You strange old ghouls,
Who gloat with dulled old eyes,
Over those lists,
Those dreadful lists,
To see what name
Of friend of relation,
However distant,
May be appended
To your private Roll of Honour.
Unknowingly you draw, it seems,
From their young bodies,
Dead young bodies,
Fresh life,
New value,
Now that yours are ebbing.
You strange old ghouls,
Who gloat with dulled old eyes,
Over those lists,
Those dreadful lists,
Of young men dead.
Who gloat with dulled old eyes,
Over those lists,
Those dreadful lists,
To see what name
Of friend of relation,
However distant,
May be appended
To your private Roll of Honour.
Unknowingly you draw, it seems,
From their young bodies,
Dead young bodies,
Fresh life,
New value,
Now that yours are ebbing.
You strange old ghouls,
Who gloat with dulled old eyes,
Over those lists,
Those dreadful lists,
Of young men dead.
Helen Hamilton
This poem bares some similarity to the poem 'Fallen' by Alice Corbin as it covers the same subject however they contain contrasting imagery, for example, this poem by Hamilton uses phrases such as 'dead young bodies and 'dulled old eyes' to give the reader sombre mental images and gives the impression that death due to the war isn't worth it. Corbin, on the other hand, uses imagery such as 'storm of petals', and 'children laughing' which would give the reader a more content view of death from the perspective of a female envisioning what it must have been like for a soldier.
ReplyDeletei agree, as well as this I also think that the poem 'Fallen' by Alice Corbin have similarities to 'Ghouls' as both use a free verse structure to slow the overall pace of the poem to convey the atmosphere of the soldiers passing and becoming 'dead young bodies'. However the poems contrast each other as the portray different points of a soldiers death, this is because 'Fallen' uses tranquil langauge to pull across the dreamy state of the soldiers death 'and the weight dropped off' wheras 'Ghouls' conveys an image of the amount of lives that have been lost and added to 'those dreadful lists'.
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