English Literature, Key Poems List

Thomas Hardy: Men Who March Away
- Volunteers marching to war tell those who watch them pass by of their faith in the justice of their cause.

Thomas Hardy: In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’
- The routines of life and love continue during conflict, and will continue long after it is over.

Rupert Brooke: Peace
- This sonnet is an expression of thanks for being able to respond to the call to arms and leave behind the stale and empty concerns of civilian life.

Rupert Brooke: The Dead
- Celebrates those who have given their lives. The sacrifice of the lowliest of them has given the world honour and nobility.

Rupert Brooke: The Soldier
- A solider reflects that, should he die, his grave will become a little piece of England in a foreign country.

Herbert Asquith: The Volunteer
- Celebrates a city clerk whose dreams of military glory have been fulfilled. His death in battle is rewarded with a place alongside the heroes of the Battle of Agincourt.

Julian Grenfell: Into Battle
- Celebrates spring and moves on to describe the validity of the warrior, whose sacrifice will be rewarded. Nature and the solider are at one and this gives him peace and a sense of destiny.

John McCrae: In Flanders Fields
- The dead, lying beneath ground covered with poppies, urge the living to continue the struggle against the enemy.

Charles Sorley: All the Hills and Vales Along
- Addressing men marching past, the poet urges them to sing while they have life. The earth will welcome them in death just as it has welcomed everyone else who has passed by.

Charles Sorley: When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead
- The poet tells the reader not to be deceived about the dead. Their existence is so far removed from ours that it does not matter what we think or say of them.

A. E. Housman: Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
- Describes those who defended their country in return for pay.

A. E. Housman: Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
- This is a reply to Housman’s poem previous. It is a political poem that takes an uncompromising communist stance on the events of 1914.

W. B. Yeats: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
- An airman reflects on his fate; it is the joy of flight that has drawn him to the clouds.

Siegfried Sassoon: They
- Satirically contrasts the moral improvement to British soldiers promised by a Bishop with the physical damage and moral degradation that they actually experience.

Siegfried Sassoon: The Hero
- An officer visits a dead soldier’s mother to tell her how he died. She is proud of her son’s supposed gallantry, though in truth ‘Jack’ was a coward and the officer has lied to her.

Siegfried Sassoon: The Rear-Guard
- A soldier, stumbling along a captured trench in the dark, sees what he thinks is a sleeping soldier and demands to be given directions. The man is dead; in horror, the soldier staggers up to the surface.

Siegfried Sassoon: The General
- The General seemed a cheerful character when the soldiers saw him on their way to battle but his incompetent planning led to the deaths of most of them.

Siegfried Sassoon: Glory of Women
- Sassoon comments that women love soldiers as heroes and they delight in war stories; they have no appreciation of the horrors of war. A German mother also has no idea of the fate of her son.

Edward Thomas: Rain
- The poet lies awake listening to the rain, thinking of his own mortality and of all those he loves who may also be listening to it.

Edward Thomas: As the Team’s Head Brass
- As a couple walk together into the wood beyond, a walker rests at the edge of a field. There, a farmer is methodically ploughing his fields with a team of horses, and the narrator and farmer fall into conversation about the war.

Ivor Gurney: To His Love
- The poem is an elegy for a fellow-soldier, and is addressed to the dead soldier’s ‘love’. It asks that his body be covered with flowers from the banks of his native River Severn.

Ivor Gurney: Ballad of the Three Spectres
- A soldier meets three apparitions who foretell different futures for him: to be wounded and sent home, to die or to live until the last days of the war and die in an ‘hour of agony’.

Ivor Gurney: The Silent One
- During an attack one officer is killed crossing the barbed wire whilst the private lies flat. A second officer asks the pirate to crawl through a gap, but he refuses until he retreats and then comes back to the same place.

Isaac Rosenberg: On Receiving News of the War
- Describes Rosenberg’s reaction to the outbreak of the First World War, conveying the poet’s sense of anxious foreboding of the horrors ahead through a series of symbols of life, death and rebirth.

Isaac Rosenberg: August 1914
- Reflects on the beginning of the First World War, questioning the consequences of its destruction.

Isaac Rosenberg: Break of Day in the Trenches
- At dawn a sentry standing on duty pulls a poppy from the top of the trench he guards. A rat jumps over his hand. At first amused, the soldier reflects on the animal’s presence on the front line.

Isaac Rosenberg: Dead Man’s Dump
- Wagons run over some dead bodies on their way to the front. The poet reflects on the fate of these men.

Isaac Rosenberg: Returning, We Hear the Larks
-Soldiers returning to camp at night are delighted by the songs of unseen larks.

Wilfred Owen: Anthem for Doomed Youth
-The poet asks what ceremonies will commemorate those who die in battle. Rather than religious ceremonies they will have the sounds of battle and the mourning of those grieving at home.

Wilfred Owen: Dulce et Decorum Est
- Men returning from the lines are attacked by gas shells. One of them is too slow fitting his mask; they put him on a wagon and hear his agonized coughing as they follow.

Wilfred Owen: Exposure
- A company of soldiers suffers the bitter cold of a night at the front. Dawn brings snow and a few bullets. They dream of spring in the countryside – but their lot is to lie out in the trenches.

Wilfred Owen: Insensibility
- The poet says that men who have lost all feeling are happiest in wartime because they do not feel the loss of comrades or even their own sufferings. Those civilians who have no compassion are, however, wretched, utterly without feeling.

Wilfred Owen: The Send-Off
- WW1 soldiers leaving their homes to go off to war. It is set in a train station where a soldier is watching the new recruits boarding the train.

Wilfred Owen: Futility
- Concerns a soldier or several soldiers moving a recently deceased fellow soldier into the sun, hoping its warmth will revive him.

Wilfred Owen: Strange Meeting
-A description of a soldier's descent into Hell where he meets an enemy soldier he killed lends itself to a critique of war.

Robert Graves: Sergeant-Major Money
-About two ‘Welshmen’ (soldiers) who bayoneted their superior officer as he was too hard on them.

Edmund Blunden: The Zonnebeke Road
- Day breaks over a trench in the grip of winter. A group of soldiers suffer in the bitter cold but defy death.

Edgell Rickword: Winter Warfare
- The poet imagines cold as an officer visiting the battlefield to inflict on the troops.

E. E. Cummings: My Sweet Old Etcetera
- The man is talking about the opinions of his family on what the war should mean to everyone, and from his perspective, it looks like the war and all attached perspectives were fairly meaningless.

E. E. Cummings: Next to of Course God America I
- Parodies a patriotic speech praising the glorious dead who gave themselves for liberty.

Laurence Binyon: For the Fallen
- An elegy to those who have died in defence of England, who will never be forgotten.

Ezra Pound: from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
- A survey of the reasons men fought, what they learnt and what they found on their return from the War.

T. S. Elliot: Triumphal March
- Spectators describe an enormous military parade. Eventually the leader passes and the procession enters a temple.

Thomas Gray: Elegy in a Country Churchyard
- Argues that remembrance can be good and bad, but the narrator finds comfort in pondering the lives of the obscure rustics buried in the churchyard.

Rudyard Kipling: Epitaphs of War
- A series of thirty-four epitaphs for a wide variety of men and women why died in the war.

Elizabeth Daryush: Subalterns
- A woman’s enthusiastic talk about battle and two officers’ subdued reactions.

May Wedderburn Cannan: Rouen
- A nurse at an army hospital remembers her working day during the war, meeting the trains of wounded and resting in the evening.

Philip Larkin: MCMXIV
- A description of scenes at the outbreak of war in 1914, as men queue up to enlist.

Vernon Scannell: The Great War
- Discusses what common things occurred in the war and personifies it as as ‘invad[ing] the mind’ – where invasion is not a good thing.

Ted Hughes: Six Young Men
- A description of a photograph of six young men taken on the moors. Each perished in the war.