Last Post by Carol Ann Duffy

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud ...
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too -
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.

Analysis:

Carol Ann Duffy creates a poem to mark the death of the two of the last 1^st World War’s survivors: Harry Allingham and Harry Patch. Indeed, the title reminds the reader to the last greeting to the soldiers. The poem consist of a single stanza, made up of 30 lines. Right from the first line the intelligent reader understands the poem is a patchwork of 1st World War poetry, also because it is a post-modern poem.  As a matter of fact, the incipit sends back to Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est as line 12, that is an explicit reference. The Last Post where as in Dulce Et Decorum Est the sentences are generally quite a similar length. Moreover, the poetess uses the same rhetorical choice of Siegfried Sasoon, quoting the names of dead English soldiers. Not surprisingly, the first name is Harry, the one of the two survivors, and in the middle, Wilfred the one of Owen.The second rhetorical choice adopted by Carol Ann Duffy is the juxtaposition of images drawn from ordinary life and from war. The reader identifies himself with the soldier. He sees and perceives war atrocities. His story ends with death “to die and die and die”. He will not see his family again, “mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers”, nor his companions “lines and lines of British boys”. The keyword "mud" shooting twice, underlines the difficulties and fatigue of war, but also the futility. There are no heroes.