There was no sound at all, no crying in the village,
Nothing you would count as sound, that is, after the shells;
Only behind a wall the low sobbing of women,
The creaking of a door, a lost dog-nothing else.
Silence which might be felt, no pity in the silence,
Horrible, soft like blood, down all the blood-stained ways;
In the middle of the street two corpses lie unburied,
And a bayoneted woman stares in the market-place.
Humble and ruined folk-for these no pride of conquest,
Their only prayer: "O Lord, give us our daily bread!"
Not by the battle fires, the shrapnel are we haunted;
Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?
Margaret Sackville
This poem could be about the aftermath of a bombing which we can get from when Sackville mentions the 'shells'. We could also assert that in the poem she is talking about how the people living in the village can't escape the reality of how many people and soldiers are dying due to the damage done to the village; everywhere they look there is a reminder. Also we see the 'low sobbing of women' which could convey how because they stayed at home whilst their men went to fight at war, now they have been shelled and their men may be dead, their lives could be seen to be falling apart as their village now is.
ReplyDeleteI think it depends on when it was written .This could describe the end of war and how people felt after they have gone to fight .The regretting to go to war and not stay at home , the mournfulness of the dead in memory and the emptiness of the bombs no longer being drop. A new change.
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