Poetry is best when it is
heard (and not read): listen to Carol Ann Duffy’s "Last Post" (read by Vicky McClure). The text of the poem is posted below for those who want to read while listening.
Last Post (Carol Ann Duffy)
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud...
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home--
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce -- No -- Decorum -- No -- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
like all your mates do too --
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert --
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History, the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.
Duffy, the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, wrote
this poem in 2009, shortly after the deaths of two of the last surviving
British soldiers of WWI: Henry Allingham
and Harry Patch. The title “Last Post”
is the name given to the British military bugle call that signals the end of
the day’s activities and is also played at military funerals and ceremonies of
remembrance to indicate that a soldier has gone to his final rest (like the
American “Taps”).
Interwoven with Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum
Est,” Duffy re-imagines the past of one hundred years ago with haunting
language and imagery. In her rewinding of time, she references the most
famous poem of the war, Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The first lines of “The
Last Post” quote from Owen’s poem and recall the haunting sight of a man dying. In the middle of “The Last Post,” she quotes the title and final words of
Owen’s poem. The Latin justification for
war (it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country) is not just unsaid, but
forcefully denied: Dulce (sweet) – No. Decorum (fitting or proper) – No. But “pro
patria mori” – to die for one’s country -- that is left unchallenged, as the blood runs up and back into the bodies, as the men rewind back into their trenches.
Listening to "The Last Post," you hear a steady drumbeat, a repetitive quality, in sound (“bled bad blood”), in rhythm (“to die and die and die”) and in sense (the lists of loved ones’ photographs, the list of soldiers’ names, the list of future possibilities that soldiers’ lives held). It is these repetitions that undercut the hopeful imagining of the poet, as they inexorably, like a metronome, move the poem forward, relentlessly chaining it to the tyranny of time.
Listening to "The Last Post," you hear a steady drumbeat, a repetitive quality, in sound (“bled bad blood”), in rhythm (“to die and die and die”) and in sense (the lists of loved ones’ photographs, the list of soldiers’ names, the list of future possibilities that soldiers’ lives held). It is these repetitions that undercut the hopeful imagining of the poet, as they inexorably, like a metronome, move the poem forward, relentlessly chaining it to the tyranny of time.
Perhaps most poignantly, there is the repetition of the
opening and closing lines. “If poetry
could tell it backwards” (at the start of the poem) is altered by the
addition of the word “truly” at the end:
“If poetry could truly tell it backwards.” The addition of that one small word pulls us
up short and recalls us to the truth that we cannot rewind time, we cannot undo
the effects of the war, we can never fully understand the loss of potential
that resulted when over sixteen million people died during The Great War.
But we will remember them.
But we will remember them.
This reading always gives me chills. So beautiful for Memorial Day.
ReplyDeleteCouldn't agree more -- McClure's reading is hard to forget -- Lest We Forget.
ReplyDeletelovely piece to read. I was wondering how Carol Ann Duffy reveal the gruesome reality of war through the poem?
Deletegreat poem and great reading. I'll use it at school. Thanks
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