In the context of “Trench Poets,” the adjective “blacker” could refer to being “[d]eeply stained with dirt; soiled, filthy, begrimed” (OED “black, adj., 5”), or to “an emotion, state of mind, etc.: full of gloom, melancholy, misery, or sadness; [being] very depressed” (OED “black, adj., 14.a.”).

In the context of “Trench Poets,” the adjective “blacker” could refer to being “[d]eeply stained with dirt; soiled, filthy, begrimed” (OED “black, adj., 5”), or to “an emotion, state of mind, etc.: full of gloom, melancholy, misery, or sadness; [being] very depressed” (OED “black, adj., 14.a.”).

In the context of “Trench Poets,” the adjective “blacker” could refer to being “[d]eeply stained with dirt; soiled, filthy, begrimed” (OED “black, adj., 5”), or to “an emotion, state of mind, etc.: full of gloom, melancholy, misery, or sadness; [being] very depressed” (OED “black, adj., 14.a.”).

In the poem “grow blacker” is ambiguous. The “chum,” mentioned in the first line to which the adjective refers to, is dead (this becomes clear at the end of the poem “He stank so badly […] then rats ate his thumbs” l. 23-24) and his decomposing body is therefore turning black (see “blanch”). However, “grew blacker” can also be read as “becoming sadder,” for the chum might be “full of gloom” because of the situation in the trenches and the death of his chum. There also seems to be a connection to the subsequent verb “blanch”.

The (transitive) verb “blanch” mainly has two meanings relevant for the poem: 1. “To make white, whiten […] by depriving of colour; to bleach. Also in a figurative sense” (OED “blanch, v., 1”) 2. “To make pale with fear, cold, hunger, etc.” (OED “blanch, v., 4”) Click here to learn more about the ambiguity of “blanch” in this poem.

In the context of the poem, “blanch” is ambiguous. The most immediate interpretation in the context of lines 1-5 is that it refers to the soldier who is growing pale with fear by “the hum / of passing shells” (l. 4-5). Nevertheless, when the poem is read completely and it becomes clear that the solider is dead with “rats [eating] his thumbs” (l. 24), the context of death changes the word’s meaning. If the soldier is dead, his whiteness may be explained by his being deprived of colour. This is due to a stage of death called livor mortis or lividity, which is “the discoloration of the body after death due to the gravitational settling of blood which is no longer being pumped through the body by the heart” (Dix and Graham 4). The negation of “would not” in line three points at the fact that this chum cannot grow paler, which is logical in the context of livor mortis: since there is no more blood current, there is no possibility of colour change. The soldier cannot grow whiter, but the accumulated and dried blood shows as black (cf. 5), reconnecting to the chum who “grew blacker” in line 2.

The noun “post” can either refer to “[a] support or column of timber or (later) some other strong material” (OED “post, n. 1”) or to “[a]n autopsy, a post-mortem” (OED “post, n. 12”).

Given the two possible readings of “a post” (l. 10), the speaker might either try to emphasise that his chum is not able to stand anymore and, therefore, “lay[s] […] stiff and senseless as a post” (l. 9-10) or that the decomposing body of his chum, who “lay[s] gaping, mackerel-eyed” (l. 9), reminds him of a corpse after an autopsy.

“To rouse” has three possible meanings. When looking at the etymological background, the first one is “to animate”: “to bring to life, to refresh” (OED “animate, v.”). The second meaning is to wake somebody up (“rouse from sleep” OED “awake, v. Etymology 4”). It also refers to “a state of sexual arousal” (OED “arouse, v. 4”), which links it to the topic of Donne's “Elegies”.

When looking at the following lines of the poem, the speaker fails to animate his comrade as the chum “was far gone, / for he lay gaping, mackerel-eyed” (l. 8-9) By comparing the chum with a fish, another possible reading of “to rouse” is established, namely “[t]o sprinkle (fish, esp. herring) with salt, as part of the curing process” (OED “rouse, v. 3”) to preserve it.

A female first name.

Maud: A Monodrama (1855) is a poem by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892). It was originally subtitled ‘The Madness’ (Sanders 434).Link to the full text of Maud: http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/desc/3030

Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate in 1850 and held the position until his death in 1892 (Shatto 1). During his tenure he wrote two poems that dealt with the Crimean War. The narrative poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1854 and Maud in 1855. While “The Charge of the Light Brigade” can definitely be said to be the public and official work of a Laureate, “Maud” seems to be a far more private poem (Markovits 488). As various scholars have shown, “Tennyson’s monodrama revisits crucial periods of the poet’s own life, including intimate aspects of his early love affairs and the family history of mental instability that contributed to his father’s death” (488).

In Tennyson's poem the mentally unstable, unnamed speaker falls in love with a woman called Maud. The speaker and Maud are meeting in secret when Maud’s brother appears. He insults the speaker and is probably killed by him in a duel. Maud dies and the speaker loses his mind completely, but when he joins the army he “recovers his sanity” (“Maud”).

Death is a major theme in “Maud”, though it is not its natural, but rather its violent form that keeps recurring throughout the poem. The suicide of the narrator’s father, the (probable) murder of Maud’s brother, and Maud’s own premature death blend with visions of death that hold an escapist quality, connecting it strongly to the emotions of the speaker and to life itself. Early on in the poem Maud’s beauty is described as “dead perfection” (Tennyson 1.2.7), with herself being “ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long / Growing and fading and growing” (1.3.8-9). She seems to be in a state between death and life – ever “[g]rowing and fading.” The obsession with death becomes even more evident in the second part of the poem where the speaker imagines himself to be in “a shallow grave” (2.5.6) and is thus actively blurring the line between life and death. Death, at least metaphorically, becomes another state of being, of self, and thus ceases to be a fundamental change to non-existence. Dorothy Mermin connects this rather distorted view of death to an inability of coping with loss and mourning. She describes the narrator’s attitude as “an attempt to recapture the irrecoverable past, a refusal to accept the fact of loss,” and draws the conclusion that “such an attempt cannot […] succeed, it leads to isolation, madness and further loss” (Mermin 267).

By mentioning the poem “Maud”, the speaker in “Trench Poets,” a soldier trying to cope with his comrade dying, establishes a connection to another soldier: the psychologically instable narrator of “Maud” who, in the end of the poem, joins the army to fight in the Crimean War.

In Layer 1, the theme of madness in both “Maud” and “Trench Poets” was mentioned. In regard to “Trench Poets”, one could argue that the speaker lost his mind in war, because he does not realise that he is talking to a dead man throughout the whole poem. The speaker of “Maud”, however, could be said to recover his sanity by going to war. For example, while the speaker of “Maud” scorns others at the beginning of the poem, he feels that he is “one with [his] kind” when he goes to war (3.5). Thus, the war for him means reconciliation with his fellow human beings, while for the speaker of “Trench Poets” it means losing his sanity.

Since madness is a prominent theme in Alfred Tennyson’s Maud, “healthy things” (if read as mental health) and the reference to “Maud” become an oxymoron. See also Madness and Irony

The narrator’s assertion in quoting “Maud” for “healthy things” is most likely ironic. While the war proves to be a sort of remedy for the speaker in “Maud”, the “chum” (Rickword 1) in “Trench Poets” is not “recovering” with the war, but is actually dying in - and from - it. The sanity of the speaker of “Trench Poets” seems to be questionable, too. After all, he tries to “rouse” (6) his dead friend, not minding his being “stiff and senseless as a post” (10), and talks to him as if he were still alive (14). The term “healthy” is also ironic with respect to the high number of casualties in the First World War. In total, the Great War cost the lives of around 17 million soldiers as well as civilians. Of the 700,000 men fighting for Great Britain, 11.5 % died. A high number of those who survived were physiologically or psychologically maimed (cf. Winter 73).

In the OED, the word “purity” is defined as “the state or quality of being morally or spiritually pure; sinlessness … innocence; chastity” (“purity, n. 1.”).

Since the term “passion” has many different meanings, the line “he sneered at passion’s purity” is ambiguous. For more information, see the layer 3.

The line “he sneered at passion’s purity” can be understood in different ways. The fact that the word “passion” has a religious connotation could mean that the sufferings of the speaker of “Trench Poets” are equated with the sufferings of a martyr or of Jesus Christ. The equation of soldiers and Jesus Christ can be found in other poems from the First World War, for example in Charles Sorley’s “All the Hills and Vales Along”. If “passion” is understood as “sexual desire,” the phrase “passion’s purity” is cynical, because sexual desire and innocence are contradictory. If we take “passion” to mean “strong affection”, the dead man could sneer at the speaker’s affection and care for him. In this case, the line would not be ironic. Also, if we assume that “passion” means “the zealous pursuit of an aim”, the dead man could sneer at the speaker’s futile attempts to console him. If the word “passion” is supposed to mean “outburst … marked by … strong excitement”, the man could sneer at the speaker’s emotionality (“passion, n. II. 6. c.”). An earlier meaning of “passion” was also “a fit of madness or mental derangement” (ibid.). Thus, the dead soldier could sneer at the speaker’s madness. See also the note on madness in “Maud”.

The root of the poisonous and narcotic plant Mandragora officinarum was “formerly credited with magical and medicinal properties esp. because of the supposedly human shape of its […] root” (OED). It was used to promote conception, as a narcotic, an aphrodisiac, and a cathartic (i.e., to clear and liberate).

The mandrake is mentioned twice in the Old Testament, presumably as a fertility drug and an aphrodisiac (see Ferber 122). In ancient Greece and Rome it was thought that the seemingly human-shaped root was in the power of dark spirits. “It could be safely uprooted only in the moonlight, after appropriate prayer and ritual, by a black dog attached to the plant by a cord.” (Encyclopædia Britannica). After the dog had died of the shriek, the root could be used for beneficent purposes such as to sedate, to anaesthetize (cf. Hambel 56), to induce love and to increase sexual desire (cf. Roth 15), but also to poison, to drive insane and to kill (cf. Müller, 619). In medieval times the mandrake was thought to shriek when pulled from the ground to cause the madness or death of whoever uprooted it (Encyclopædia Britannica). “According to a fable mandrakes grew under the gallows fertilized by the urine or semen from a hanged thief.” (Müller 622). In the early modern period, William Shakespeare and John Donne, for example, refer to the mandrake and its magical powers (OED). Whether in their time, “educated men did not believe such things any more” (Robbins 193) is still being discussed among scholars (cf. Dickson 73).

Ingesting mandrake root can lead to asphyxia (Wikipedia), that is, “the failure or disturbance of the respiratory process brought about by the lack or insufficiency of oxygen in the brain” – compare the comrade’s “gaping” (9). “The unconsciousness that results sometimes leads to death.” (“asphyxia”. Encyclopædia Britannica) The mandrake root’s narcotic properties might relate to the comrade’s apathy and stand in sharp contrast to its purportedly aphrodisiac properties and the speaker’s intention to “rouse” him (c.f. 6).

The poem’s speaker is quoting the second line of Donne’s “Song: Go and catch falling star.”

The speaker of “Trench Poets” quotes poems of Donne in lines 7, 12, and 15, “Song: Go and catch falling star,” “Love’s Deity,” and “Elegy: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” respectively.

“Get someone with child” is an archaic idiomatic expression and means, “Make a woman pregnant” (“Get. Phrases, 10”).

The line is part of the first stanza of Donne’s poem in which the speaker is charging the addressee with impossible tasks, such as to “catch a falling star” (1). “Get with child a mandrake-root” (73, l. 2) is to be read as: Make the mandrake root pregnant (cf. Allen 397, Redpath 119). The speaker stresses that, even if the addressee was able to fulfil these tasks, he could not convince him that a “true and fair” (Donne 74, l. 18) woman exists.

A possible interpretation would be to connect the impossibility of begetting a child on a seemingly human root to the futility of the speaker’s attempt to “rouse” (6) his dead friend by reciting poetry to him.

John Donne (1572 – 1631) was an English metaphysical poet and Dean of the Church of England. He is best known for his love and erotic verses, religious poems and sermons. His major works include Songs and Sonnets and the Divine Poems. The term “metaphysics” was used first by Dryden to criticizes Donne for being driven by thought and not sensuality when writing love poetry: “He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with softnesses of love”(Clemens) However, Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and philosopher was the first to coin this term to a literal genre: Metaphysical Poetry. It describes a loose group of poets including George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and of course John Donne, who inspired many metaphysical poets in their work. Metaphysical Poetry is characterised by the use of inventive syntax, paradoxical images, and comparing ideas that seem unconnected to express philosophical and spiritual subjects. It combines imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit.

The title “Trench Poets” is ambiguous. It refers to soldier poets of the First World War who often wrote directly from the trenches, drawing on their experiences during the war, as well as to the poets read “within” the trenches, here Donne and Tennyson.

The term “trench poets” as a sub-group of “war poets” seems to have developed in literary history. The epithet “trench poet” probably originated in the fact that poetry by soldiers at the front often appeared in so-called trench newspapers, for instance the The Wipers Times, which was published by British soldiers (cf. Lee). The term is now used widely (see, for instance, the entry on “War poets” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, or The Short Story and the First World War by Ann-Marie Einhaus).

“Trench poets” was published in 1921 in a collection of Rickword’s poetry called Behind the Eyes. Rickword wrote these poems after the war had ended, “reflecting on the experience rather than writing directly out of the experience” (Schmidt, Young). Still, he had been a soldier and knew what he was writing about. He was a “trench poet,” a soldier poet of World War I (Lusty 201). The “trench poets” included mostly young, unknown poets like Sassoon, Owen and Rickword himself who could, through their personal experience, write about the horrors of war in an “authentic voice” (Lusty 199), picturing war with all of its atrocities, and creating a counter-image to pro-war propaganda

The poets alluded to in the text are John Donne and Alfred Tennyson. In Donne’s elegy “The Autumnal,” he mentions trenches in relation to lovers (full text): “Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit, / Vow'd to this trench, like an anachorite” (15-16).

One might read the title “Trench Poets” as self-referential to the speaker and his “chum” in the poem. It is possible that what they have in common is, apart from being soldiers, that they are both poets. In the last line, the speaker says that “rats ate his thumbs” (24), indicating that the chum’s ability to write has been taken away. If we accept this line of reasoning, the speaker and chum in the poem might relate to war poets in general, of which some survived the war (e.g. Rickword or Siegfried Sassoon) whereas others did not (e.g. Wilfred Owen).

Mackerel is a common food fish found in temperate and tropical seas all around the world. It is known to spoil “more readily than others” after death (see Croker 104). The eyes of a mackerel are usually clear, but become “gray and sunken” (Croker 104) after the fish has died.

The mackerel is a forage fish (cf. http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/seabirds_foragefish/foragefish/index.php). These smaller fish types are food for their larger predators. This notion can be linked to “chum” through the association with the action “chumming”: since the second half of the 19th century mackerel were caught by “chumming” (“[The fishermen] also began ‘chumming’ – casting scoopfuls of ground bait into the waters around the vessel – as a means of keeping mackerel at the surface and biting hooks” (Goode/Collins, 278).)

1.n. brit. coll. friend. Probably deriving from chamber mate, confer comrade, deriving from lat. camera = chamber. (see "chum, n.1.") 2. also: n. “1. Refuse from fish, esp. that remaining after expressing oil. 2. Chopped fish, lobsters, etc., thrown overboard to attract fish, as in trolling. 3. v. trans. to bait (a fishing-place) with chum.“ (see “chum, n.2 and v.2.").

“Chum” is ambiguous. It refers to the friendship between the speaker and his fellow soldier a well as to refuse from fish, which points to the use of soldiers in WWI as cannon fodder. The soldiers were “wasted” in pointless assaults, used like “chum,” as a means to achieve military goals. Within the semantic field of fish and fishery it is hence connected to “mackerel-eyed” (1.9).

The Elegies the speaker refers were written by John Donne. His Elegies deal with a variety of themes relating to human existence, life, death, love, sex, power-relations, the divine, and the mundane. Donne is assumed to have written his Elegies between 1592 and 1597 and understood to be the first English “love-elegist” (Variorum xciv).

An Elegy in the literary traition of ancient Greece was a lament or a funeral poem, while the Romans used the term for their erotic love poems. In the 16th and 17th century the topoi for elegies contained funeral/commemorative poems, didactic verse and witty, erotic or paradoxical love poetry. (see Variorum xciii)

The reference to Donne in this poem conveys irony, in the sense that the soldier reads the Elegies to his dead chum to rouse him. The ambiguity of the word “rouse” can be linked to the erotic Elegy “Upon his mistress going to bed” and thus refer to hope for the "rousing" of his "chum."

The speaker quotes the last line of the Elegy “To his mistress going to bed”, written by John Donne.

In the erotic Elegy "His mistress going to bed" is soliciting his mistress into taking off her clothes and sharing the bed with him. Despite the sexual content of the Elegy that bears resemblance to Ovid, here the arts of love (Ars amatoria) merge semantically into the “arts of war”, as the male speaker transfers the seduction of a woman to the context of a military campaign (cf. l. 25-29; see Bell 208). The lover speaks as if he were an “imperial ruler” discovering his conquered territory (Hadfield 53) and its riches, while the female body becomes the land that is awaiting to be colonised. In this sense the the laying down of the clothing becomes a symbol for the letting down of barriers, resulting in the invasion of the country (see Loomba 73).

The word “cover” means a) A defensive or protective covering for the body; a piece of armour; an article of clothing b)That which serves for shelter or concealment; or c) Protection from attack; esp. that afforded by the presence or fire of a supporting force; also, a force providing such protection.(OED “cover”).

The soldier's chum grins nastily upon hearing the line: "What needst thou have more covering than a man?" This can either be because of the strong sexual connotation of the line as well as the whole Elegy, but it could also be a remark of sarcasm, considering the situation in the trenches, in the war. The soldiers need to rely on each other, they have to give each other air-cover and also need a shelter to hide behind. Giving up the shelter could lead to a likely death. The lover in the poem entices his mistress into laying of her cover to make her fit for invasion, while the soldier in the trench on the one hand has to keep their armour to be protected from a bullet’s penetration, on the other hand he also needs his fellow soldier’s cover. The idea of covering and uncovering becomes important for survival and every barrier that is fallen becomes a further threat for the life, which the “chum” is already losing. Considering this, one could assume that the cover has already been lost once which lead to the “chum’s” state he is in.