I wanted to share this little poem that was written to be from the perspective of a WWI soldier visiting what used to be a battle site. In the fall, UMW’s Chamber Choir (that includes me) performed this piece, and I fell in love with the text. The text is titled “A Sonnet: to Wilfred Owen”. Given that we’re meant to read Owen for next class, I figured it was at least a little appropriate. It appears it was written only for the piece, which is titled “The Front”, so I could only find it on the sheet music’s home page. The piece itself, along with the poem, was written and released in January 2020. I think it’s interesting to look at this poem, knowing that Matthew Taylor King, as far as I could find, was quite young, and thus was not a part of WWI in any way. The music piece itself is also incredibly moving. I’ll include a link to a video of it if you want to check that out. Anyways, I’ve been rambling. I just wanted to share đ
A Sonnet to Wilfred Owen: Have you seen the Front? It is not as it Used to be. Larks sing. Shells rust. Fevers cool. The Winter of the world is in tacit Armistice with Spring. Living waters pool In tired foxholes. Proud young forests shelter No man’s land. Moss gilds sandbags, else they spill. Mine-sunk craters yield to ponds where elder Turtles sun themselves, warm amid Aisne’s chill. Only the mud is as it wasâpartout. It clings to every sole. But certain fields Block the charging sludge. In them, marble shields âOr are they dragon’s teeth?âmark you, guard you From the mire. You rest. Your dagger’s sheathed. And yet: How swiftly Nature heals; how slowly men forget. -Matthew Taylor King
The poems âI Looked Up From My Writing,â âMy Boy Jack,â âThe Messages,â âAugust 1914,â and âFor a Girlâ all emphasize the distance and disconnect from the war. In reality, I think you could argue that most of these poems emphasize that, but I feel that these provide particular important perspectives. How do you begin to characterize the feelings towards the war in these poems? How does this distance change the way these poets relate to the war and to the people fighting in it?Â
Charlotte Mewâs poem âMay 1915â is maybe the one that has stuck with me the most. She repeats âsureâ and âsurelyâ several times as if to convince the reader, and perhaps herself, that pring will return and life itself will come back. In the most basic way possible: are you convinced? Or are the war and grief too blinding? Are we, as readers, supposed to feel optimistic at the final line of the poem?Â
Weâve encountered patriotic characters in all of novels: the BF, Mrs. Evans-Mawnigton, Paulâs father, other soldiers, the General in Hemmingway. Most of the time, though, these characters are set in opposition to the protagonist and narrator; they are the ones blinded by nationalism and propaganda. This is perhaps the first time weâre getting patriotic writing from the author themselves. Particularly in Kiplingâs poems (the same guy who wrote âWhite Manâs Burdenâ), we see the English nationalism come through. What is Kipling trying to suggest about patriotism and war? Do you feel that the tension between loss and duty in âMy Boy Jackâ supports or undermines this propaganda that Kipling puts forth?
This is what I briefly said to Dr. Scanlon yesterday. And, even after listening to todayâs discussion, those thoughts remain relatively the same.
Iâm having a hard time liking any one character, even smaller ones like the different nurses around the hospital where Frederick is staying. There seems to always be something that they say or do that bothers me, or makes me stop and think âhuh, thatâs kind of weird.â Granted, each character has their moments where Iâll like them for what they said, or maybe something they did, but it never lasts.
I love that, though. Iâd rather read a book that frustrates me to no end, that makes me feel at least something, rather than read a book where I feel nothing at all and I am just chugging my way through it. Donât let my above thoughts fool you: I actually really like this book. I like not knowing who I side with in conversation; I like constantly flip-flopping back and forth on character support. It keeps my reading experience interesting.
I think itâs actually a great tie-in to the other stories weâve read, and All Quiet in particular. War forces a person to play on a line of morality that someone like me really hasnât had to even think about. I donât believe that anything in life is completely black and white, but especially in a war, the different shades of grey are endless. You become who you have to, and do what you feel you have to in order to get by. This applies to Frederick and Catherine as well. While I think there are some genuine emotions toward each other, as someone mentioned, itâs more like the idea of playing house with someone than anything else. Theyâre playing a part that they need to in order to stay some semblance of sane.
I donât dislike Catherine for her as a character, necessarily, but more for the way Hemmingway wrote her, if that makes sense. Iâm more upset with the author than I am the character.
These narratives weâve read all play with morality in interesting ways, and Iâm curious to see what happens with the rest of the narrative.
Or deliberate contrasts, or both! I’m not claiming to have exhaustively mined our section for today, but I love patterns and referentiality, so I’m going to start up a list of sections from the text of Not So Quiet… that explicitly evoked a segment of All Quiet on the Western Front to me. The interaction of explicit contrasts, parallels, and half-parallels was really engaging to me.
Page 13: resentment of blind patriotism back home.
“No, Smithy, you’re one of England’s Splendid Daughters, proud to do their bit for the dear old flag, and one of England’s Splendid Daughters you’ll stay until you crock up or find some other decent excuse to go home covered in glory. It takes nerve to carry on here, but it takes twice as much to go home to flag-crazy mothers and fathers…”
In some ways this is an explicit, direct echo of All Quiet, and in some ways we see the class difference between Smithy and Paul; we don’t see quite as much of Paul’s parents being blamed for his entry in the war as Kantorek, even though his father does try to show him off to his social circle. Still, the idea of young people being traumatized while people back home congratulate themselves for the “sacrifice” echoes between the two novels.
Pages 19-20: bathrooms.
“Our thoughts fly to bathrooms: big, white-tiled bathrooms with gleaming silver taps and glass-enclosed showers, bathrooms with rubber floors and square-checked bathmats, bathrooms fitted with thick glass shelves loaded with jar upon jar of scented bath salts, white, green, mauve–different colours and different perfumes, lilac, verbena, carnation, lily of the valley.We see ourselves, steeped to the neck in over-hot, over-scented water ;in our hands are clasped enormous, springy sponges foaming with delicious soapsuds, expensive soap-suds-only the most expensive will suffice–sandal-wood, scented oatmeal, odiferous violet. Massage brushes lie to hand, long-handled narrow brushes with quaint, bulbous bristles of hollow rubber that catch the middle of the back just, where the arms are too short to reach… We scrub and scrub and scrub until we are clean and pink and tingling and glowing, we lie in a pleasant semi-coma until the water begins to cool, but emerging has no terrorsElectric fires glow softly ; before them are spread incredibly huge bath-sheets, soft, lavender-scented, monogrammed, waiting to caress our dripping bodies, to smother them in voluptuous warmth.Now we are dry; we pepper our newly-born selves with talcum powder.”June Roses “fills the air with its fragrance, daintily argues with the scent of the bath water, triumphs…
“Half a pint of icy water between six of us,” says Tosh. “Oh Hell, there’s a war on, they tell me.”
This feels like one of the more explicit references to the quick but memorable segment of All Quiet where Paul and his comrades dismiss memories of “white marble” in favor of “shitting under the stars.” It’s a divergence that I think can be rooted in class as well as gender, because (as Smithy’s narration takes care to keep reminding us in various ways) the cast of Not So Quiet… is specifically selected for their middle and upper-class status, and far from every young woman of the time would have had memories of verbena-scented bath salts. Certainly I doubt Paul’s sister would resonate with this particular memory.
That said: I also think this bathroom scene illuminates something fundamentally distinct from Paul in Smithy’s narration, which is that she’s more unstuck in time; this isn’t the only time that she tries to imagine her past life in detail, even though I read ahead by accident and thus can’t bring up the other visible example I have of this yet. To Paul, time and space are more-or-less rigidly delineated between home and the war; I don’t think it would be comforting to him to imagine the former when he’s occupying the latter space. Whether or not it’s comforting or painful to Smithy, though, she does keep doing it.
Page 30: Communications with home, and the truth.
My last letter home opens before me, photograph clear, sent in response to innumerable complaints concerning the brevity of my crossed-out field postcards: “It is such fun out here, and of course I’m loving every minute of it; it’s so splendid to be really in it…”
Jokes aside, though, I think this sequence with Smithy’s letter (and a great portion of the book) demonstrates a far more explicit disdain for Englishness than Paul ever expresses for German-ness. It’s explicitly jarring to hear Smithy put on a show of parodically English upper-class diction after hearing her real narrative voice. (This is another shared quality between All Quiet and Not So Quiet, and perhaps between more of the novels we’ll read this semester; the intimacy between the narrator and the audience, an intimacy that doesn’t include older authority figures in the narrator’s life.) And picking up from my very first item: what my writer friends and I refer to as “momblems” are a lot more bitter and pronounced for Smithy than they are from Paul. Paul lies to his mother with the primary intent of protection; Smithy feels an explicit (and justified) disdain for her.
39: Authority figures
“One of these days I will murder her slowly and reverently and very painfully. I will take lots of time over itâunless I meet her coming up the hill with dim lights, denoting an empty ambulance, in which case I will crash her bus head-on and take the risk of my own skidding into the valley afterwards.”
Two important points here. First, a quality of this book that I appreciate is that (even though one of the girls later says “It’s women who will end war,” a statement I find unconvincing in the light of the rest of the book) there is no essential quality of kindness or goodness ascribed to women by default here. The Commandant abuses her power and takes pleasure in doing so, not in the same ways but in many ways just as destructively as Himmelstoss does. Secondly: young women are just as capable of thinking murderous thoughts about their sadistic superior as young men. With the difference being, I guess, that Smithy and the gang cannot plausibly team up to beat up the Commandant. (Cannot, or choose not to, or both? Let’s debate violence again, I guess.)
45: Camaraderie
“A hot-water bottle? They have made a hot-water bottle for me. My friends! They have not forgotten me. This touch of kindliness finishes me completely. The tears roll down my cheeks. I feel a rotter… a beast.I have been calling them everything vile, and all the time they have done this for me.”
A parallel and a contrast in one: the sense of camaraderie between the young people in a horrible situation is the same, but the vital distinction is that Paul never has the moment of misdirected rage against his comrades that Smithy experiences on the preceding pages and feels horrible for upon discovering the hot-water bottle. I don’t like to express preferences here, but I there’s something more authentic about this particular take on experiences of comradeship in crisis; rather than a consistent flood of safety, Smithy’s informed sense of crisis functions in such a way that everyone is a potential threat to her, and in moments of real despair even the bonds of friendship can’t automatically beat out cold, hunger, and exhaustion. Of course, the two characters also exist in different situations; is it in some ways lonelier to be an ambulance driver than to be a soldier? I don’t think I’m qualified to say, having done neither.
55: Solutions?
“Enemies? Our enemies aren’t the Germans. Our enemies are the politicians we pay to keep us out of war and who are too damned inefficient to do their jobs properly. After two thousand years of civilization, this folly happens. It is time women took a hand. The men are failures… this war shows that. Women will be the ones to stop war, you’ll see. If they can’t do anything else, they can refuse to bring children into the world to be maimed and murdered when they grow big enough.”
The same sense of flirtations with internationalism that Paul and his comrades experience on the other side; the same blaming of authority. The gender theory is new, and given the actions and words of the Commandant and Smithy’s mother and the B.F., I’m not sure the text of Not So Quiet… is in accordance with Edwards’s statement here. I like that it’s brought up here, though, for contemplationâ
â and I like most of all the way focusing in on any one echo between the two books brings up more questions than answers, and rarely leaves us with the ability to say “well, that’s a parallel!” and move on without further interrogation. So: if there’s anything I missed, or any parallels/contrasts/half-parallels that you discover in further chapters, or if you want to respond to any of the big themes listed above, that’d be (Smithy writing to her mother voice) really splendid!
Paul says this about the books on his shelf at home (173), buttttt I am really excited to track it as a major theme throughout the book. The inadequacy of language is something we continuously see Paul struggle with, on the front and at home. At the front: “Attack, counter-attack, charge, repulse â these are words, but what things they signify!” (129). And “Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand grenades â words words, but they hold the horror of the world” (132).
At home, though, this struggle is emphasized. We can see clearly that Paul is split between these two worldsâthe western front and the home (or lack thereof) front. I know we talked at length about this in class, but I wanted to bring it to the blog. To me, It was one of the most compelling sections in this week’s reading. When Paul’s mother is saying goodnight to him, there is a clear division between what Paul wishes he could say and what he actually says. All of it is terrible and heartbreaking and so sad I am once again nauseous reading it, but to just pull one example, take this exchange: “‘And be very careful at the front, Paul.’ Ah, Mother! Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are! ‘Yes Mother, I willâ” (183).
UGHHHHHHHHH
In the 12:30 class, we used this passage to start to generate a list of ways Paul is split, or broken in two. We have: parent (specifically mother) Paul vs. child Paul, maternal vs. violent Paul, and broken vs. performative Paul. Maternal in the sense of pretty consistently thinking of others and caring for them before himself. And performative meaning that Paul performs this calmness as a way to protect himself and those he loves from the broken madness he really feels.
I’m wondering (hoping, PLEASE) if anyone wants to add to/expand on this list of Broken (to use Bonnie’s word) Paul. How else is he broken? What are other ways we can map this conflict in Paul? and bonus: how does language complicate these divisions?
