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November 11, 2009, 02:00 PM ET
Archive Watch: Armistice Day Edition
November 11 is Armistice Day, which marks the cessation of Great War hostilities in 1918. (Here in the United States, of course, this is now Veterans Day.) In honor of the day and the dead, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, housed at the University of Oxford, chose today to unveil its Siegfried Sassoon Collection.
Although it contains photographs and other materials, the collection centers on manuscripts of Sassoon's poems, drawn from holdings at Oxford's Bodleian Library and at the University of Cambridge, the New York Public Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A draft of Sassoon's poem "Standing With the Dead" turns up in a June 19, 1918, letter to his friend Robert Nichols.
"Here's my only poem in ages -- is it any good?" Sassoon asks Nichols. Then comes the poem: "I stood with the Dead, so forsaken & still./ When dawn was grey I stood with the dead. And my slow heart said, 'You must kill, you must kill;/ Soldier, soldier; morning is red.'"
At the top of the letter the poet has scrawled, "Write again, write again -- I'm not dead yet -- I've got weeks and weeks to live." As it turned out, Sassoon was one of the luckier ones; he surrived the war and lived until 1967.
Sassoon's poem "Everyone Sang," with its sense of being surprised by joy -- "Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted,/ and beauty came like the setting sun" -- is usually associated with the relief brought by the Armistice. So it's interesting to note that a manuscript copy from the Bodleian Library carries a date of March 1915.
Two other Armistice Day notes: Over at the Poetry Archive, there's an audio file of Sassoon (later in life, it sounds like) reading "Everyone Sang." And via Twitter, Candace Nast, a graduate student in history at the University of Windsor, in Ontario, flags the Canadian Letters & Images Project, an online archive that documents Canadians' experience in war (any war). Today the project has posted an Armistice Day letter home from a soldier named Archie Keat: "Wont [sic] they be excited over there and in Canada and all the other countries tonight. Such a Day. Now I must close for tonight."
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