The war to end all wars.” That was the ubiquitous sentiment about WWI. Never before in history had the world seen carnage and death from violence on such a grand scale. The sentiments and emotions that are expressed in the two following poems exemplify how the literati viewed this travesty. In the following two poems, one gets a clear sense of how the how world war one is often referred to as.
In Volume 57, No.1 of Scribner's is a poem by Olive Tilford Durgan titled, “This War.” Durgan, a native of the United States, writes a three part poem that is just as powerful in imagery as it is in emotions. The three parts of the poem can be understood as the war's beginning, the entrenchment, and the hopeful conclusion. In the first part, there is a reference to the assassination of the Archduke, “stricken by the spear of one.” In other words that the war was caused by one man's weapon. This simplistic version of events written using language that conjures to the mind one of man's most primitive weapons, the spear. In addition, Durgan utilizes imagery of death in relation to life in a clear way, paralleling the idea of love and death with one physical element, lips, “...that the lips that knew our kiss/ Are parched and black..” Delineating that the same lips that have in the past been a conduit of love are now a symbol of death. Durgan uses this parallel throughout this poem, the beauty of life with the ugliness of death. In part two of this poem, Durgan continues with her powerful exposition of the war's ugliness, but she places a seed of hope, “...and they/ Who wear with blush the fang and claw/May yet make love their law.” This line could be looked upon as a critique of the people in power. The people who wear blush, or rouge, are the same ones who are causing all this death and misery, i.e., those in power. In the third part of the poem, the anthropomorphic description of peace sets the tone for the future, “But be the minstrel breath of Peace/For her alone lift up you lyre.” In other words, that peace should reign over humanity and the conclusion of the war should come to pass. This sentiment is expressed a second time in the poem, when Durgan writes, “And Peace shall cast after her seed,/Shall set the fields where skulls have lain.” This exhibits another instance of the aforementioned life and death parallel, here striking the tone of re-birth from death. Throughout this poem, Durgan uses language in an almost celestial way, the imagery and evocative bare emotions frame the war in a poetic yet toxic sphere, leaving the reader with hope that the end of the war is around the corner.
The next poem is by Osbert Sitwell, titled “Youth and Age,” which is from the magazine, Wheels, Volume 3. This poem, written in 1918, is in two parts, the first titled 'Youth' and the other 'The Old.' There is an interesting contrast between the two sections. 'Youth,' describes an elderly gentleman's death, which would seem strange considering the title. One could submit that the section titles are describing the world's youth, it's pre-war existence. And in a continuation of that theme, the second part of the poem describes the world's aging from the horrors of war. This can be seen from the description in the second part, “Throughout this dreadful war we sit and sigh/For all the youthful millions that must die.” In other words, the first section that describes the old world order, where age is death's causation, compared to the second part, where age is supplanted by war as the main cause of death. In addition, this poem seems to tackle the issue of veterans returning home. This is evidenced by Sitwell writing, “They never lost their faculties' we sing” and then writing later about the eventual griping about their, the veteran's, injuries and disfigurements that will commence, “Why can't the old keep quiet, and sit and sigh?” In other words, those that maintained their faculties, mental acuity, but lost their physical wholeness, will eventually be looked down upon by the populace. Throughout this poem, the tone is reflective and sentimental, which would match the time period that the poem was written in, toward the end of the war. After so much death and suffering, it is not difficult to imagine the author seeing the paradigm shift from pre-war to post-war Europe.
To conclude, the traumatic effect that the war had on Europe is immeasurable and an attempt to quantify it through the abstract practice of literary analysis seems futile. Although the poets, Durgan and Sitwell, do an exemplary service to the contemporary generation in dramatizing the war through the use of categorization of 'pre' and 'post' war events (Sitwell) or euphemistic language (Durgan). Through these two viewpoints, one gets a peek into the perspectives of then-current poets on the awe-inspiring violence that man perpetrated on himself.
