The poem consists of a single ten-lined stanza, with predictable jogging rhythm. The rhyme scheme is ABAB, CDCD, EE. The final couplet is rhyming to provide a neat, humorous resolution. Schuklenk, U. Health Care Professionals Are Under No Ethical Obligation to Treat COVID-19 Patients . 2020 April 1st Journal of Medical Ethics Blog In the 1990s, a series of six books were written, set in the same fictional world as Up the Line, called Robert Silverberg's Time Tours: The collection includes familiar poems, like Wilfred Owen’s “ Anthem for Doomed Youth” and Rupert Brooke’s “ The Dead, ” and poets and poems almost forgotten, including C.H. Sorley, considered among the finest poets of his time. Their poetry, and the war it told the story of, had an enormous influence, including on the reluctance to engage Adolf Hitler until it was almost too late.

The moral injury of avoidable harm to health and social care workers cuts deep and the scars will persist, as the scars of the first world war lingered into the twenty-first century. Reflect on that when you are next tempted to prod “our healthcare heroes” into harm’s way with your self-serving cheers.Absolutely fantastic! This is really well put together and informative. The level of detail is so comprehensive... The sheer level of detail isimpressive. S Alsop, Teacher & Peer Reviewer

The more familiar members of this group, many of whom died in battle or from disease, were poets like Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and perhaps Isaac Rosenberg, who were most typically represented in our high school and college textbooks. They fought and died on the western front, mostly in Flanders and northeastern France. But there were other fronts—Turkey, Iraq, Germany, East Africa—and other poets, some of whose names are still quite well known: Rudyard Kipling, Robert Graves, e.e. cummings, Herbert Asquith (son of the prime minister), Thomas Hardy, Seigfried Sassoon, Robert Service, A.P. Herbert, A.E. Housman, William Butler Yeats, and even A.A. Milne.Fifty years ago, author Brian Gardner assembled an anthology of poems by the War Poets to commemorate the Great War (overshadowed as it had been by World War II). Entitled Up the Line of Death: The War Poets 1914-1918, it included poems by 72 poets, 21 of whom had died in the war.

Up the Line to Death now possesses only historical interest. A set text for many years in our secondary schools, it symptomised a desire to exploit the poetry of the Great War for political purposes. However noble those purposes may occasionally be, they damage and devalue those writers whose work does indeed amount to 'great poetry in [nearly] any company'. If I were fierce” is not a compliment. It merely describes the language and bluster of a general adept at saber rattling, letting raw recruits, some of them still boys, be marched off to the meat grinder of an insatiable war. It clearly reminds me of the general in Apocalypse Now who says “What a beautiful morning for a war.” The faces of “glum soldiers” serve as reminders of its nightmare and so, of course, the general wants to dismiss them from his sight - and from the world. A “puffy petulant” face describes one who has never seen, much less felt, the horrors of warfare, a coddled infant apt to hide behind his mother’s apron strings if ever forced to face a battle. Let us speak plainly now, not just about the NHS, but about healthcare systems all over the world. They are top down, “command and control” bureaucracies, not dissimilar to military organisations. Though they brim over these days with fine words and caring mission statements, we all know they are rigid, unkind bureaucracies, the main purpose of whose management subunits is less to deliver healthcare, than to take and hold organisational territory. In such authoritarian, often bullying regimes, the pressure to conform need only be explicit occasionally. Fear of censure, and fear of letting others down, will do the rest. Despite this, I can definitely appreciate the poems in here. I'm not a huge fan of long poems (of which there are a few), and obviously you're not going to like every single poem, but some really stand out for me and encapsulate the feeling of war and create such a realistic surrounding. Also, the gradual progression of patriotism to stoicism, to general criticism of the war is interesting as it portrays how blinded we were as a nation. I think reading this with the 21st Century hindsight we possess creates a huge irony in which Gardner attempts to further this with his choice of poems. It was over the last seven or eight months that I have read this extraordinary collection of poems brought together by Brian Gardner and introduced with a short foreword by Edmund Blunden. And these poems do not take you to a better place but make you grateful for the courage of these men and sorrow for the waste of their sacrifice. In this collection the well known sit alongside the totally unknown, the brilliant and sparkling talents alongside the lost and wasted. It is an almost unbearable wading through the horror and tragedy of the 'Great War' expressed in hope, hell and humour in if not equal measure then certainly in notiecable presence.

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Berger, D. 26 July 2020. Please stop calling healthcare workers ‘heroes’. It’s killing us Sydney Morning Herald. Maybe I've been spoiled, because my first sustained exposure to war poetry was in Hibberd and Onions' The Winter of the World, a comprehensive collection of First World War poetry which also managed to arrange things with a readable flow and provide unobstructive biographical context. But Gardner's older collection holds, and the uncomfortable truth of war poetry will likely never wane. There are probably many reasons for our continued fascination; Gardner's introduction speculates on some of them, including the immediacy of the lines from poets who didn't know if they would live long enough to write revisions, its own incomprehensibility to us in a peaceful time and our futile attempts to understand such horror, and the admiration for gentle men who, though they despised the war, could find the nobility of man in their war (pg. xx). And yet, this is no volume dedicated to anti-war sentiments. Even among the most embittered, an understanding exists that some things have to be defended, have to be fought for. It is that understanding that makes the poems all the more poignant. Most of the soldiers writing poetry, of course, were educated men, which means that most of them were among the young officers, which means that most of them died. The end of the book consists of a potted biography of each of the contributors, some of whom survived the war and went on to publish professionally, but many of whom went on to other careers and so far as I know were never stirred to verse again. Those who were killed are marked with an asterisk, but their biographies are rarely any shorter.