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War Poets 22
War Poets 22
A attractive
In contrast with this is the picture of the emptiness of
spirit and feelings when Eliot considers the condition
:of man
What are the roots that clutchA, what branches grow
,Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man
You cannot say or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken imagesB , where the sun beats
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricketC no relief
.And the dry stone no sound of water
A: bars B: die
C : ten years
During the Second World War he went to live in
America, and by the end of the war he had lost
much of his earlier hope that the world could be
changed and made better by decisive human
action (political action influenced by literature) .
After this time his poetry became in many ways
more personal and, increasingly, looking for
.spiritual qualities in the life around him
His poems often communicate a strong sense of the realities of everyday
life; he writes, for example, of how suffering and death can happen for
one man while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along, and how a party that seems to the staff of an Embassy to be
boring and ordinary can mean war and death for the countries whose fate
depends on them: Embassy Poems
And on the issueA of their charm depended
,A land laid waste, with all its young men slainB
.The women weeping and its towns in terror
A : result B : killed
Auden also wrote many lyric poems, of which this early
example is one of the best known: (Lullaby poems)
,Lay your sleeping head, my love
;Human on my faithless arm
Time and fevers burn away
IndividualA beauty from
Thoughtless children, and the grave
: Proves the child ephemeralB
But in my arms till break of day
.Let the living creature lie
MortalC , guilty, but to me
.The entirely beautiful
A: special B: living only for a short time
C: certain to die
Two other poets who became known in the 1930s were louis MacNeice and CECIL
Day Lewis. The poems of MacNeice deal with personal experiences as well as with
political events and their results, while Day Lewis's best work is related to social
themes, as in his song for the child
of poor parents: (A Carol Poem)
The stars in the bright sky
Look down and are dumb
At the heirA of the ages
Asleep in a slumB
,ThyC mother is crying
."Thy dad's on the doleD
Two shillings a week is
.The price of a soul
A: person who will receive something B: poor, dirty house
C: your D: money given by the State