Heres a virtual movie of a recitation by an English soldier of the naive Jingoistic WW1 poem "The Call" by the poetess Jessie Pope. History has not been kind to Jessie Pope who was blamed for glorifying war with her poems,but at the time she wrote them she was responding to the patriotic mood of the time.
Jessie Pope (18 March 1868 - 14 December 1941) was an English poet, writer and journalist, who remains best known for her patriotic motivational poems published during World War I.[1] Wilfred Owen directed his poem Dulce et Decorum Est at Pope, whose literary reputation has faded into relative obscurity as the works of war poets such as Owen and Siegfried Sassoon has grown.
Pope's war poetry was originally published in The Daily Mail and focused on encouraging recruitment. Nowadays, this poetry is considered to be jingoistic,[8][9] consisting of simple rhythms and rhyme schemes, with extensive use of rhetorical questions to persuade (and sometimes pressure) young men to join the war. This extract from Who's for the Game? is typical in style:
" Who's for the game, the biggest that's played,
The red crashing game of a fight?
Who'll grip and tackle the job unafraid?
And who thinks he'd rather sit tight? "
Other poems, such as The Call (1915)[10] - "Who's for the trench — Are you, my laddie?" - expressed similar sentiments. Pope was widely published during the war, apart from newspaper publication producing three volumes: Jessie Pope's War Poems (1915), More War Poems (1915) and Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times (1916).[11]
[edit] CriticismHer treatment of the subject is markedly in stark contrast to the anti-war stance of soldier poets such as Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Many of these men found her work distasteful, Owen in particular. His poem Dulce et Decorum Est was a direct response to her writing, originally dedicated "To Jessie Pope etc.". A later draft amended this to "To a certain Poetess", later being removed completely to turn the poem into a general attack on anyone sympathetic to the war.[12] In hindsight, Pope's poetry seems to take a light-hearted approach towards a conflict nowadays considered brutal in the extreme, though her views were by no means atypical of the general public at the time.
Pope is prominently remembered first for her pro-war poetry, but also as a representative of homefront female propagandists such as Mrs Humphry Ward, May Wedderburn Cannan, Emma Orczy, and entertainers such as Vesta Tilley.[13] In particular, the poem "War Girls", similar in structure to her pro-war poetry, states how "No longer caged and penned up/They're going to keep their end up/Until the khaki soldier boys come marching back". Though largely unknown at the time, the War Poets like Nichols, Sassoon and Owen, as well as later writers such as Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and Richard Aldington, have come to define the experience of the First World War
Reappraisal
Pope's work is today often presented in schools and anthologies as a counterpoint to the work of the War Poets, a comparison by which her pro-war work suffers both technically and politically. Some writers have attempted a partial re-appraisal of her work as an early pioneer of English women in the workforce, while still critical of both the content and artistic merit of her war poetry. Reminded that Pope was primarily a humourist and writer of light verse, her success in publishing and journalism during the pre-war era, when she was described as the "foremost woman humourist" of her day has been overshadowed by her propagandistic war poems. Her verse has been mined for sympathetic portrayals of the poor and powerless, of women urged to be strong and self-reliant.[ Her portrayal of the Suffragettes in a pair of counterpointed 1909 poems makes a case both for and against their actions
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2011
The Call............
Who's for the trench ?
Are you, my laddie?
Who'll follow French ?
Will you, my laddie?
Who's fretting to begin,
Who's going out to win?
And who wants to save his skin ?
Do you, my laddie?
Who's for the khaki suit ?
Are you, my laddie?
Who longs to charge and shoot ?
Do you, my laddie?
Who's keen on getting fit,
Who means to show his grit,
And who'd rather wait a bit ?
Would you, my laddie?
Who'll earn the Empire's thanks ?
Will you, my laddie?
Who'll swell the victor's ranks ?
Will you, my laddie?
When that procession comes,
Banners and rolling drums ?
Who'll stand and bite his thumbs ?
Will you, my laddie?
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