"Favorite 4 LINES of military poetry" Topic

Rules:
DO NOT QUOTE THE WHOLE POEM!
This has to fit in a Poll. 😄
I mean it, damn your eyes! I shall huff and puff!

Here's my first.
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlane the Great. (Okay, okay. It's a play! But it's still poetry!)
"Is it not passing brave to be a king
And to ride in triumph through Persepolis!"

If you MUST quote Henry V…
Keep it short. Not the whole speech!
Two (or three 🙄 lines.
Yeah! I'm looking at YOU!
I shall ask Dear Editor to ignore you if you go on too long.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap.

"Tommmy" Kipling

Ooooh!
Cite your source!

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Rudyard Kipling

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

Wilfred Owen

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

Alan Seeger

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

John McCrae

--- so many spring to mind from WWI.

Maybe these are too long, but they are only "two lines" as written.

"But stands a Dorsai monument,
To Colonel Jacques Chrétien."

Gordon Dickson, "Ballad of Jacques Chretien."

From one of the early Dorsai books. "Soldier, ask not" I think.

"But what good came of it at last?" Quoth Little Peterkin.
"Why that I cannot tell," said he,"But twas a famous victiory."
Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don Jon of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
G. K. Chesterton: Lepanto

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we spring.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young
A. E. Housman: Here Dead Lie We…

Among the guns,
In the hearts of soldiers
Running free blood
In the long, long campaign:
Dreams go on.
Carl Sandburg: Among the Red guns

Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
William Butler Yeats:Easter, 1916

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandon'd, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
A. E. Houseman:Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

There will be a rusty gun on the wall,sweetheart,
The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust.
A spider will make a silver string nest in the
darkest, warmest corner of it.
Carl Sandburg: AEF

"I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose."

-Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, by Randall Jarrell

And sometimesw for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills.

Robert Louis Stevenson:The Land of Counterpane

On my command. Unleash Hell!

I prefer the original Greek for word order and poetry, but for poll purposes, let's go with:

"Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,"

—Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore (1951)

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
More of "Tommy" by Rudyard Kipling. Written in 1890, and not much has changed.

On the lighter side:
In tropical regions there's mozzies in legions, but none causes havoc completer
Than one little devil, who's not on the level- it's Mike, the malarial moskeeta.

"A. Digger", Jungle Warfare, AWM Canberra, 1943 (from memory).

"When yer lyin' there wounded
On Afghanistan's plains
And the women come out
To cut up what remains
Just roll to yet rifle
And blow out yer brains
And go to yer God like a soldier.
—-Rudyard Kipling

Damn. I broke my own rules!

"They told me Heracleitus,
They told me you were dead.
Bitter news they brought me
And bitter tears I shed. "

Plus marks if anyone can name the poet without googling etc.

NB edited to 4 lines with the OFM's blessing

I petitioned Dear Editor to change my criteria to … 4 lines.
Mea culpa.

"Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie." — Epitaph by Simonides, carved into a stone memorial slab at Thermopylae, and quoted by Heroditus. (Obviously, the original was Greek; I don't know who produced the first English translation in this poetic form.)

And of course:

"O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

Citation not necessary.

Ah, glad someone posted Simonides on Thermopylae! I missed that one before.

It fell about the Lammas-tide,
When the muir-men win their hay.
The doughty Douglas bound him to ride
Into England, to drive a prey.

-- trad. Border ballad, "The Battle of Otterburn"

The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.

from "The Oracles" by A.E. Housman

Get off your asses and on your feet. Get out of the shade and into the heat. RUCK UP! We're moving Light.

Unknown light infantry squad leader.

Q: What is the definition of Light Infantry?
A: Too light to fight, too heavy to run!

So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man;
We gives you your certificate, an' if you want it signed
We'll come an' 'ave a romp with you whenever you're inclined.

Callimachus – 3rd century BC Greek:
"They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky."

The translation from koine is an old one: a C19th Englishman's version which takes a little, dare I say?, poetic licence with the original. Rather a good lament for a fallen comrade-in-arms.

Four lines helps the Dickson, but I really needed eight:

No more is there a Rochmont town,
No more are Rochmont's men.
But stands a Dorsai monument,
To Colonel Jacques Chrétien.

So pass the word from world to world,
Alone still stands Dorsai,
And while she lives no one of hers,
By foreign wrong shall die.

Dickson had his moments. Canadian born, but US Army 1943-46.

Anyone else scrounging through Sarpedon's speech in the Illiad? I keep looking through 12:310–28, and I can't nail it. I suspect the fault is mine or the translators' not Homer's.

"The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke…"
Vital Lampada, Sir Henry Newbolt

There's more, but that usually describes my position in any game. The rest of the poem is rather saccharine. My apologies to any who like it.

Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream.

Shakespear
King Henry IV

Well, more fantasy, than historically attested, but:

Lo, there do I see my father; Lo, there do I see my mother, and my sisters, and my brothers.
Lo, there do I see the line of my people, back to the Beginning.
Lo, they do call to me; they bid me take my place among them, in the Halls of Valhalla, where the brave may live forever.

The "Viking Prayer" from "The 13th Warrior" film (1999)

Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the gate:
'To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods'

Horatius, Verse 27
Lord Macaulay

Will add 2 from Kipling

You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

Different section than fat wally quoted

We've fought with many men acrost the seas,
An' some of 'em was brave an' some was not:
The Paythan an' the Zulu an' Burmese;
But the Fuzzy was the finest o' the lot.

And 1 from Bill Barber
A Hard Poem About War by a Vietnam Marine

The sound of drums, the fife, the bugle's call, the charge into the dark unknown, all lost to the foregone, this is the fate of Glory's soldiers, their life spent, their duty fulfilled, they are silent— Comrades, sharing in the forever nothingness the finality of Glory's resolve.

Bad luck to this marchin', pipeclay and starchin',
How neat one must be to be killed by the French!
I'm sick of paradin', through wet and cold wadin',
And standin' all night to be shot in a trench..'

Mickey Free's song from Charles O'Malley the Irish Dragoon

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the Grapes of Wrath are stored
He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword
His Truth is marching on!

And the fifth (often final) stanza always makes me cry, but it's not really military. (And I prefer "… live to make men free.")

The most beautiful rendition is by the United States Marine Corps Band. Chokes me up, every time.

'Make them forget, O Lord, what this Memorial
Means; their discredited ideas revive;
Breed new belief that War is purgatorial
Proof of the pride and power of being alive;

At the Cenotaph, Siegfried Sassoon

Since John wants only something short from Henry V,

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Said by Henry V, who is safely back and not going anywhere near that breach.

Grelber

"Walk wide o' the Widow of Windsor,
For 'alf of creation she owns:
We 'ave bought 'er the same withe the sword an' the flame,
An' we've salted it down with our bones."

From "The Widow of Windsor" by Rudyard Kipling
[And Larry Brom's inspiration for the title of his Colonial rules.]

{And a P.S., we've having a poetry night at out church today, and I think I'll take this poem to read.}

Jim

Where is the captain who could bear to touch
this banquet in my place? A decent man
would see his company before him first.

Homer, The Odyssey

Grelber

What is best in life?

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

That is good! That is good.

link

The boy stood on the burning deck
We all thought he was crackers
The flames ran up his trouser legs
And burned off both his pockets

Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf;
She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.
Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country's flag, she said.

Barbara Frietchie by John Greenleaf Whittier

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson

You know, we French stormed Ratisbon:
A mile or so away,
On a little mound, Napoleon
Stood on our storming-day;

Incident of the French Camp by Robert Browning

And the battle that followed at Candahar was a complete victory,
And Lord Roberts' march to Candahar stands unrivalled in history;
And let's thank God that sent Lord Roberts to conquer Ayoob Khan,
For from that time there's been no more war in Afghanistan
McGonagall (Scotland's other national poet)… not sure he got the last bit completely right…

"Spears shall be shaken
Shields shall be splintered!
A sword day! A red day!
‘Ere the sun rises!"

Preceded by tactical positioning.
Followed by "Death!" showing how Rohan accepts the gift of the Gods.
"Forth Éoringlas!"

Hearing such spirited martial poetry, the Orcs fail their "Stand to receive a charge" roll, and become Shaken and Disordered.

Oh, and thanks to Dear Editor for cross posting to fantasy and sci-fi.

Neither rhyme, rhythm scanning or accuracy are expected from the Poet McGonagal. It is enough to just recite his immortal words and hold back a tear. 😢

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But left him alone with his glory.

"The Burial of Sur John Moore " – last four lines

My father. A WW2 veteran, used to recite the whole poem to me when I was a small child over 70 years ago..

On Shiloh's dark and bloody ground,
The dead and wounded lay,
Amongst them was a drummer boy,
Who beat the drum that day,
A wounded soldier raised him up,
His drum was by his side,
He clasped his hands and raised his eyes
And prayed before he died.

From "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh" by William S. Hays