Andrew's Wiki
Nineteen Fourteen

War Sonnets, very famous

1. Peace

• War is good b/c it wakes up sleeping youth
• “Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, /
  Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move”
• Love is empty, not good enough
• In war, death is both your friend and enemy; and sleep will always be there to help you

2. Safety

• “We have found safety with all things undying”
• Safe despite war: “Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall; / And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.”

3. The Dead

• Before, they could have been poor, lonely, but now they are “rarer than gold” by dying
• By sacrificing youth
• Even the sons they would’ve had are now immortal b/c of it; and their own names immortal b/c of the sacrifice
• Their deaths bring back honor b/c they brought back “Love” and “Pain” and therefore “Holiness”
• Death: “We have come into our heritage.”

4. The Dead

• They are peacefully unchanging
• Imagery: First stanza has a changing world (sunset, movement) and also changing, experiencing people; whereas second has a still world (of frost, of unchanging white expanses) and also unchanging dead people
• What do the dead have? “unbroken glory, a gathered radiance” unlike the qualified, sorrowful joys of life

5. The Soldier

• Talking about himself if he dies
• “That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.” b/c it holds the dust of someone shaped by England
• One full verse of sentimentality about the English made man
  • So that “all evil shed away, / A pulse in the eternal mind,” is actually him in “an English heaven” (which is the last phrase of the poem.
  • Ah, patriotism. Death hallowed by the motherland.

The Treasure

• When you’re dead you can count over your life experiences like a mother thinking about her children’s day after they fall asleep. Wow: it weirdly privileges what he misses by death, showing the breaking point underneath these stupid sonnets: and suggests that interpretation of experience is better than experience itself. That IS significant for modernism