Two poems, "We're British, and We Know It" and "Lives Lost in Vain," by British children's poet, Josie Whitehead, portray conflicting messages that would confuse a child.
“We’re British, and We Know It”
This poem delightfully portrays the speaker’s pride of being a British citizen. It consists of six quatrains, each with two riming couplets. The first couplet: “We’re British, and we know it; we’re surrounded by the coast. / We start our day each morning with our tea and round of toast.” Then the speaker continues the quatrain by further mentioning typical British fare of “Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding” and “Apple pies or rhubarb crumble.”
The poem proceeds musically and colorfully including such patriotic lines as “We’re British and we know it and our history goes way back – / We hold on to our islands and drive our enemies all back.” And finally, “British folk are known by everyone to be tolerant and just. / They’ll quickly rise to fight against the things that are unjust. / The British pint is famous, and our sense of good fair play – / I was born right here in Britain, and in Britain I will stay.”
Whitehead’s web site proudly displays information about her father’s service in World War I, plus a picture of him. Her father-in-law lost an arm while serving, yet he held down a job as a postman and supported his family that included three children.
This poem consists of five stanzas, each a quatrain with the rime scheme ABCB. In the opening quatrain, the speaker looks back to when she “was young and life was sweet.” And she and her companions had not known the word “war.”
The verse continues looking back into the second quatrain; she says they “walked together to [their] school.” And they played in fields and sailed boats on the pool. In the third stanza, they have all grown up, married, and had children.
Then suddenly amidst the idyllic existence of bringing up the children to be “honest folk,” war breaks out: “Our children went to fight a war / And all were lost within a week.” Their children went to war, and they all died within one week.
In the final stanza, the speaker moans: “I thought of all our children lost / By human greed, by human hate.”
Commentary
The patriotic speaker in “We’re British, and We Know It” proudly claims, “We hold on to our islands and drive our enemies all back,” and “They’ll quickly rise to fight against the things that are unjust.” And of course, the speaker is correct. The British, including the poet’s father, have fought to hold their island and have risen to fight injustice, including the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and even now fighting the unjust and dangerous ideology of Islamofascism in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But the speaker in this poem claims that these young soldiers are “Lives Lost in Vain,” that is, the lives of these fallen heroes are considered wasted. Instead of hailing these young soldiers as heroes who had risen “to fight against the things that are unjust,” as the poet’s father had done, the speaker declares these heroes “lost / By human greed, by human hate.” But is that not what soldiers always have to fight against, the greed and hate of the enemy?
If the British proudly stand up to injustice and drive enemies back, how can their soldiers’ lives be lost in vain? How can a child be expected to integrate these two conflicting messages? How can anyone?
