The Death of the Soul

When Peter Walsh awakes in the park, he says "The death of the soul."  What does that mean?  What prompts him to think about it?

The Poetry and the Novel

What connections can you see between the poetry of World War I--written during or shortly after the war--and the novel, published in 1993.  How does the description of the battles, or wounded, or trench life, or nature, in the poetry compare to the descriptions of those things in the novel?  Does one seem more authentic than the other? Does the style of poetry itself change how you respond to the images and themes?

Letters Home

On pages 212-213 of Birdsong are letters that some of the men wrote in the hours before the impending battle.  What does each letter reveal about the writer and the war?  You should consider also what the narrator tells us about Stephen and Byrne on these pages.  Look at the kinds of details the writers include in the letters.  It seems to me that what they choose to write about shows, in this time of great stress and uncertainty and fear, what they really value.

Birdsong First Impressions

What do you think of the novel so far?  When you started the book and saw the date, 1910, what did that make you think about?  What are your expectations for the characters and the narrative?

Remember we are only talking about the first part of the book--the prewar part.  The first reading assignment just barely gets into the war.  Please don't spoil it if you have read ahead.

Noble Death?

Compare the death and burial of Hardy's  "Drummer Hodge" ("They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest / Uncoffined--just as found" (1-2)) to the death and burial of Brooke's "The Soldier."  How are they different?  Choose one other poem from the World War I collection (Sassoon, Gurney, or Rosenberg) that also provides a contrast to Brooke's view of death in war and explain the contrast.

Romantic Poetry and the Power of Language

I have been thinking about our brief discussion of the power that language has to shape how we perceive things. I found the passage in "Fears in Solitude" strikingly contemporary.  What happens to public perception when "all the dainty phrases for fratricide" are " Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which / We join no meaning and attach no form!" (116, 118-119)?  How did euphemisms control understanding after the French Revolution, according to the speaker in Coleridge's poem?  How do they control how we think now?

N.B.  The numbers in parenthesis are line numbers for the poem.  That is how you cite poetry although it is a bit tough when you have to number the lines yourself!