Death’s Kingdom

• Rather than acquiescing to our modern sensitivities, Gardner allows the soldier-poets’ graphic descriptions to speak for themselves, forcing us to confront the horrors of war.
• Ultimately, there is no honour among these men, and although Frankau writes that ‘The Deserter‘ is sentenced to ‘die his death of disgrace’, there begs the question if there is such a thing as an honourable death in war.
• This section is the longest of the collection, documenting the personal experiences of the soldiers first-hand.
• Death, danger, and fear are ubiquitous themes, featuring heavily in every single poem - a deciding turning point in the anthology.
• The camaraderie of ‘Tipperary Days’ has manifested into a deep, mutual understanding of mental and physical suffering.
• Insanity is directly confronted in poems like ‘In The Ambulance’
• In the beginning, the same sense of Georgian formalism is evoked, in the simplistic form (with regular quatrains and alternating rhyme schemes frequently used). This allows the brutality of the poets’ imagery to become the defining, prominent feature of their style.
• Blunden is the first here to use a modernist style in his 2 consecutive poems.
• Those who embrace modernism combine brutal imagery with a less ordered, more chaotic structure (a reflection of the combat itself)
• Poems like ‘My Company’ offer rare moments of tenderness and empathy, contradicting the attitude that the chain of command should remain unattached to their men for impartiality’s sake.
• Poems increasingly from this point focus on the individual experience of loss and pain.
• Siegfried Sassoon has 5 consecutive poems in this section, which tend to juxtapose moments of kindness and camaraderie with the inescapable brutality of war.
• The poem ‘Going into the line’ captures the terror of being sent ‘up the line’ to the Somme.
• The final 3 poems chart Rosenberg’s poetic development, ending in his early modernist poem ’Break of Day in the Trenches’ in which he links trench life with the traditional post-war symbol of mourning - the poppy.