06-23-2021, 04:07 AM
(06-21-2021, 09:56 PM)dukealien Wrote: For that matter, a contemporary (pre-WWI) reader would have likely taken this at face value, harrowing but inspiring, perhaps brought up short at times by the lese-majeste of incorporating phrases from the anthem. An inter-war or post-Vietnam reader would, instead, likely find it deeply cynical. "Red Badge of Courage," anyone?Interestingly, Peter Jackson's 2018 film 'They shall not grow old', which contains still pictures set to motion with the voice overs of WW1 vets from 1970s BBC recordings, makes this point. Or rather, the vets themselves do: there wasn't a lot of intellectual pondering over the rights and wrongs of the 'Great war'. Nor was there, unlike in WW2 or the Spanish civil war, a definite moral compass.
The mental capacity of the average factory lad from Lancashire was perhaps rather limited in those days from limited diet and education. I wonder if it was the same in America - were the masses who went to fight for the South in the civil war just thick headed? How did they run their farms and fields with that level of sentience?
Coming to the poem - I find it too conscious of its own irony to be convincing as a first person narrative. That is to say, it doesn't work at the level of the author as well as the narrator, only the former.