Thought for the week

"The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life.

Try to be Shakespeare; leave the rest to fate!"

Two great songs about the First World War

To round off our study of WWI poetry, I shared with my students today a couple of favourite songs about WWI by the folk singer Eric Bogle. I saw him play at the Anzac Club in Toronto in 1998, while I was working there as a lawyer (quite possibly on Anzac Day - pretty close to it, anyway). He told an amusing story about how the then UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had recently professed that one of Bogle's songs, The Green Fields of France, was his favourite 'poem' about the First World War, but had gone on to mention that its author, like so many of the War's great poets, had died in the fighting. This is a dumb mistake to make - a lazy error on the part of one of Blair's speech writers, no doubt - since the piece is pretty obviously written long after the War, from the perspective of someone visiting a war cemetery.

Bogle got further free publicity from the incident when one of his formidable Scottish aunties wrote to The Times newspaper to point out to the careless Prime Minister that the poet he admired was in fact very much alive and well... "and to prove it, here are his upcoming tour dates."

As we can see from the photo montage accompanying this recording, Bogle's song was inspired by an actual grave, that of a Pte. William McBride, who was killed in 1916, at the age of 21. (This is one of the best montages of this kind I've ever seen: the images, mostly contemporary photographs, are very appropriately matched to the lyrics.)

Bogle was born in Peebles in Scotland in 1944, but emigrated to Australia as a young man. This, And The Band Played 'Waltzing Matilda'..., perhaps his most famous song (certainly in Australia, where it has become hailed as a national treasure), was written in the early 1970s, shortly after he moved there. At this time, many veterans of the 1915 Gallipoli landings were still living, still able to turn out for annual Anzac Day parades, even though they would have been mostly in their 70s and 80s. You can hear Bogle himself sing this song here; but my favourite of the many cover versions that have been made of it is this one by Shane MacGowan and The Pogues (a crazy Irish punk-folk group who enjoyed major worldwide success during the 1980s). Again, there is an excellent photo montage accompanying the music.

As an extra little musical treat in my second class, I asked one of my students, Sophia Chan, an outstanding musician, to preface this by playing Waltzing Matilda for us on her violin. She had challenged me on Monday - in reference to my latest 'Thought for the week' on my desire to share enthusiasms in the classroom - to allow her a chance to share her enthusiasm for music with the English class occasionally, and I was delighted to agree.

Helen of Troy

In reading WWI poems with a class on Saturday we came upon some written at Gallipoli, making reference to the legendary Siege of Troy. I was suddenly reminded of this, a bitter jest on female vanity, cherished since my adolescence. I was relieved to discover that, despite not having thought of it for some years, I could still recall it by heart.

“And were you pleased?” they asked of Helen in Hell.

“Pleased?” answered she, “When all Troy’s towers fell,

And dead were Priam’s sons, and lost his throne,

And such a war was fought as none had known,

And even the gods took part, and all because of me alone?

Pleased?

                                                 I should say I was!”

Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany (1878-1957)