Timor Mortis Non Conturbat Me

[dedalus]

... tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalize the dead.

When I travel in dreams to 1916,
to the barricades of Dublin, to the angry cannonades
by the streams of the Ancre above the Somme,
I can see their tired individual faces
squinting east into the sun.

Curiosity rather than fear now traces
the look in their eyes, hands clasped loosely on rifle or gun,
their look of wonder married to mild surprise,
the morning roll-ups drooping on young dry lips.

This thing we have been waiting for all our lives,
this event from boyhood only half-imagined,
is about to begin. What will it be like?

[ray miller]

I found it a little confusing, Bren, in that it starts as a dream and then I get the impression that you're looking at photos. Maybe that's the intent.Is the half-imagined event, war or death? I liked the occasional rhymes, angry cannonades, anguished Ancre. Not too sure about "Curiosity rather than fear now traces", whether still might be preferable to now.

[dedalus]

Fair enough. I'll come back to this, Ray. It's a recurring theme in a lot of what I do: it goes way back to barber shops in Dublin when I was a wee kid of 6 or 7 ... hard-eyed men with missing arms and legs. The Somme. Passchendaele. I had no idea then. Now I think I know.

This one is a conflation of the Easter Rising and the First Day of the Somme -- young men all. It's a reaction to real people, not photographs.

Bren

[Raine]

I'm not qualified to comment on the content but from a purely poetic stand point I like this very much. Good use of language, some very effective half rhymes !

[dedalus]

My thanks to ray and to raine for the comments above ....

Timor mortis conturbat me is a Latin phrase commonly found in late medieval English poetry, translating to "fear of death disturbs me". The phrase comes from a responsory of the Catholic Office of the Dead, in the third Nocturn of Matins:
Peccantem me quotidie, et non poenitentem, timor mortis conturbat me. Quia in inferno nulla est redemptio, miserere mei, Deus, et salva me.
"Sinning daily, and not repenting, the fear of death disturbs me. Because there is no redemption in hell, have mercy on me, O God, and save me."

The addition of 'Non' in the title renders the phrase into a negative: fear of Death does NOT disturb me.
Why ever not? Here's some background:

Lord Kitchener's New Army consisted of 1914 civilian volunteers who had been trained throughout 1915 and shipped to France, for the most part, in the spring of 1916. These were idealistic patriotic young men, many of them serving with their friends or workmates in locally organised "Pal's Battalions" -- the very flower of English manhood. Their first and for many last battle began at 7.30 am on July 1st, 1916, the opening day of the great British attack just north of the River Somme. The battlefield extended for about 30 km (18 miles) in the Artois/Picardy region of northern France, from the villages of Gommecourt in the north to Montauban in the south, an area just east of Amiens and south of Arras and bisected by the River Ancre, a tributary of the Somme. Before evening fell more than 57,000 of these young soldiers had been killed or wounded, the worst single day for casualties in the whole history of the British Army, more than its battle casualties in the Crimean War, Boer War and Korean War combined. Reinforcing the catastrophic failure of the opening day, their commanding generals (primarily Sir Douglas Haig aided by his subordinates Rawlinson, Gough, Allenby and Snow) threw them into further attacks for another four months until winter brought the offensive to an end -- by which time they had suffered another 350,000 casualties and advanced exactly six miles. That was the end of the Volunteer Army, and the experiment of the Pal's Battalions was never to be repeated -- whole towns and villages throughout Britain had been plunged into mourning. Conscription came in and the War went on.

About two months previously in that same fateful year of 1916, other young men of similar age and patriotic disposition, members of the Irish Volunteers and Citizen Army who had refused to fight overseas for the British Empire, occupied strategic buildings in Dublin and declared an Irish Republic. The rebellion was ruthlessly crushed after the centre of the city had been destroyed by artillery. Martial law was declared and executions followed.

In spite of the vast differences in scale I have conjoined these two events in my poem, not to score any political points but to show that for young patriots facing their first armed conflict in a cause they passionately believed in, feelings on the eve of battle -- excitement, trepidation, curiosity, a desire to perform bravely, the nobility of the cause -- would not have entirely overcome their fear of death or maiming but would have done much to mitigate it, and would probably have been quite similar among both sets of young men.

[David]

Cowper, eh? That's his "Year of the Cat", in terms of anthologies, isn't it?

I must admit I haven't looked at this until now, and it isn't at all what I expected.

In spite of the vast differences in scale I have conjoined these two events in my poem, not to score any political points but to show that for young patriots facing their first armed conflict in a cause they passionately believed in, feelings on the eve of battle -- excitement, trepidation, curiosity, a desire to perform bravely, the nobility of the cause -- would not have entirely overcome their fear of death or maiming but would have done much to mitigate it, and would probably have been quite similar among both sets of young men.

That's exactly what you've done, and I think you've achieved it very successfully.

"When I travel in dreams to 1916" is a wonderful opening, at once conversational and incantatory, and I honestly don't think you put a foot wrong afterwards.

I know you count your own poetic successes as few and far between. I suspect you think this is one of them. I agree.

Cheers

David

[k-j]

The joining of the two events neutralises the politics brilliantly.

I like this very much, although I suspect that curiosity and fear are both present in those looks.

"Mild surprise" made me instantly think of Keats' "wild surmise" - that sense of wonder at an undiscovered country.

Lovely detail with the dry lips. The rhyme / halfrhyme is nicely done.

Have they been waiting for it all their lives? Surely many never dreamed this would happen to them? Nonetheless I like the ending.

I'm not keen on the title, although as Latin phrases go it's a great-sounding one. But it's still a dead language!

One of your best, I reckon.

[dedalus]

William Dunbar's "Lament for the Makars", written around the end of the 15th century, employs the phrase at the last line of each verse. The poem refers back to medieval Scottish poets.

He hes done petuously devour,
The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,
The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

The gude Syr Hew of Eglintoun,
And eik Heryot, and Wyntoun,
He hes tane out of this cuntre;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Indeed, David, the opening quote came from Cowper. Both he and Dunbar were included in the Oxford Anthology that many of these young fellows carried with them to the trenches. And k-j was quick to pick up the passing (respectful) nod to Keats!

I don't know if this is one of my best, or even successful in what it sets out to do. At least it's short!

Bren

[Elphin]

Ded

I cant argue that this isnt well constructed - the morning roll-ups drooping on young dry lips I like very much and the conflation of the two events is a good one.

I wonder though if the subject is just so well covered by the Sassoons, Owens etc that it becomes exceptionally tough to put a new slant on it. Even the Latin title nods to Dulce et ...etc. Having said that you made a good fist of it though.

Cheers

elph

[dedalus]

I wonder though if the subject is just so well covered by the Sassoons, Owens etc that it becomes exceptionally tough to put a new slant on it.

Well, ... yesss, with the enormous difference that from poor doomed Rupert Brooke at the beginning, all the other poets that followed: Sassoon, Graves -- (they were in the same regiment, the Royal Welch) -- Wilfred Owen ... (who met Sassoon at Craiglockhart Hospital, aka the Loony Bin) ... Herbert Read, Blunden, Edgell Rickword, Ivor Gurney, John McCrae, et al, actually lived through the experiences they wrote about. There is a tendency to lump them together as the War Poets -- now the FIRST War Poets -- as though the whole thing has been boxed and shelved and generally tidied up. The whole point is that even as the Great War fades chronologically in our memory -- the last of the boy-combatants has now succumbed, I believe -- the enormity of what happened remains.

Philip Larkin was one who returned to the theme in "MCMXIV":

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

There is a great danger of domesticating or even patronising the Past as Larkin seems to do so in his first three stanzas above, to relegate it from modern consciousness as an area of quaintness now long outgrown or superceded, something to be given the gloss of Disneyfication or else herded into various Theme Parks with admission prices and opening and closing times. This, I think, is a mistake. Looking at the jerky old newsreels or posed photographs we can smile at the fashions, the early motorcars, the peculiar telephones, and smugly believe we have left all that behind. We can even look at the bulky video cameras and somewhat-mobile phones of the 1980s and delight in the same feeling. This may make us feel superior (among the young the 1960s felt INFINITELY superior to the 1950s and everything that went before ... now that's a half-century ago) but it overlooks the non-superficial, the things that never seem to change: the Seven Deadly Sins, for example, a form of behavioral shorthand which need no religious connection to be recognised. Emotional reactions, failures of judgement, moral lapses, are human phenomena that are still very much with us, and so is the potential for repeating the horrors of the past on an even grander scale.

I may have strayed away from the focussed intent of your criticism (and you did say a couple of nice encouraging things), and for that I apologise, but it has afforded the opportunity to express my rather firm and indeed growing suspicion, hardly original since others have made the warning before, generally ignored, but at least now in my own case not simply read but understood, that if we don't make an enormous effort to understand the events of the past we can have little hope of creating a better future.

A bit of a rant, sorry, but that's one of the things poems (and comments on poems) are for!

All the best,
Bren