The Dragon and the Undying
Author: Siegfried Sassoon
All night the flares go up; the Dragon sings
And beats upon the dark with furious wings;
And, stung to rage by his own darting fires,
Reaches with grappling coils from town to town;
He lusts to break the loveliness of spires,
And hurl their martyred music toppling down.
Yet though the slain are homeless as the breeze,
Vocal are they,like storm-bewilder'd seas.
Their faces are the fair, unshrouded night,
And planets are their eyes, their ageless dreams.
Tenderly stooping earthward from their height,
They wander in the dusk with chanting streams,
And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms up-flung,
To hail the burning heavens they left unsung.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Posted: May 2011
About this poem:
This is a poem written by a WW1 veteran in February 1916, and sadly some of his work is going out of print so I thought I'd post it. Siegfried Sassoon was decorated with the Military Cross and was wounded four times in action. Through his later poetry, he began to speak out against the war, describing the horror of it, and saying it was being fought for unjust reasons. Perhaps as a result of this attitude, he was sent to an army psychiatric hospital in 1917, making a full "recovery" shortly afterwards. Read and comment, perhaps you feel what he had to say is still relevant today.
Comments (6)
interesting education.