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The Great War (1914-1918) Forum

Remembered Today:

New sonnet "The Wound in Time"


michaeldr

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A new poem by Carol Ann Duffy, a sonnet in which the poet laureate mourns the “Wound in Time” left by the first world war, will be read aloud on beaches on Armistice Day as part of a nationwide gesture of remembrance for next month’s centenary.

 

Read further here - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/22/poet-laureate-sonnet-danny-boyle-armistice-day-centenary-carol-ann-duffy-the-wound-in-time

 

 

Edited by michaeldr
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Being a stuffy purist I am not enamoured of calling a poem a sonnet when it doesn't fit a classical sonnet form. Why call it a sonnet, then? It's a fourteen line poem with neither a discernible rhyme scheme nor a consistent iambic pentameter.

 

I like the notion of a "wound in time", but...

 

… I am not comfortable with the concept of these people being washed into oblivion (the pictures in the sand) though I see the theme that they departed by sea. The suggestion that they boarded the ships as the first stage of their passage to death is true only for a small percentage of those who went. During the past four years I doubt that many families have not recalled from their family tales at least one person, man or woman, close or distant, who served in some way, so the endlessly repeated mantra that they are mainly forgotten simply isn't true. Was it the "end of God"? Many people found succour and hope in their religious beliefs and some embraced religious beliefs that they hadn't held before. Maybe, like Otto Dix after WW2, some looked at the damaged world and thought that God was dead, but religion was a much stronger force in the early years of the 20c (and I suggest especially in Wales after its Revivals) than even fifty years later.

 

"What happened next?" Well, people came home, in one form or another, and there were practical tasks to sort out, and a society to build, and the one hundredth anniversary of  the 1919 Housing Act should be part of remembering, and many towns will still have the bricks-and-mortar evidence of the homes fit for heroes. By focussing on the dead, by making "sacrifice" an end point, the event's creators are doing the living a grave disservice.

 

Having said that, I haven't a clue what I would do were I asked to compose an event to mark the close of the Great War and I am willing to wait and see how effective Danny Boyle's concept is on the day.

 

Gwyn 

 

 

(Here is a hyperlink.)

Edited by Dragon
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