Remembrance Sunday is on us again this weekend, and again a surprisingly large crowd from my village will be gathering round its memorial cross to hear the names of the fallen read out, so many from a place that at that time had scarcely four hundred inhabitants. So on that theme I have chosen as this week’s poem an elegy by the Italian-born British poet Humbert Wolfe (1851-1940). Wolfe had a big reputation between the wars and was even considered for Poet Laureate, but he seems to be little remembered today except for his mordant epigram on the British journalist:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
thank God! The British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

(As an aside, I was amused to come across an AI interpretation of these lines that took them for a straightforward tribute to the British journalist as being of impeccable integrity and needing no base incentive to strive for excellence. Which shows that AI has some way to go in detecting nuance. Unless, of course, it is developing a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour).

Wolfe, who worked as a civil servant, was a bit too close to the Establishment for my taste – I think myself that it is better for poets to maintain a polite distance from anything that might seek to press them into service. But I find that this poem, though possessing nothing like the power of Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, does have a certain quiet poignancy.

Requiem: The Soldier

Down some cold field in a world outspoken
the young men are walking together, slim and tall,
and though they laugh to one another, silence is not broken;
there is no sound however clear they call.

They are speaking together of what they loved in vain here,
but the air is too thin to carry the things they say.
They were young and golden, but they came on pain here,
and their youth is age now, their gold is grey.

Yet their hearts are not changed, and they cry to one another,
‘What have they done with the lives we laid aside?
Are they young with our youth, gold with our gold, my brother?
Do they smile in the face of death, because we died?’

Down some cold field in a world uncharted
the young seek each other with questioning eyes.
They question each other, the young, the golden hearted,
of the world that they were robbed of in their quiet paradise.

Humbert Wolfe