Poem of the Day

My Oxford Book of English Verse does not have the poem by Wilfred Owen that I wanted. It has only "Anthem for Doomed Youth," which is in a similar vein, "Strange Meeting," oh heck that one too. "Miners" is the only non-war poem.

But it does not contain the famous "Dulce et Decorum est." Here it is. It is sweet and right to die for your country. The old lie.

I vividly remember reading this poem in high school. Growing up, World War I was represented by a photo of my father as a child, dressed in a dough-boy uniform his mother had sewed. Anyone called a dough-boy could not be anything very serious. This poem exploded my childhood understanding.

Such reformulations become rarer with age, but I certainly experienced two yesterday while watching John Adams. In the first scene, a mob seized a British Customs Agent and tarred and feathered him. I have read and heard that phrase "tar and feather" so often that it never had precise meaning. Seeing someone tarred and feathered changes that. The second powerful visual for me was the inoculation scene. Several years ago I read Elizabeth Fenn's Pox Americana, which contains written descriptions of the process of taking material from an active lesion and inserting it into the upper arm of a non-immune person. Seeing is another matter.