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The Great War (1914-1918) Forum

Remembered Today:

The War Poets revisited: a modern-day response to 1914


michaeldr

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Not a bad effort from the late Nobel laureate but it inevitably seems rather slight when printed alongside one of the finest poems to come out of the War.

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Michael,

Thanks for the link. Contributions of widely differing quality and often the Original is certainly not inferior.

Cheers,

Fred

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Has anybody any idea what this means (bold) from the first "poem" by Heany

In buttoned khaki and buffed army boots,
Bruising the turned-up acres of our back field
To stumble from the windings' magic ring

And take me by a hand to lead me back
Through the same old gate into the yard
Where everyone has suddenly appeared,

As for the second one by Duffy what the heck is that about?, cannot be bothered to read the rest.

Example

"I saw love's child uttered,
unborn, only by rain, then and now, all future"

Norman

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Norman,

Reading poetry is similar to looking at a painting; each will see something different

This is what I see

The demobbed soldier returns home unexpectedly (“from nowhere”) to the farm at ploughing time

He is not the same man who left; hard years have gone by; he is “unfamiliar”

Hearing of his return, everyone comes out into the yard to meet him, but they seem unsure how to greet him. Your quote has omitted the last line - “All standing waiting”

The winding is a reference back to the poem's second verse's last line

“The windings had been ploughed, furrows turned”

regards

Michael

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"I saw love's child uttered,
unborn, only by rain, then and now, all future..........

Seems to me a description of what could have been.

I found the Duffy poem quite poignant.

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Has anybody any idea what this means (bold) from the first "poem" by Heany

In buttoned khaki and buffed army boots,

Bruising the turned-up acres of our back field

To stumble from the windings' magic ring

'Windings' is a ploughing term, Norman. The ploughman sets his rig (pegs out a rectangular area to be ploughed), cuts his first furrow, turns in a broad arc on the headland and then cuts a second furrow back in the opposite direction, some distance apart from the first. He then turns again and cuts another furrow inside the first and then another outside the second, and so on until all the ground between the two rows of furrows has been ploughed. If we have a horse-ploughing expert among us, they could no doubt explain it much better, but essentially I don't think it would be far wrong to describe the rounded rectangular patterns you see on Google Earth images of cultivated fields, for example on the Somme, as modern-day 'windings'. Someone standing on the unturned ground inside the windings (the 'magic ring') would eventually have to either walk out via the headland or 'stumble' their way across the fresh plough.

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