Carol Anne Duffy’s ‘Last Post’

Carol Anne Duffy is a good poet, and the Laureateship seems to have given her a new lease of poetic life. She has just released a new poem, marking the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch; it has a strong central idea – a war film played backwards:

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

The poem relies on a fiction created by the poetess who imagines to play a film backwards. The return to the past is a key theme for those survived soldiers, who continuously went back to the moments lived in the trenches, to the horrors seen during the conflict.

The poem takes its title from the bugle call used at British ceremonies to remember those killed in war, called the "Last Post". The title remembers that the poem has been written to celebrate two veteran’s death.

It begins quoting two lines taken from the poem Dulce et Decorum Est by the war poet Wilfred Owen:

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

The title of Owen's poem is taken from the Roman poet Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, that means It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country. The phrase is again referenced when Duffy writes Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori. She denies the statement, reinforcing her refuse by the anaphora of the negation No. As well as Owen, Duffy quotes Horace’s line to affirm its contrary, to affirm that war doesn’t make you honorable, just drags you towards your death. 

It turns out to be indispensable a comparison between Duffy’s and Owen’s poems. First of all, you should remember that, differently from Owen, Duffy has not been affected by war in her life. Therefore quoting Owen’s lines somehow she becomes the mouthpiece of someone who had experienced war.

Both poems reference to Horace’s lines opposing the idea of “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”. Carol Ann Duffy corrects the line adding the negation No in anaphora, building a strong image of disliking war in the reader’s mind. On the other hand, at the end of his poem, Wilfred Owen defines it an “old lie” unveiling the meaning of the title and attacking war itself. Therefore the message of the poems is rather the same but the two poets’ reactions are different. On one hand, Carol Ann Duffy moves onto a theme of stopping war, and depicts the image of what it would look like if war stopped (lines 15-28). But world peace is something that the human race is far from achieving, it could only happen in poetry. On the other hand, having experienced the horrors of war, Wilfred Owen deepens the description of a soldier’s death, revealing his hopelessness. In other words, in front of the war, Owen  remains on the image of death while Duffy responds with the image of life, with the strength of hope. 

Indeed, the heart of the poem depicts scenes as "if poetry could tell it backwards". The speaking voice is the poetess’ voice who imagines soldiers who died in the conflict coming back to life.  The poem relies on the same device exploited by Siegfried Sassoon in his poem They. As Sassoon shifts from the Bishop’s idealized speech to the soldier’s realistic point of view, the poetess moves from the abstract to the concrete, giving a name to the dead soldiers and conferring realism to the lines (Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert).

Duffy pictures what would have happened to them if they had not died, if they were still freshly alive: You lean against a wall, your several million lives still possible and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.

Here the poetess exploits punctuation in order to modulate the sound and the rhythm of the poem. The commas slow down the reading, making the images seem more dramatic and putting more emphasis

At least she adds "You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile". Probably Duffy is once again referring to Owen: it is the last celebration to a poet who had the nerve to tell realistically and cruelly the horrors of war.