Rad Geek People's Daily

What I'm Reading: Charles Hamilton Sorley, in World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others (1997, ed. Candace Ward).

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
> Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
> Say not soft things as other men have said,
> That you'll remember. For you need not so.
> Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
> It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
> Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
> Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
> Say only this, They are dead. Then add thereto,
> Yet many a better one has died before.
> Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
> Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
> It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
> Great death has made all his for evermore.

>

—Charles Hamilton Sorley (1915/1916)When you see millions of the mouthless dead...
World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others

This was Sorley's last poem. The manuscript was recovered from his soldier's kit after a sniper killed him at Loos.

It was published posthumously in Marlborough and Other Poems (Cambridge, 1916). I read it, and copied it out of, the Dover anthology World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others (1997, ed. Candace Ward).