greykit.poetry — #1910s
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns — no mockeries, no prayers; their only memorial the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Dulce et Decorum Est
Owen's soldiers march exhausted through sludge; a gas attack takes one too slow with his helmet; the speaker inverts Horace's old lie — you would not glorify war if you had watched this man drown in his own lungs.
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Futility
Move him into the sun — it woke him always, even in France, until this morning and this snow; was it for this the clay grew tall? — O what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all?
-
1919
[rudyard-kipling]
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
Kipling’s bleak parable — the plain truths you can deny, ignore, or outlaw, but never escape.
-
1919
[w-b-yeats]
The Wild Swans at Coole
On his nineteenth October at Coole Park, Yeats counts fifty-nine swans and watches them mount and scatter — unwearied, their hearts not grown old — and wonders where they will delight men's eyes when he wakes to find they have flown away.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God — yet men sear and smear the soil, shod from feeling it; and yet the Holy Ghost broods over the bent world with warm breast and bright wings.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Pied Beauty
A curtal sonnet of thanksgiving for dappled things — brinded skies, rose-moles on trout, finches' wings, landscape plotted and pieced — all fathered-forth by a beauty past change.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Spring and Fall: to a young child
Hopkins asks Márgarét, weeping at Goldengrove's unleaving, whether she grieves for the world or for herself — sorrow's springs are the same; it is the blight man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
The Windhover
Watching a kestrel ride the morning wind, Hopkins finds mastery — the achieve of the thing — that buckles into the beauty of Christ; even the plough-share, shéer plód, flashes gold-vermillion.
-
1916
[w-b-yeats]
Easter, 1916
Yeats's elegy for the leaders of the Easter Rising — men he had passed with a nod, transformed utterly by their sacrifice into a terrible beauty that is born.
-
1915
[t-s-eliot]
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Prufrock's hesitant interior monologue circles a visit never quite made — measuring life in coffee spoons, hearing the mermaids sing, asking "Do I dare?" — a portrait of paralysis and the fear of the overwhelming question.
-
1912
[thomas-hardy]
The Convergence of the Twain
Hardy's cold meditation on the Titanic and the iceberg, grown in shadowy distance as twin halves of one august event, until the Spinner of the Years said "Now!" and jarred two hemispheres.
-
1910
[rudyard-kipling]
If—
A father’s litany of self-mastery — the whole world for the price of composure.
-
1910
[rudyard-kipling]
The Way Through the Woods
A road the forest swallowed — and the ghosts you can almost hear still riding it.