The hold of WWI on the world we live in today

Being invited to write a poetic response to World War I by the Poetry Society to mark its centenary is a risky and potentially daunting commission.

The temptation is to write what would inevitably be a generic anti-war piece — an empathetic and angry mourning, or a retrospective protest against the slaughter. But what is there to be said in that vein that hasn’t already been said so eloquently and movingly by those poets infinitely more qualified to speak out about “the pity of war” — Owen, Rosenberg, Read, Trakl, Blok, Apollinaire, et al?

Accordingly I resolved to write the piece out of my current intellectual interests and poetic practice — and conform the commission brief — “write a poetic response to WWI” — into those.

I’m currently writing what will become two books of poetry.

Bloody, Proud And Murderous Men, Adulterers And Enemies Of God is an exploration of violence and the irrational. Incendium Amoris is an exultant affirmation of nature, people and place rooted in the writings, life and landscape of the 14th-century hermit, Richard Rolle of Hampole.

Both books — in different ways — critique the devastations and brutality of industrial capitalism and inchoately affirm a utopian, rural, agrarian alternative.

The WWI sequence I’ve written for “The Pity” — How Dear Life Is — contains the impulses and spirits of both those works — as such, a commissioned, occasional work has become something wholly of myself.

The overarching motif of How Dear Life Is is that of the Exodus. The poem imagines a journey from bondage to liberation.

The bondage is not merely that of war but that of the world-destroying growth-and-profit system (Pharaoh) in which we are all trapped and of which war is merely the extreme, hyperbolic expression.

The envisioned liberation is from that system — not just from war.

How Dear Life Is takes its title from the sixth volume of Henry Williamson’s semi-autobiographical A Chronicle Of Ancient Sunlight.

Williamson experienced WWI from the trenches and wrote about the slaughter with unflinching honesty and immense pathos.

He came to see WWI as a sacrifice of innocents on the altar of capital and believed that the Treaty of Versailles placed such a burden on Germany that WWII was inevitable.

Williamson believed that the history of the 20th-century — rise of Communism and Fascism, WWII, Cold War, the European Community— was ultimately a consequence of the WWI.

I share this belief, which lies behind and is expounded in my sequence. Globalisation, the rise of radical Islam and the ongoing impulse to wider and deeper the European Union are products of WWI dominating politics, culture, economics and society in our century.

However, a range of other influences inform the various component poems of How Dear Life Is — the Geneva Bible, particularly the book of Exodus, informs the opening poem, Business, As usual. Poems two and three — Tommy and The Corn Harvest — imagine moments in the life of my great-grandfather, who was killed on the Somme in 1917. The latter poem draws on Williamson’s A Fox Under My Cloak and Brueghel’s painting The Corn Harvest.

The fourth poem We Shall Remember Them, is dedicated to my former football teammate, Ian Cameron — killed at Kellingley Pit in 2009 — and compares the mining and war memorials in my home town of South Kirkby. The poem also narrates the pit accidents that maimed my grandfather and killed my wife’s.

The fifth, The Vision Of The White Crow, imagines the content of a fateful vision experienced by a gassed Austrian corporal as he recuperated in a Pomeranian military hospital in 1918 and references Hamburg gay bars, German reality-TV stars and the krautrock band Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, among other things.

The last poem, Rising, returns to the book of Exodus and references the break-up of Yugoslavia, Sykes-Picot, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Isis and Lee Rigby, lifts a line from Herbert Read and enters into exhortatory dialogue with a range of “war poets” before concluding with a loaded and ambivalent appraisal of Khalid al-Islambouli, the assassin of Egypt’s president Sadat in 1981.There’s a lot in it.

A version of this article was originally published in Poetry News.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter – wveditor@gmail.com
Connect with Well Versed on Facebook.