Poems about World War I, also known as the Great War, delve into the profound impact it had on society, culture, and individual lives.
These verses capture the horrors of trench warfare, the sense of disillusionment that engulfed a generation, and the profound grief of families who lost loved ones. They pay tribute to the bravery of soldiers and nurses and reflect on the futility of war and the longing for peace.
Poems about World War I evoke a somber reflection on the toll of conflict and serve as a reminder of the need for compassion and understanding in a rapidly changing world.
‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ by Wilfred Owen is an unforgettable poem. In it, Owen uses the story of Abraham and Isaac from the Bible to describe World War I.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
‘The Soldier’ is a poem by famed war poet Rupert Brooke. It celebrates the sacrifices of soldiers during World War I.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
‘The Fish’ by Marianne Moore uses imagery and form to objectively describe nature and humanity’s ability to survive and mature in the face of death, destruction, and loss.
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
Once considered as a preface to the major poem ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S. Eliot, ‘Gerontion’ effectively deals with the huge psychological, spiritual, and physical destruction caused by the great war.
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
‘The Waste Land,’ epitomizing literary modernism, is one of the most important poems of the 20th century portraying its despondent mood in a new form.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
‘Sweeney Erect’ presents the complex and ambiguous state of Sweeney, in turn questioning civilization’s state in the modern world.
And the trees about me,
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches!
‘The Hollow Men’ presents the hollow, degenerated, and disillusioned people dealing with their meaningless existence amidst the ruins of the postwar world.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
‘Preludes’ is a chilling exploration of life amidst urban decay, alienation, and absence of meaning in the dark modern world.
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
‘The Spires of Oxford’ by Winifred M. Letts is a memorial war poem that explores the loss of innumerable men from Oxford. The poet expresses her hope these men are in Heaven.
I saw the spires of Oxford
As I was passing by,
The gray spires of Oxford
Against the pearl-gray sky.
‘Ducks’ by F.W. Harvey is a charming and interesting poem about the movements and lives of ducks. It looks at their humorous and calming features.
From troubles of the world
I turn to ducks,
Beautiful comical things
Sleeping or curled
Their heads beneath white wings
The best inspirations for poetry, or any art, really, as with the case of Owen’s ‘1914,’ come from anything that is real and important in the life of the writer.
War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,
Is over all the width of Europe whirled,
Wilfred Owen wrote ‘A Terre’ about the aftermath of the war. In it, a soldier reminisces about his days before the war – the days when he had full functionality of his limbs, and could do whatever he wanted – to an unknown listener, most likely a young and influential boy.
Sit on the bed; I'm blind, and three parts shell.
Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall.
Both arms have mutinied against me,—brutes.
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.
After losing his dear friend in World War I, William Butler Yeats wrote this particular poem, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. Robert Gregory, an Irish Airman, was accidentally shot down by an Italian Aviator, who happened to be a dear friend of Yeats.
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
‘And There Was a Great Calm’ by Thomas Hardy describes the horrors of WWI, the end of the war, and the ‘Great Calm’ which came on November 11th, 1918.
There had been years of Passion—scorching, cold,
And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,
Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,
Among the young, among the weak and old,
‘Counter-Attack’ is perhaps Siegfried Sassoon’s longest poem that describes a failed counter-attack on the German line. From the very first stanza, a sense of hopelessness lurks in this poem.
‘Distant Fields/ANZAC Parade’ by Rhian Gallagher is a poem about witnessing one parade commemorating the service of the deceased soldiers.
‘Dreamers’ by Siegfried Sassoon speakers on the inner, dream-like lives of soldiers fighting in the trenches of World War I.
‘Easter Monday (In Memoriam E.T.)’ is a fascinating exploration of grief and friendship against the backdrop of the First World War.
‘First March,’ written by one of the lesser known First World War poets, Ivor Bertie Gurney, is about a soldier’s emotional state while returning to his home.
Despite Wilfred Owen’s prodigious writing, only five poems were ever published in his lifetime – probably because of his strong anti-war sentiment, which would not have been in line with British policy at the time, particularly in their attempt to gather rather more and more people to sign up for the war.
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
In ‘Glory of Women,’ Siegfried Sassoon attacks the role of women in wartime and makes them complicit in the deaths of the men they claim to “worship”.
Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Inspection’ was drafted at a military hospital Craiglockhart in August 1917, and completed in September, under the influence of wartime poet Siegfried Sassoon. In it, Owen writes about the loss and cheapness of life through war.
"You! What d'you mean by this?" I rapped.
"You dare come on parade like this?"
"Please, sir, it's -' ''Old yer mouth," the sergeant snapped.
"I takes 'is name, sir?" - "Please, and then dismiss."
In ‘Last Post’, the poet winds back the clock so we reimagine fallen soldiers being brought back to life instead of dying in battle in the fields during WWI.
'In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.'
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
So the church Christ was hit and buried
Under its rubbish and its rubble.
In cellars, packed-up saints long serried,
Well out of hearing of our trouble.
“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
Pictures of these broad smiles appear each week,
And people in whose voice real feeling rings
Say: How they smile! They're happy now, poor things.
‘The Garden’ by Ezra Pound describes the emotional conflict caused by changes in the upper and lower classes of England during the ending months of WWI.
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