fran brearton
In another of Sassoon’s best-known poems, ‘Blighters’, the relentless hammering
outof unambiguous stresses turns the poem on one level into a parody of ‘the
prancing ranks|Of harlots’ who ‘shrill the chorus, drunk with din’,^37 and on
another, into an ironic comment on the ranks of soldiers who die in the ‘din’ of
warfare, who fall in rows like the ‘tier beyond tier’ of the music-hall audience. Seem-
ingly crude in both form and theme, ‘Blighters’ is a poem in which the obtrusive
becomes a measure of its subtlety. The ‘crammed’ House of the music-hall is also
obliquely evocative of the centre of political power, as if the theatre of war is itself
a ‘Show’ for their amusement. The ‘prancing ranks’ suggest the cavalry in earlier
forms of (glorified) warfare. The audience’s ‘grin|And cackle’ become disturbingly
ironic in the final line, since as the poem protests against the ‘jokes...To mock
the riddled corpses round Bapaume’, it also puns on ‘riddled’ to make its own
double (triple) entendre: the corpses are riddled with bullets, riddled by being
the subject of ‘jokes’, and the line glances back to the image of the tank coming
‘down the stalls’, itself riddling—in the sense of pervading and permeating—the
body of people watching the show. In two senses, then, the poem is guilty of
what it derides, making capital out of its own riddling qualities, turning war and
suffering into art (and therefore presumably entertainment), countering violence
with violence—the ‘Lurching’ tank as ‘drunk’ in its own way as the chorus girls it
is meant to silence.
In contrast to Sassoon, whose reputation now rests primarily on these satirical
poems, as well as on the more sustained achievements of ‘Repression of War
Experience’ or ‘Counter-Attack’, and who promoted himself through the 1920s as
a war poet, Graves in later years suppressed much of his early work, and almost
all of his war poems. His judgement in such suppressions is not always to be
trusted, since by the 1960s he had cut from hisCollected Poemssome of the finest
achievements of his career. Yet in the case of the early war poems, his scruples
are more understandable. It is hard to claim for any of the poems inOver the
Brazier(1916) orFairies and Fusiliers(1917) a status equivalent to either Owen’s or
Sassoon’s best poems from the same period. In that sense, Graves, however famous
he may be as memoirist, is not a recognizably important war poet—or at least
not of the soldier-poet variety habitually associated with the Great War. That said,
some of the early war poems deserve to be better known, both in and of themselves,
and in terms of their influence on Sassoon and Owen. They also show some of the
qualities which were to turn Graves into such an exceptional poet in mid-career,
from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Over the Braziercontains poems written while Graves was still at school, from
1910 to 1914, and a handful of early war poems from 1915. (As noted above, the
book was in preparation for press when Graves first met Sassoon.) Unlike some
of his contemporaries, Graves does not, in his 1914–15 poems, idealize war, or
(^37) Sassoon, ‘Blighters’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956, 19.