- Image via Wikipedia
Thanks for the feedback. Here some more videos of me reading aloud the poems we read at the last session.
First, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by the famous World War I poet, Wilfrid Owen. My grandfather fought in this war as a young man. He survived. Later, he fought in the 2nd World War, too, and survived that as well, but he never spoke to me about it.
What a lamentable funeral it was !( if I can call this funeral.) It is very regrettable that only the anger of the guns and rifles’s rapid rattle were the kind of prayer, not any voice of mourning, and these were to be the Anthem. I wish their soul went to next world by divine leading safely and lived eternal lives.
I also feel the sound of guns” the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle”
is impressionable, and being followed by sound of bugles and then by silence it gives readers feeling of greatly missing importance.
I would like to read this poem, repeating and overlapping you. The more times I read, the more I come to feel the lament for young soldiers. How cruel and sad the warfare was! I am very sorry.
If they had not been killed , they should have lived a happy life. If Owen had lived to old age, he would have written much more significant and wonderful poems.
This poem is a sonnet,three stanza of four lines and another two lines,and have nice rhymes. He also often used impersonatings and onomatopoeia in this poem. These ways of expression make us feel the poem more realistic and grievous.
What does the word “anthem” mean as this poem’s title? If it means “a hymn of praise or loyalty,” how ironical sounds the tile! The soldiers were tortured and they didn’t live for themselves. Is it honorable to fight for the country to be slaughtered like cattle? If it means “a hymn sung on a service,” I can understand the poem as offering to the soul of the dead soldiers. Words are carefully selected regarding a word’s emotive qualities, and its musical value to the rhythm, alliteration, and rhyming, in sonnet form. It conveys the feeling of reality in battlefields, and cause bitterness, sadness and emptiness on our mind. No wonder the poem has caused great impact on audience’s mind since it was brought to the public.
The website says “Anthem – perhaps best known in the expression “The National Anthem;” also, an important religious song (often expressing joy); here, perhaps, a solemn song of celebration”. I agree: “a solemn song of celebration”. With his words, Owen is giving the fallen soldiers the funeral, the respect, the final farewell, that they did not have on the battlefield. The word “anthem” makes a connection with religion, with the divine, reminding the reader that human beings have a divine origin or divine connection.
So, different from kind of Requiem? I think the idea of “celebration” here is interesting. For me it’s just like saying “commencement” instead of “graduation”.Very positive attitude for humanity.
Anyway I realize how elaborately carefully the poem was made and to hear you read it makes me feel tense and confronted with the harsh reality of war.
I remembered the boy nicknamed Wet Nurse in “Atlas Shrugged” who was taught by grown ups that death of human beings and of animals had same value.He learned to be aware of his own value with Hank Rearden just before his death. I suppose Wilfred Owen did it as well with his own poems represented by this.
By the way,as for World War1 there is a famous movie directered by Rene Clement,「禁じられた遊び」I remember.
I don’t know this movie, but I know “All Quiet on the Western Front”. Perhaps you do, too. This movie was made in the U.S., but was not shown there at first, because it was anti-war, and the government wanted to encourage people to join the war.
In the case of Atlas Shrugged, the Wet Nurse came to appreciate his value, and how a human life is worth more than that of an animal. Rand believed a philosophy that teaches that a human life is worth the same as that of an animal is a vicious philosophy, highly dangerous and damaging because the result may be that person will value themselves less.
In the case of Wilfrid Owen, it was the opposite: he understood well the value of a human life (he was a Christian), but he was living in an environment that did not reflect this value: the war DE-valued human life. This caused intelligent people like Owen to ask, why are we fighting this war, then? For what values are we fighting for?
Rene Clement, a French movie director (Japanese Wikipedia entry here). The movie “stray sheep” refers to is about the second world war, not the first. The French title is Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games in English). My mother was living in Paris when the Nazis invaded. She stayed in Paris until the war ended. Her older brother escaped to the south of France before the Nazis arrived, and joined the French Resistance. He spent the later part of his life with a woman who had also been a member of the Resistance (but they did not know each other then). She was caught by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. She survived, but most of her family did not.
Thanks for pointing this movie out, stray sheep. I will try and watch it.