Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Voice over
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The death of the hero
- 2 Survivors' songs
- 3 England's epic?
- 4 Who was Rupert Brooke?
- 5 Christ and the soldier
- 6 Owen's afterlife
- 7 Owen and his editors
- 8 The legacy of the Somme
- 9 The iconography of the Waste Land
- 10 War and peace
- 11 The fire from heaven
- 12 Henry Reed and the Great Good Place
- 13 The fury and the mire
- Notes
- Index
11 - The fire from heaven
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Voice over
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The death of the hero
- 2 Survivors' songs
- 3 England's epic?
- 4 Who was Rupert Brooke?
- 5 Christ and the soldier
- 6 Owen's afterlife
- 7 Owen and his editors
- 8 The legacy of the Somme
- 9 The iconography of the Waste Land
- 10 War and peace
- 11 The fire from heaven
- 12 Henry Reed and the Great Good Place
- 13 The fury and the mire
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The image of the trench is so ubiquitous in writings about the First World War that one can forget it was fought in the air as well as on the ground. Yeats had eulogized and elegized ‘An Irish Airman’, Major Robert Gregory, RFC, MC, Legion of Honour, killed on the Italian Front in January 1918. And just as the trench had its mythic dimension as the mouth of hell, so ‘the daring young men in their flying machines’ were to enter popular mythology as heirs to the wings of Daedalus and Icarus. The aviator as hero becomes a common figure in the literature of the 1930s. At the hopeful start of that decade, Cecil Day Lewis begins a poem ‘Come out in the sun, for a man is born today!’ and prophesies:
Now shall the airman vertically banking
Out of the blue write a new sky-sign […]
When he wants to celebrate his literary hero, Auden, he elevates him to the skies: ‘Look west, Wystan, lone flyer, birdman, my bully boy!’ And in A Time to Dance (1935), his modern mini-Odyssey begins:
Sing we the two lieutenants, Parer and M'Intosh,
After the War wishing to hie them home to Australia,
Planned they would take a high way, a hazardous crazy air-way:
Death their foregone conclusion, a flight headlong to failure,
We said. For no silver posh
Plane was their pigeon, no dandy dancer quick-stepping through heaven,
But a craft of obsolete design, a condemned D. H. nine;
Sold for a song it was, patched up though to write an heroic
Line across the world as it reeled on its obstinate stoic
Course to that southern haven.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Survivors' SongsFrom Maldon to the Somme, pp. 146 - 161Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008