'Does it Matter?'

On Sunday we have our annual Remembrance Day ceremony and service, and our 77th Poem of the Week is a reference to this. It was read out in Chapel this morning by Mrs Haslett in her talk to the school about the Poppy Fund and its origins.


'Does it Matter?' by Siefried Sassoon
 
Does it matter?—losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
 
Does it matter?—losing your sight?...
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit?...
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.

'The Send -Off'

Today is Remembrance Day, and we've just had our annual ceremony on Chapel Square, with the laying of the memorial wreath by the Senior Prefect in memory of Columbans who died in wars.

Here's the first repeated Poem of the Week (previously posted two years) ago, just because it's so appropriate. Wilfred Owen's quiet and devastating 'The Send-Off' can be read in full here, and is spoken by Kenneth Branagh above.

If you're in the College, and you've arrived here via the funny thing in the right-corner by scanning it on your House noticeboard, well done. It's a QR code, and the English Department will be experimenting with these. You just need a 'smartphone' and a QR reader such as NeoReader. For a thorough explanation of QR codes, go to James Michie's excellent article here.

Remembrance Week 6

Our 59th Poem of the Week (poems which are posted around the school, and read and discussed in English classes) is 'Vergissmeinnicht' by Keith Douglas. Above, an animation by Jim Clark of the poem. This is the last post in our Remembrance series, concluding today after the Act of Remembrance on Chapel Square this morning.

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

Remembrance Week 5

Pictured, a display of books of war poetry arranged by our Librarian Mr McConville, from among the many resources on this subject in the English Literature section. There are plenty of anthologies on the shelves, as well as books by single authors, including, pictured, Brian Turner's Here, Bullet (whose 'The Baghdad Zoo' was Poem of the Week in April 2008).

Remembrance Week 3

The Guardian reports in an interview with the author Michael Morpugo that the papers of Siegfried Sassoon (author of 'Attack', from Wednesday's Chapel talk) are being bought by Cambridge University. Among these papers is the famous 'A Soldier's Declaration', which opens Pat Barker's novel Regeneration, which we have studied several times for the Leaving Certificate.

Morpugo says :- This collection is vital to our understanding of war both then and now. The poets of the first world war – Sassoon, and others like Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas – evoke the pain and suffering of war in a way that I, when I discovered them aged 14 or 15, found riveting. I was a war baby. Born in 1943, I grew up with the suffering of the second world war all around me. I played in bomb sites, and my mother cried often, mourning the death of the uncle I never knew – Uncle Peter, who was in the RAF and was shot down in 1940, aged 21, and whose photograph was always on the mantelpiece. But it was only when I read Sassoon, and the others, that I realised how extraordinarily brave these soldiers, and these poets, were. They faced down the most difficult thing for any of us to face down: our own mortality.

It's worth reading Morpugo's full piece.

Remembrance Week 2

A second post on war and literature for this week, leading up to November 11th.

Teachers may find useful the Peace Pledge Union microsite on war poetry. This has 30 poems from the 20th century divided into The 1930s / The Second World War / Crimes Against Humanity / The Nuclear Age / Other Wars / Responsibility and Women's Voices. In this last section, there's a poem called Tortures by Wislawa Szymborska (see yesterday's post about her poem 'The Terrorist, He's Watching'). There's also plenty of background material, with study and teaching resources on all the poems.