It Is Easy to be Dead
In the trenches of World War I, a young poet saw through "thank you for your service."
I am starting to think that maybe this blog's deep subject — the one that moves people to worry about care and indifference — is grief. How people experience it, avoid it, engage in contortions to impose it on others, or to spare others from its burden.
Today's literary post is a poem about that. It isn't, though, the typical sort of lyric about the writer's sorrow. Instead, he eerily places himself among the already-dead, contemplating the living as they mourn. If there's to be grief, he writes, let it be real — personal and ungovernable. Let it not be grief's official public expression — political and glib, proclaiming that soldiers' deaths were always worth it, and their memory eternal, blah blah blah.
I don't think the poem tells you not to feel this way. It tells you not to talk this way, because to talk so facilely of death is not to mourn, but rather to avoid mourning.
The writer, Charles Hamilton Sorley, had every right to his words. He volunteered for the British Army in 1914, at the age of 19, and fought on the Western Front, where he wrote these lines.
Sorley was shot dead by a sniper during the Battle of Loos on October 13, 1915. The poem was found in his kit bag.
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
By Charles Hamilton Sorley
When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across your dreams in pale battalions go, Say not soft things as other men have said, That you'll remember. For you need not so. Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know It is not curses heaped on each gashed head? Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow. Nor honour. It is easy to be dead. Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto, “Yet many a better one has died before.” Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you Perceive one face that you loved heretofore, It is a spook. None wears the face you knew. Great death has made all his for evermore.