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English I

I read and analyzed English Literature from different times in history to compare language styles and other literary aspects and to learn about literary epochs in English Literature.

Literature I read and analyzed

Ambrose Bierce - An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (short story)w (short story)
Rupert Brooke - The soldier (poetry)
Charles Sorley - When you see millions of the mouthless dead (poetry)
King James Version (Bible version)
Charles Dickens - A Christmas carol
Washington Irvin - The legend of sleepy hollow

Poetry

One of the most impressive poems, what "The Soldier" from Rupert Brooke. Sometimes I wish I could have written something like that. The poem was written during the "Great War", the first world war. It is full of patriotism and sentimentalism. Signifying, that the essence of the dead will live on and "somewhere give back the thoughts by England given". This was in a time, where people thought there was something like an "ether" which was where the radio waves fly, but where people could also pick up information in a sixth sense kind of way, which is reflected in the poem. Rupert Brooke actually died young himself, but never participated in battle.

The Soldier

By Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The anti-poem that is essentially the complete opposite of the poem above, is a poem from Charles Sorley, who wrote the poem "When you see millions of the mouthless dead" which decries the senselessness of all this killing and stresses the fact that nobody will remember the soldiers and they do not live on "They are dead." This poem stresses the sheer magnitude and raw reality of the death and destruction of the killing fields of the WWI front.

When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead

by Charles Hamilton Sorley

When you see millions of the mouthless dead

Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

Say not soft things as other men have said,

That you'll remember. For you need not so.

Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know

It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?

Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.

Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,

“Yet many a better one has died before.”

Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you

Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.

Great death has made all his for evermore.

I have been visiting many cities and villages during my time with Clonlara and I started to notice, that every ever so tiny village here in Germany, but also in the UK has a church with a monument that attests to the dozens of young men that never came back from this atrocious war. I was in a small village, that essentially consisted of one street, a church and 2 side alleys and there was a monument with 61 names on it. Surely farmers' sons from the neighboring farms who had let their lives. The scale is unimaginable. I also visited a restaurant, that used to be a young men's society house and even there, there was a copper plate about the ones who hadn't made it back. Their families in perpetual mourning, girlfriends who would never become wives, because so many of the men were gone forever and the soldiers themselves, slaughtered for some cause they probably hardly understood.

Other helpful resources I used

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_literature
https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature
https://www.sparknotes.com/writinghelp/how-to-write-literary-analysis/
https://www.goshen.edu/academics/english/literary-analysis-guide/
https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/assignments/closereading/
https://www.khanacademy.org/making-inferences-in-literary-texts-reading