seems to be here, with the main verb tell at its center. If Jessie Pope – or anyone else – could experience all that the poet describes in the previous verses, there is something they would not tell children. In typical second conditional form, the modal introduces the result that is predicted by the author of the hypothetical that had been proposed by him in the ‘if’ clauses. He appears to be certain that what he says here would be the result. The reader is to be left with that certainty.
That which would not be told to children were the hypothetical true would have to be what is told in reality, and told with high zest. Owen’s readers might see here that there is something that is being told with a great sense of enjoyment and enthusiasm. The adjective such to qualify the high zest appears to mean that the author believes that there would be less zest from the addressee of the poem.
Those to which something is being told are characterized as children, which could be literal, or, what seems to be more likely, referring to young men who, in their innocence, are willing to go fight in the War. The fact that they are ardent for glory which is desperate seems to be a way for the author to emphasize not once, but twice how eager those young men are. The reader might see here a sense of great urgency from the children in achieving glory.
The glory itself might be what the young men who were unaware of the reality of combat, and thus susceptible to the influence of recruitment verses, equaled to being soldiers in the War.
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est,br>
Pro patria mori.
The Latin verse is a line from the Roman lyrical poet Horace’s Odes, and it translates as ‘it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country’. Often quoted to celebrate the sacrifice of those who have died in battle, the phrase is the motto of military organizations in several countries. Owen calls it the lie that is being told to young men during the War. By doing that, he appears to be making his position clear to the reader: dying for one’s country is neither sweet nor proper, as authors like Pope (and Brooke) might say, but rather quite terrible.
Owen does not say the phrase ‘is a lie’, but nominalizes and finishes with the noun Lie, thus apparently leaving his readers no alternative but to accept that the Latin phrase is indeed a lie.
Finally, the apparently unjustified capitalization of the initial L in Lie seems to indicate that the author wishes to present the phrase as especially important. The capitalization could be a way of highlighting its importance to the reader.
Precisely on the eve of Rupert Brooke’s death, the Germans carried out, at Langemark, Belgium, the first significant use of gas in war, which is what Wilfred Owen vividly describes in his poem. Owen, who, before becoming a soldier, even wrote a pro-war poem, was profoundly affected by what he experienced. Although he fully believed in his responsibilities as a soldier, in the end, he felt, very much like Sassoon, that it was also his duty to alert the people about the horrible reality of war (Roberts 1996). He wrote that “all a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful”.
Wilfred Owen expresses with unparalleled accuracy the true horrors of trench warfare. The semantic effect he achieves is that of letting his readers get as close as possible to the suffering of the soldiers, in such a way that neither his generation nor any of the ones that have come since can claim to ignore the fact that dying for one’s country may be necessary, but it is not ‘sweet and proper’. Structurally, Dulce Et Decorum Est is in two parts, with an 8-line and a 6-line stanza in the first and a 2-line and a 12-line stanza in the second.
Owen enlisted in October of 1915. Suffering from shell-shock after a series of traumas that included gas attacks, he was sent to military hospitals in France, then Hampshire, and finally Edinburgh, where he met fellow English poet Siegfried Sassoon, whom he greatly admired and who influenced him to develop his poetry. Owen was able to merge his romantic style with Sassoon’s gritty realism, in a poetic synthesis that resulted in a body of work that is both potent and sympathetic. He was killed by German fire on November 4th, 1918, exactly one week before the armistice.
In the following reproduction of the cloze activity, the words suggested by the students are after each gap. In a couple of cases, they could think of nothing; in a few others, their ideas were excellent. In spite of the difficulty they had, they clearly enjoyed being shown what the actual missing words were.
The Soldier
Rupert Brooke
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever ______ (alone/abandoned). There shall be
In that rich earth a ______ (single/small) dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her ______ (ways/chance/heart/name) to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the ______ (tears/light/water/rain), 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 ______ (love/soldiers) by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams ______ (rise/light/sweet/bright) as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In ______ (earth/place) at peace, under an English heaven.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old ______ (land) under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant ______ (way/place/land/fate) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with ______ (pain/blood/hope); deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was ______ (no ideas) out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him ______(fight/cry/die).
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could ______ (breathe/see), at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as ______ (no ideas), bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To ______ (burn/fight) ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
On November 16th, 2015, we went back to those students and finally told them about the historical context of the poems. In our conversation, the students’ reactions can be summarized in the following manner:
- They now believed to understand the main point of each poem;
- They were greatly impressed by what eventually happened to Brooke and to Owen;
- They liked Dulce Et Decorum Est better, because it “said something about the reality of war”.
Several of the words that the students proposed in the activity are remarkably close, respectively, to the positive and negative, stronger and weaker choices made by Brooke and Owen, as interpreted in our analysis. Such proximity, of course, proves nothing, but adds to the dialogical aspect of this research.
The analyses of the two poems suggested the various linguistics mechanisms used by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen in order to realize their desired semantic effects, creating vivid, if opposed, images of what going to war meant to men who lived one century ago. Throughout the analysis, it was possible to notice that the fact that the two men were writing within the same context of culture – World War I England – but, as mentioned earlier, rather distinct contexts of situation, seems to have led them to pointedly different sets of linguistic choices. The EP activity provided a complementary perspective, as the ideas that occurred to the students who participated showed that The Soldier and Dulce Et Decorum Est still have something to say, at this time when sacrifice oneself for one’s country has meant enduring horrors which could not be imagined until rather recently.
We agree with teacher educators Uwe Pohl and Margit Szesztay when they state that the realm of ELT encompasses wider aims (Pohl-Szesztay 2015). Intercultural encounters such as the ones that took place throughout this research, as Brazilian teachers and students sought to understand the work of English war poets, can open doors to dealing with otherness in a more empathetic manner. As a number of recent political developments around the world make all too clear, there is tremendous need for that right now.
On a personal note, reflecting upon how each of the poems speaks to us became inevitable during the course of this investigation. In the end, Brooke’s vision was – is – a source of inspiration, which is an essential part of human life. What Owen had to say, however, was about opening our eyes to the realities of war. That can lead to an improved sense of perspective. In the words of Carl Sagan, “think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot” (Sagan 1994). In this so often chaotic world, that seems to be even more necessary.
There is a memorial to World War I poets located in the Poets’ Corner inside Westminster Abbey, in London. The memorial is a slate stone slab with the names of the poets inscribed on it, and a quote by one of them – none other than Wilfred Owen. His is the final word. The quote reads:
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
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Mycroftlectures (a). Rupert Brooke – The Soldier – Full lecture and analysis by Dr. Andrew Barker. Retrieved January, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB6nUtRSPxg& index=2
Mycroflectures (b). Wilfred Owen – Dulce Et Decorum Est – Full lecture and analysis by Dr. Andrew Barker. Retrieved January, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= DB6nUtRSPxg&index=2
Pohl, U. and Szesztay, M. (2015). Bringing creative, critical and compassionate thinking into ELT. Humanising Language Teaching, Year 17, Issue 2. Retrieved January, 2017, from http://hltmag.co.uk/ apr15/sart06.htm
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