Category: Poetry

The Wrist Watch Man

9/30/2021

At the beginning of the twentieth century, wrist watches were feminine novelties worn by trendy women. By 1920, they had become standard military issue and symbols of masculine virility. This change came about because of the need to synchronize artillery and infantry during the First World War. Perhaps no one captured this change better than Edgar Albert Guest, the people’s poet whose poems filled the papers throughout the war.

The Wrist Watch Man

He is marching dusty highways and he's riding bitter trails,
His eyes are clear and shining and his muscles hard as nails.
He is wearing Yankee khaki and a healthy coat of tan,
And the chap that we are backing is the Wrist Watch Man.

He's no parlour dude, a-prancing, he's no puny pacifist,
And it's not for affectation there's a watch upon his wrist.
He's a fine two-fisted scrapper, he is pure American,
And the backbone of the nation is the Wrist Watch Man.

He is marching with a rifle, he is digging in a trench,
He is swapping English phrases with a poilu for his French;
You will find him in the navy doing anything he can,
For at every post of duty is the Wrist Watch Man.

Oh, the time was that we chuckled at the soft and flabby chap
Who wore a little wrist watch that was fastened with a strap.
But the chuckles all have vanished, and with glory now we scan
The courage and the splendor of the Wrist Watch Man.

He is not the man we laughed at, not the one who won our jeers,
He's the man that we are proud of, he's the man that owns our cheers;
He's the finest of the finest, he's the bravest of the clan,
And I pray for God's protection for our Wrist Watch Man.

Jennifer Bohnhoff lives in the mountains of central New Mexico, where she writes historical fiction and spends way too much time finding interesting bits of history on the internet. You can read more about her and her books on her website, jenniferbohnhoff.com

Two Fusiliers and Two Poets

9/22/2021

Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon in 1895, the third child of ten. His father was an Irish poet and his mother was the great-niece of a famous German historian. Graves learned to box because his half-German ancestry made him the target of bullies.

Graves published his first poems in 1911, when he was a student at The Charterhouse School. One of the young masters there was George Mallory, who introduced Graves to the works of George Bernard Shaw, Rupert Brooke, and John Edward Masefield, and took him climbing. Mallory was later to die on the 1924 Everest expedition.

In 1914, Graves was supposed to go to St John’s College, Oxford. Instead, he enlisted in the army joining the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He was posted to France in May 1915, and fought in the Battle of Loos in September that year. Two months later, he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow-officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. “Two Fusiliers”, is a celebration of that friendship.

In July of 1916, Graves was wounded by a shell at High Wood, in the Somme. His colonel believed that Graves' injuries would result in his death, and wrote a condolence letter to Graves’s parents. The Times reported that Graves had died of his wounds in their August 4, 1916 edition. This “death” and “rebirth”, which occurred close to his 21st birthday, had a profound effect on Graves’s life and writing.

Graves' bestselling war memoir, Good-bye to All That, was published in 1929 and caused a rift between him and Sassoon and ultimately between himself and his country. He moved to Deià in Majorca, where he lived until his death in 1985 with the exception of two periods, during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, when he was evacuated.

Graves is not only known as a poet and mythologist, but as a novelist. His I, Claudius books were turned into a miniseries for PBS.

Two Fusiliers
BY ROBERT GRAVES

And have we done with War at last?
Well, we've been lucky devils both,
And there's no need of pledge or oath
To bind our lovely friendship fast,
By firmer stuff
Close bound enough.

By wire and wood and stake we're bound,
By Fricourt and by Festubert,
By whipping rain, by the sun's glare,
By all the misery and loud sound,
By a Spring day,
By Picard clay.

Show me the two so closely bound
As we, by the wet bond of blood,
By friendship blossoming from mud,
By Death: we faced him, and we found
Beauty in Death,
In dead men, breath.

Jennifer Bohnhoff's World War I historical novel A Blaze of Poppies will be published in October 2021 and is available for preorder on Amazon.

A Rendevous with Death

9/16/2021

Alan Seeger was born in New York City, the son of a businessman with connections to Mexico's sugar refining industry. He and his two siblings grew up in a wealthy and cultured home in Staten Island. He attended the Staten Island Academy and then the Horace Mann School in Manhattan until the family moved to Mexico city when he was 12. Alan returned to New York in 1902 so that he could attend the Hackley School, in Tarrytown. He then went on to Harvard University, where he came under the influence of the Romantic poets.

After graduating in 1910., Seeger moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where he attempted to live a bohemian life, writing poetry and sleeping on the couch of his classmate, the revolutionary, John Reed. After two years, Seeger moved to Paris, France. When World War I began in 1914, Seeger enlisted in the French Foreign Legion.

Seeger's war-time letters talk of crowded quarters, filth, cold and misery. None of this made its way into his poetry, which demonstrates a romantic and fatalistic streak.

Alan Seeger died of a shot to the stomach during the attack on Belloy-en-Santerreon on July 4th, 1916. The French military awarded him the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille militaire posthumously. He was buried in a mass grave.

Seeger’s collected Poems were published in 1917 to mixed reviews. Critics often criticize his verses as impersonal, conventional, and idealized, but, like his English contemporary Rubert Brooke, Seeger hadn't matured as an artist. James Hart in the Dictionary of Literary Biography explained, “He needed more time to move from a stock and outmoded romanticism to a more distinctive and original style, from a style full of abstractions to one more concrete and personal.” Given more time, he might have become an American version of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon.

I Have a Rendevous with Death

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air--
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath--
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear ...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former history teacher who now writes full time. Her next novel, A Blaze of Poppies: A Novel About New Mexico and World War I, is due out on October 22, 2021.

The Americans who Lie in Flanders Field

9/5/2021

Flanders Field American Cemetery and Memorial is the only World War I American cemetery on Belgian soil. It is located on the southeast edge of the town of Waregem and honors 411 American servicemen, some of whose bodies are unidentified and others whose bodies are unrecovered.

The memorial was designed by architect Paul Cret, who ennobled the site with art deco and lots of quiet, garden-like areas that make it a deeply moving place.

Lieutenant Kenneth MaCleish

One of the men interred in this cemetery is Kenneth MaCleish, the brother of American poet Archibald MaCleish, who lived into the 1980s and produced a massive and impressive body of work. Here is one of his poems to think on:

Liberty
When liberty is headlong girl
And runs her roads and wends her ways
Liberty will shriek and whirl
Her showery torch to see it blaze.

When liberty is wedded wife
And keeps the barn and counts the byre
Liberty amends her life.
She drowns her torch for fear of fire.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former educator who writes historical fiction. Her World War I novel, A Blaze of Poppies, will be released in October 2021.

a Medic and a Poet

9/1/2021

During his fifty-year career, Robert Laurence Binyon authored many poetry collections, plays, historical biographies, and art history books. During World War I he served as an orderly in the Red Cross, working in a military hospital in France in 1915 and 1916. This experiences influenced his poetry. While this is not his most famous poem, this invokes a somber picture of what medics had to go through to retrieve the wounded. It is eerie and haunting.

Fetching the Wounded

by Robert Laurence Binyon

At the road's end glimmer the station lights;
How small beneath the immense hollow of Night's
Lonely and living silence! Air that raced
And tingled on the eyelids as we faced
The long road stretched between the poplars flying
To the dark behind us, shuddering and sighing
With phantom foliage, lapses into hush.
Magical supersession! The loud rush
Swims into quiet: midnight reassumes
Its solitude; there's nothing but great glooms,
Blurred stars; whispering gusts; the hum of wires.
And swerving leftwards upon noiseless tires
We glide over the grass that smells of dew.
A wave of wonder bathes my body through!
For there in the headlamps' gloom--surrounded beam
Tall flowers spring before us, like a dream,
Each luminous little green leaf intimate
And motionless, distinct and delicate
With powdery white bloom fresh upon the stem,
As if that clear beam had created them
Out of the darkness. Never so intense
I felt the pang of beauty's innocence,
Earthly and yet unearthly. A sudden call!
We leap to ground, and I forget it all.
Each hurries on his errand; lanterns swing;
Dark shapes cross and re--cross the rails; we bring
Stretchers, and pile and number them; and heap
The blankets ready. Then we wait and keep
A listening ear. Nothing comes yet; all's still.
Only soft gusts upon the wires blow shrill
Fitfully, with a gentle spot of rain.
Then, ere one knows it, the long gradual train
Creeps quietly in and slowly stops. No sound
But a few voices' interchange. Around
Is the immense night--stillness, the expanse
Of faint stars over all the wounds of France.

Now stale odour of blood mingles with keen
Pure smell of grass and dew. Now lantern--sheen
Falls on brown faces opening patient eyes
And lips of gentle answers, where each lies
Supine upon his stretcher, black of beard
Or with young cheeks; on caps and tunics smeared
And stained, white bandages round foot or head
Or arm, discoloured here and there with red.
Sons of all corners of wide France; from Lille,
Douay, the land beneath the invader's heel,
Champagne, Touraine, the fisher--villages
Of Brittany, the valleyed Pyrenees,
Blue coasts of the South, old Paris streets. Argonne
Of ever smouldering battle, that anon
Leaps furious, brothered them in arms. They fell
In the trenched forest scarred with reeking shell.
Now strange the sound comes round them in the night
Of English voices. By the wavering light
Quickly we have borne them, one by one, to the air,
And sweating in the dark lift up with care,
Tense--sinewed, each to his place. The cars at last
Complete their burden: slowly, and then fast
We glide away. And the dim round of sky,
Infinite and silent, broods unseeingly
Over the shadowy uplands rolling black
Into far woods, and the long road we track
Bordered with apparitions, as we pass,
Of trembling poplars and lamp--whitened grass,
A brief procession flitting like a thought
Through a brain drowsing into slumber; nought
But we awake in the solitude immense!
But hurting the vague dumbness of my sense
Are fancies wandering the night: there steals
Into my heart, like something that one feels
In darkness, the still presence of far homes
Lost in deep country, and in little rooms
The vacant bed. I touch the world of pain
That is so silent. Then I see again
Only those infinitely patient faces
In the lantern beam, beneath the night's vast spaces,
Amid the shadows and the scented dew;
And those illumined flowers, springing anew
In freshness like a smile of secrecy
From the gloom--buried earth, return to me.
The village sleeps; blank walls, and windows barred.
But lights are moving in the hushed courtyard
As we glide up to the open door. The Chief
Gives every man his order, prompt and brief.
We carry up our wounded, one by one.
The first cock crows: the morrow is begun.

Jennifer Bohnhoff lives in the mountains of central New Mexico, where she writes historical fiction. Her next novel, A Blaze of Poppies, tells the story of two New Mexicans serving in World War I.

Break of day in the trenches

8/25/2021

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old Druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems, odd thing, you grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping,
But mine in my ear is safe –
Just a little white with the dust.

Isaac Rosenberg
1890-1918

Image © The Imperial War Museum & The Isaac Rosenberg literary estate

A Poem to Lead Men Into Battle

8/18/2021

When I first began plotting out a novel set in World War I, it was tentatively entitled Agnes Goes to War. Then I came across this poem, and it moved me enough that I retitled the novel The Destined Will, used this poem as a preface, and named my lead male character Will. Two different critique partners suggested that the title wasn't inspiring and that readers wouldn't bother with a poem so long at the beginning of a novel, so I dropped both, and the novel became A Blaze of Poppies.

Julian Grenfell's parents were members of the Victorian high-society group called “the souls.” He attended Oxford's Eton and Balliol Colleges where he was known as a superb athlete and sportsman. He excelled at boxing and steeplechase, but most loved to take his greyhound hunting. Like many aristocrats of his time, he sketched and wrote poetry.

Grenfell joined the Royal Dragoons in 1910. He served in India and, after the outbreak of World War I, transferred to France, where he received a Distinguished Service Order and refused a staff position in order to continue fighting.

On May 13, 1915 during the Battle of Ypres, Grenfell volunteered to run messages during a heavy bombardment. He was seriously wounded when a shell splinter struck his head, and died in a Boulogne military hospital thirteen days later. 'Into Battle' was published alongside his obituary in The Times.

Into Battle

by Julian Grenfell

The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze;

And life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting has increase.

The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from glowing earth;
Speed with the light-foot winds to run
And with the trees to newer birth;
And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fulness after dearth.

All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their bright comradeship,
The Dog star, and the Sisters Seven,
Orion's belt and sworded hip:

The woodland trees that stand together,
They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridges end.

The kestrel hovering by day,
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they,
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

The blackbird sings to him: "Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another;
Brother, sing."

In dreary doubtful waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers; --
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!

And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind,
And only joy of battle takes
Him by the throat and makes him blind,
Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.

The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

A Blaze of Poppies is a novel set on a ranch in southwest New Mexico and in France during World War I. You can read more about Jennifer Bohnhoff, its author, here.

Preorder A Blaze of Poppies here

A Poem for a Horse

8/11/2021

A Soldier’s Kiss

'Goodbye, Old Man,' by Fortunino Matania

Only a dying horse! pull off the gear,
And slip the needless bit from frothing jaws,
Drag it aside there, leaving the road way clear,
The battery thunders on with scarce a pause.

Prone by the shell-swept highway there it lies
With quivering limbs, as fast the life-tide fails,
Dark films are closing o'er the faithful eyes
That mutely plead for aid where none avails.

Onward the battery rolls, but one there speeds
Heedlessly of comrades voice or bursting shell,
Back to the wounded friend who lonely bleeds
Beside the stony highway where he fell.

Only a dying horse! he swiftly kneels,
Lifts the limp head and hears the shivering sigh
Kisses his friend, while down his cheek there steals
Sweet pity's tear, "Goodbye old man, Goodbye".

No honours wait him, medal, badge or star,
Though scarce could war a kindlier deed unfold;
He bears within his breast, more precious far
Beyond the gift of kings, a heart of gold.

by Henry Chappell

Known as the Railway Porter Poet because he worked at Bath Railway Station, Henry Chappell (1874 - 1937) is most known for a WWI poem entitled "The Day." A collection of his poems is available as a free download here.

Fortunio Matania (1881–1963) was an Italian artist noted for his realistic portrayal of World War I trench warfare and other historical scenes.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. Her historical novel about World War I, A Blaze of Poppies, will be released this fall and is available for preorder.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

8/4/2021

Gassed, by John Singer Sergeant

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 gas-shells dropping softly 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.

Wilfred Owen was a sensitive young man who considered joining the clergy. He volunteered to help the poor and sick in his parish until the tepid response of the Church of England to the sufferings of the underprivileged and dispossessed disillusioned him. He then taught in France for two years, returning to England and joining the army after the war began. Owen's first few letters home to his mother in the early winter of 1916 indicate that he was enamored with the glamor and excitement of war, but in less than a month reality had taken hold and he had seen enough. The events depicted in "Dulce et Decorum Est" occurred on January 12, 1917. By then, he was ready to deny Horace's Latin admonition to the Romans that it was sweet and good to die for one's country. Owen died on November 4, 1918, just days before the war ended.

The memorial in front of where Wilfred's old school, Birkenhead Institute, once stood. 88 of its students, including Wilfred, died in WWI.

Jennifer Bohnhoff's World War I novel, A Blaze of Poppies, will be published in October 2021. It can be preordered here.

In Flanders Fields

7/28/2021

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The author of perhaps the most recognized poem of World War I was not an English schoolboy with romantic ideas about going off to war. Lt. Col. John McCrae was a Canadian surgeon. He had previously served in the Boer War in South Africa and knew the horrors of war first hand.

McCrae served in a field hospital that sat close by the Yser Canal in Ypres, Belgium. On May 2, 1915, McCrae had to officiate at the battlefield funeral of Lt. Alexis Helmer a 22-year-old close friend. from Ottawa who seved with the Canadian First Artillery. Helmer been blown to bits by an eight-inch German shell launched from the other side of the canal.

The next day, McCrae penned his famous poem while sitting on the back bumper of an ambulance that overlooked the make-shift cemetery. He was inspired by the poppies that grew among the wooded crosses.

McCrae did not live to see the end of the war. He died of pneumonia in 1916.

Jennifer Bohnhoff's novel about World War I will be published in October 2021. You can preorder A Blaze of Poppies here. To learn more about John McCrae, click here.