fran brearton
World War poem ‘Silent Service’: ‘let Britain’s patient power|Beproven within
us for the world to see...In every separate soul let courage shine—|A kneeling
angel holding faith’s front-line.’^68 In a reverse scenario, it is possible to argue that
not until the 1940s does Graves write war poems that equal the best of Owen’s
or Sassoon’s Great War trench lyrics—even if to say so is to stretch the genre of
‘war poetry’ beyond usual expectations.^69 In different ways, neither Graves nor
Sassoon could ever claim to be free of the war which both made and—one might
also argue—marred them as poets. ‘And have we done with War at last?’, asks the
speaker in the opening line of Graves’s ‘Two Fusiliers’. For good or ill, in terms of
their poetic development, the answer for these two Fusiliers must surely be no.
(^68) Sassoon, ‘Silent Service’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956, 238.
(^69) Those poems which articulate Graves’s devotion to the Muse may also be read in terms of the
First World War. See ‘To Juan at the Winter Solstice’ and ‘The White Goddess’, inComplete Poems
(2003), 405 and 428, and discussion of these poems in Fran Brearton,The Great War in Irish Poetry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 3.