www.fallenheroes.co.uk
Teaching the Great War
This lesson was delivered on Friday 3rd November
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The Poetry of War
Pupils used material from the following website in researching this topic :
The Lost Poets of World War 1
http://www.cc.emory.edu/ENGLISH/LostPoets/

Peace
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke

1887-1915

Sassoon, Siegfried (1886-1967).

http://raven.cc.ukans.edu/~kansite/ww_one/bio/s/sassoon.html

On November 1, 1915 Sassoon suffered his first personal loss of the War. His younger brother Hamo was buried at sea after being mortally wounded at Gallipoli. Sassoon subsequently commemorated this with a poem entitled "To My Brother" (published in the Saturday Review, February 26, 1916). Then on March 18, 1916 second lieutenant David C. Tommy' Thomas (the 'Dick Tiltwood' of Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man) was killed whilst out with a wiring party. He had been hit in the throat by a rifle bullet, and despite the Battalion doctor being a throat specialist, had died of the wound.

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