Text 68

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we curded through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And floundering like a man in fire of lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –

My friend, you woul not tell with such high zest

To children ardent with some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Ducle et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Those who had survived in the War did not turn into great revolutionaries. Rather, they became great individualists. Many poets, who came to literature later, in the 1930s, were also ready to fight for freedom wherever they could. The 1930s are known as a 'pink' decade on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the leading radical, Marxist and anti-fascist poets of the period was Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973). Just like Aldington, Auden left England for the USA in the 1940s.

His early work shows a concern for the important political and social events. He didn't try to put a distance between himself and the age. During the Spanish Civil War he visited Spain for two months to support the Republicans. Auden is recognized as one of the most prolific, versatile and intellectually vigorous English poets of the 20^th century. His poetry is experimenting and innovating in an attempt to render the spirit of the Age of Anxiety by departing form old poetical conventions. Like Wilfred Owen, Auden found the 'full chime' of rhyme or 'slant rhyme'. The poet was also able to reconcile traditional verse patterns with a fresh and easy contemporary language (Text 69).