"For those few, those the brave"

Last week we were celebrating "Deviations" first birthday and there was no place for morn in our celebration. I say this because of the 90th anniversary of the death of Wilfred Owen. And today is the 90th anniversary of what Americans know as the "Veterans Day" or the end of WWI with the armistice that took place at the eleventh hour of the elevnth day of the eleventh month.


WWI has been forgotten. Even when this event triggered in all ways the twentieth century history. The warfare is remembered occassionally by few English historians. Just in these occasions Prime Ministers and Persidents show themselves at Verdun to pledge the dead.





Wilfred Owen is not read in Mexico. And I dare to say in Spanish speaking countries. Even though several proffesional attempts have bene made, which are three in all Mexico over ninety years, Wilfred Owen's poetry is still ignored and in some cases outnumbered in English poetry antologies by Robert Graves or Sigfried Sassoon, to name some contemporary War poets. Antologizing Wilferd Owen is in some cases strange; either you ignore him (as in Yeats' case, receiving many criticism) or put it among Rupert Brooke, which will be the common thing.
The attempts to study Owen's poetry in my country are biassed in dull and vain comparissons with Brooke's vision of the world.


I take this quote from CNN.com to validate the presence of Owen's speech today:"In his 2007 autobiography, "The Last Fighting Tommy," written with Richard van Emden, he said 'war is organized murder' before adding at a memorial event last month: 'It was not worth it. It was not worth one, let alone all the millions.'" I urge people to read Owen because of his vision of poetry; that it is still valid unlike the case of Brooke's.





Anyway this post honour each and every man and woman, dead and alive, who served for his/her country in the most brutal war in the twentieth century. A pledge to them. And a remembrance for Owen, who we, or at least I, owe so much.

It is sweet and decorous...

Today has not been the best day of all. And I remember, although many people do not, the 6th of June of 1944. As I have previously stated the war changed my life. Not in the way of fighting which is actually ridiculous in my country but rather seeing fiction and specially reading the deeds of people in it. The deeds are occasional, ekphrastic moments of varied arrays. The best one I can remember now is "Ode to a Grecian Urn" and "The Shield of Achilles". Although these are among my favorite poems I think this view of moments is exhausted. The real poetry that changed my way of viewing war was Wilfred Owen's. It is a shock, an impulse, the terrified glance towards the apocalyptic visions of Eliot in The Waste Land. And although WWI seems far distant in any sense to WWII it is the "lilacs than breed" the same feeling as in "Dulce et Decorum Est". Everything fails, as Robbie Turner in Atonement, to produce something out of the "dead land".

And the discourse of Rupert Brooke (i.e. "The Soldier") is exhausted. That is why I still read Owen's poetry nearly 100 years after its creation. That is why I read war historians. That is why as Stephen Spender "I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Great". That is why I remember the men and woman who sacrificed themselves that dreadful but hopeful day of June. That is why "a terrible beauty is born".
A thought for the every man that died that day, on each nationality.


"Dulce Et Decorum Est"
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.