Showing posts sorted by relevance for query dulce. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query dulce. Sort by date Show all posts

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Foul Play at Vitai Lampada





Foul Play


Roger Woddis



There’s a whiff of blood in the Close tonight –
Half the team in a haze of gin –
An umpire bribed and a dirty fight,
And hell to pay if we fail to win.
And it’s not just a matter of skill or pluck,
Or done in a spirit of wat’s-a-name,
But his Captain’s fist on his jawbone struck –
“I’ll duff you up, if we lose the game!”

This is the rule we hold most dear,
Whether we score in war or net:
Decent standards we all revere
Haven’t won any medals yet.
This we all with a joyful heart
Bear in mind as we mark or maim:
Just for the sake of taking part
Is a pretty dumb way to play the game.


This poem by Roger Woddis delineates for me an unlikely circle, neither vicious nor virtuous but merely circular, tying together two schools in which I spent many of the key years of my life, and which granted me an outlet, however uncomfortable, for that far corner of this foreign soul which is forever, haplessly and hopelessly, forever England: Merchant Taylors, where I was a pupil, and Clifton College, where I taught. 

Woddis was at Merchant Taylors a half a century before me, so I have no recollection of him personally. One day, unworking but compulsorily present in the library – living the future memory that would engender the tale "The Other" and a comic scene in "The Flaming Sword" – some of the boys were giggling over a copy of that week's "New Statesman", a subversive rag which had to be smuggled in clandestinely, and which contained a newly-forged Woddis poem about the green slime of mould on a schoolmaster's gown, along with other satirical metaphors intended to deride that octogenarian institution "the English Public School". It was all terribly subterfuginous and hush-hush, because the poet whose work this was had recently revisited our invenerable place of learning as an alumnus, and it took a very rotten egg to go ra-ra in this manner on his esteemed peers and pals eh-what! Very sadly, I do not possess a copy of that poem, though no doubt an assiduous researcher could easily look it up.

"Foul Play" appeared in Punch in March 1980, but it was 1995 before I first encountered it, given to me by the 6th former who was editing the Clifton students' own satirical rag.

The original, the subject of Woddis' satire, came from the pen of Sir Henry Newbolt, one of the great Cliftonians – great enough that an entire chamber of polished mahogany and sultry lights had been dedicated to him, its centrepiece a portrait (a monoptych, dare I neologise?), a most ghastly painting of him looking like George Melly in a 50's jazz suit and what could well be dying cricketers, scrambling through a sea of mustard-gas, crossing the Close towards the Pavilion where Newbolt stands in his pomp and circumstance, and with his back turned. Turned, significantly, away from them, towards the ego-focused light that denotes his sainthood in white Saville Row. Astonishing!

In the even more dreadful 1995 film about Clifton by another old boy, Dominic Gover, the then Head Girl – a delightful girl named Gillian Staveley who really did not deserve this torture – recites Newbolt's famous ode to the dulce et decorum of war, whose "old lie" he had evidently failed to learn, and which the school's combined cadet force continues to this day to march up and down the parapet of the Close like Hitler Youth. 

But then, Clifton also alma matered Douglas Haig, who is enstatued on the parapet above the Close, an easy rifle-shot away from the memorial in his name to those Cliftonians he sent for butchery. I have no time for Haig or Newbolt. I was only sorry that the boy who republished "Foul Play" in the student rag was instructed to withdraw the magazine; and that the three boys who got expelled (sorry, I meant withdrawn voluntarily by their parents) for day-glo painting Haig's statue, failed to go the whole hog and get expelled for blowing it up with dynamite. It would have been a fitting end, where day-glo was barely satire. Perhaps they had been too deeply inculcated with the Newbolt motto: blowing up the statue would not have fitted the call to "play up, play up and play the game" which Woddis' poem ridicules, quite rightly, and which I, mercifully, have never learned to do. How, after all, does one differentiate the Newbolt motto from the act of collaborating in one's own victimhood and "only obeying orders"?

I have included the Newbolt original, below, for two reasons. First, because the Woddis cannot be fully appreciated without the original. Secondly because a comparison of the two would make for an excellent classroom activity, though I appreciate that it will take a particularly open-minded school to allow it.
Vitai Lampada

Henry Newbolt

("They Pass On The Torch of Life")

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night -
Ten to make and the match to win -
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote -
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

The sand of the desert is sodden red -
Red with the wreck of a square that broke -
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'






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Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen

(for the text of the poem, click here for Poetry Foundation. You can also find it at The Academy of American Poets, which is wonderfully ironic, as he was not American; and you can hear it recited at Poem Hunter, even more ironically as the voice is not only American, but female.)


Wilfred Owen was perhaps the finest technician of poetry to have emerged, with all his passionate horror still intact, from the trenches of the Great War. The poetry abounds in assonance, alliteration, metaphor, simile - a schoolteacher's El Dorado; one could teach everything there is to teach about poetic technique from just three, any three of his poems: scansion, rhyme, enjambment - everything. But his passionate involvement in his subject is never undermined, rarely even threatened, by this determination to establish perfect structures for his writing; indeed, writing as he was about a world whose carefully constructed order had been so utterly exploded, perhaps those perfect structures of creative poetry were a bulwark, a deliberate, equilibrating response. Where, for Borges, for Beckett, form and content are of necessity unified, for Owen they are of necessity opposed. The act of poetry, of poetic creation, transcends the nihil of trench-warfare (while Auden, in the "Musée des Beaux Arts", sucks his thumb and dreams of a safe haven in America).

The images are starkly realistic, even when they serve as metaphors. No imagination here, no Biblical visions: Owen witnessed the apocalypse "live", participated himself (died on virtually its last day), and described in precise detail what he saw and heard and felt; his poetry is not pacifist propaganda, however, but merely testimony with shell-shock.

The pace and rhythm, the careful punctuation of the opening stanza, recreate the pace and rhythm of the trudging soldiers; the images an ipsissima verba, as inexorable as celluloid. This is what it was like: even the metaphor "blood-shod" is to be taken literally. This is what it was like: if you find the Truth about Reality upsetting - why, you could always read "Gerontion".

The poem trudges as the soldiers trudge; but then, as sudden in the poem as on the battlefield, we are shocked into a frenzy of hysterical activity as the gas shell explodes. Men have become monstrous, nightmare figures, whether through the mutilation of their limbs or through the demonic figures they resemble in their masks. Fire, lime, green light, screaming - surely this is none other than the Inferno that we have entered: Hell on Earth: a waking nightmare?

One hundred years after the outbreak of World War One, Owen's "message" has infiltrated the western consciousness, better than any CIA agent trying to get into the headquarters of al-Qai'da or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. We now find war, all war, horrific, and regard even the killing of a soldier, even of a para-military combatant, let alone a civilian, as a crime against humanity. Yet was this really his message? No question that the perpetrators of the new Chalifah still believe "the old lie", though for them it is religion as much as country. But we who have rendered ourselves powerless-by-conscience of defeating them, we need to learn the deeper message of Owen's poetry, or at least to decipher its code more accurately, for he was not a pacifist, he was not anti-war per se. He was appalled by the horrors of war, and by the disingenuousness of the reasons given for that particular war that eventually took his life. And yet he fought, as we must fight, lest this other lie, the lie of the Chalifah, be transformed into our reality. It will not be pleasant, in either eventuality.


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