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AFTERMATH |
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Sassoon's poem "On Passing The New Menin Gate" will round off our discussion of the War Poets.
In this sonnet Sassoon argues that, although the world may think that the soldiers who have died in the trenches are "paid" by the Menin Gate Memorial, he, Siegfried Sassoon, is of a different opinion.
He thinks it fails as an attempt to honour and "immortalize" them.
All the individual names on the Gateway result in drowning out each individual soldier, so that only anonymity remains.
Furthermore, he suggests that the world has already forgotten these defenders of the free world.
The first quatrain of this sonnet consists of two rhetorical questions setting the tone of this poem.
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Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,‑
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace‑complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for ever,' the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
Vertaling:  Bij het passeren van de nieuwe Menenpoort
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Bij het passeren van de nieuwe Menenpoort
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Wie denkt nog, deze hoge poort passerend, aan
De nìet roemrijke Doden: het kanonnenvlees?
Wie wast de stank weg van hun lot hun vuil bestaan?
Zij die gedoemd, bijeengedreven, zegeloos waren.
Brutaal herbouwd houdt dit saillant nu zelf stand
Zijn schimmige beschermers zijn met praal betaald,
Betaald, met steen, van vrede vol en arrogant:
De legers die dat verzopen land doorstonden.
Hier was 'swereld grootste wond - en dat verwoordt
Die trotse poort nu zo: 'Hun namen even voort.'
Liet ooit een offer zich zozeer beschamen
Als door deze ondraaglijk nameloze namen?
Stonden de Doden, die streden in het slijk,
Ten spot tegen die tombe van schande en zonde.
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Engels
