Ali Ahmadi’s Reviews > How to Read a Poem > Status Update

'For Johnny'

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.

Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.

Better by far
For Johnny-in-the-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.

— John Pudney (1941)

(قافیه در شعرهای مربوط به جنگ جهانی اول و دوم)

Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion fleers
Or makes their feet
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
The front line withers.
But they are troops who fade, not flowers,
For poets's tearful fooling:
Men, gaps for filling:
Losses, who might have fought
Longer: but no one bothers.


— Wilfred Owen (1920)

"It is a mistake to hold with some modern critics that too much belief, like too much salt, is invariably bad for you. It depends on the kind of belief in question. And the critics are of course usually thinking of other people's beliefs rather than their own. My beliefs are supremely flexible, while yours are absurdly arthritic."