THE MODERN AGE
The Modern Age is a period characterised by wars, it starts in 1914 and covers the first half of the XX century.
The beginning of the Modern Age is marked by the beginning of the first world war(1914), a war that is considered not only
a historical, but also an economic and cultural event.
The First World War marked a fundamental break between the old world and the new, it profoundly changed man’s view of
life, it was a new experience for many reasons:
1. number of casualties:
8 500 000 men were killed, most of them on the ‘Western Front’
over 750 000 British troops were killed, about 50 times more than in the twenty-year Napoleonic wars.
2. the horror of the trenches
Trenches were holes in the ground, where soldiers lived in mud and water among decaying bodies and the rats
that came to feed on them.
Soldiers had to stay there for months, most of their time thinking and reflecting on what was happening, often
developing the idea they were stuck there forever.
Soldiers began to understand that they were very little more than pawns in the politicians’ and generals’ hands.
For the soldiers in the trenches life was hell.
3. new weapons
bombardments
gas
machine guns
tanks
4. crazy enthusiasm before the beginning of the war
Lots of men enlisted voluntarily, there were masses of volunteers (also many artists)
The heavy recruitment from volunteers was due to:
-patriotism
-romantic idealism: people saw in war a positive experience of struggle, change and renovation
-propaganda
We can distinguish three phases of the war:
1. war is seen with enthusiasm
2. war is seen with irony, caused by the contrast between the way the war was conceived (war as spring, positive
opportunity to change) and the way it was lived (as a hell).
People at home didn’t know what was happening in the trenches, the true horror of trench warfare was deliberately
concealed from the civilian populations, people at home regarded war as a glorious occasion for heroism and patriotic
effort.
3. war finishes with disillusionment and psycological breakdown.
people became aware that war had been a carnage, a slaughter.
The soldier, Rupert Brooke
Brooke is considered the voice of innocence, he gives a romantic vision of war.
This sonnet is not only about war, but especially about the mother-country, England.
Connotations of England:
It is described as a paradise → her flowers to love (line 6)
her ways to roam (line 6)
A body of England, breathing English air (line 7 )
blest by suns of home (line 8)
dreams happy as her day (line 12)
laughter (line 13 )
gentleness (line 13)
heaven (maximum climax)(line 14)
The sonnet conveys traditional values → love for the mother-country
pride in sacrificing oneself for the mother-country (if I should die)
It’s the typical landscape of Romantic idealism.
England is described as an idillic and romantic place.
FORM : sonnet, the most traditional kind of poem
STYLE: melodious
TONE: enfatic, solemn, declamatory
‘The soldier’ was used by propaganda, as a manifesto of idealism.
Dulce et Decorum est, Wilfred Owen
The title is a quotation from the Latin poet Horace.
Owen is considered the voice of awareness.
The poem is based on the poet’s experience of the horrors in the trenches and it is an attempt to communicate the “pity”
of war to future generations.
It’s divided into four stanzas:
1. soldiers in an open field, trying to get to rest in the trench
2. gas attack, Owen uses the metaphor of the sea and drowning to recreate the effects caused by a gas attack.
3. it’s the turning point
it’s set in the present
soldiers who have survived have horror in their minds forever
dreams become nightmares
the horror of war is unforgettable
“in all my dreams, before mu helpless sight/He plunges at me, guttering, chocking, drowning.”
4. The poet talks to the civilian who is at home as if he was his friend.
if you could see what I’ve seen, you wouldn’t say “dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori”
This poem was censured, because it shows the horror of the war.
NEW CONTENT: horror of the war
TONE: realistic, sad, ironic
STYLE: direct, precise description
(typical of Owen, not in this poem): half-rymes/pararhyme
(for example star-stir, loves-lives, seeds-sieds → change in the middle)
Owen frequently uses pararyme because of their lack of musicality, they produce a sense of frustration, they have a
symbolic meaning, they produce dissonance instead of harmony.
Break of Day in the Trenches, Isaac Rosenberg
The poem presents an insight into life in the trenches.
The poet is speaking to a rat, a queer, sardonic, droll rat.
The rat seems to become superior to soldiers.
The rat has no problem in crossing the battlefields
Soldiers are less chanced, they are less lucky, they have to stay in the trenches.
The poppy (line 5) is a metaphor, it’s the symbol of casualties
→ red is the colour of blood
→ this flowers grows well on battlefields (poppies whose roots are in man’s veins-line 23)
TONE: ironic, disillusioned, detached (war is represented indirectly), shows sympathy for the human condition
Rosenberg is considered the voice of modernity.
