The Somme 1916

Very sombre image:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36683264

On this day one hundred years ago, 9 September, the Irish politician, soldier and poet Tom Kettle was killed in action at Guinchy during the Battle of the Somme.

Kettle was an Irish Parliamentary Party MP and advocate of Home Rule, but was a contemporary and friend of many of the Easter Rising leaders.

On sick leave in Ireland in the aftermath of the Rising he was offered a staff position on health grounds, but insisted on returning to the front in July 1916 out of loyalty to his comrades in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.

Four days before his death he wrote this sonnet as a farewell to his three year old daughter Elizabeth - the last two stanzas are carved into the plinth of his memorial in St Stephen's Green.

To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

Tom Kettle, 1880-1916.

tac foley wrote: »

So many poets and composers from these islands died in WW1 that it is hard to know where to begin to remember them all. One of my all-time favourite pieces of music, 'The banks of green willows' was penned by George Butterworth, shot by a sniper.

Who knows how many similarly-gifted artists that the world has missed, all but unknowing, on the other sides?

tac

A.E. Housman's poem, "The Lads in Their Hundreds", was published about 20 years before WW I, but couldn't have been more prophetic. Along with the other poems in Housman's collection "A Shropshire Lad", it was set to music by Butterworth: