The Poetry of War Trivia Quiz

Answer: English Civil War

Lovelace was an ardent supporter of the doomed King Charles I, and was extremely poor for most of his life due to his constant donations to the royalist cause. The poem describes its narrator's heartbreak after deciding that he must leave Lucasta for a more violent mistress, ending with the immortal line "I could not love thee Dear, so much,/ Loved I not honour more."

Answer: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The poem is a stunning example of reverse psychology. It exhorts the navy to go ahead and destroy the ship, because after all it only represents our freedom, and that doesn't really matter! The wood-hulled ship, which had been around since the Barbary Wars in the early 19th century, was promptly restored. It still remains in Boston Harbor.

To this day the navy claims that the original article in the Boston newspaper was a mistake. The navy was never really considering scrapping the ship, they merely wondered how much it would cost to restore it!

Answer: 600

"All in the valley of death/ Rode the six hundred" In actuality, there were 673 cavalrymen in the brigade, of whom 113 would not survive the charge. The charge was the finish of the much larger battle of Balaclava (involving approximately 25,000 troops).

Historians now believe that the brigade simply charged (or were ordered to charge) the wrong set of Russian guns. Tennyson realized this and wrote in his poem that "...the soldier knew/Someone had blunder'd/Their's not to reason why/Their's not to make reply/Their's but to do and die."

Answer: Walt Whitman

The two poems on the death of Lincoln are "O Captain, My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd". "The Wound Dresser" is told from the point of view of an old man being asked by the young to tell of his experiences in the civil war. Whitman describes the rows upon rows of wounded soldiers in the hospital tent, many with horrific wounds.

Although he never met these soldiers before and never would again, he think that for one boy, "I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you".

Answer: Wilfred Owen

This is one of the most famous anti-war war poems. The title comes from the phrase "Dulce et Decorum Est, pro patria mori", which translates to say "It is sweet and noble, to die for one's country". It is taken from an Ode of Horace and also appears on a memorial ampitheater in Arlington National Cemetary in the United States. Owen urges us to "Not tell with such ardent jest...the old lie" (the title of the poem), and describes the horrors of war and of the death of a man who didn't get his gas mask on in time. Ironically, he himself fell victim to that lie; he was gunned down by machine fire a mere week before the armistice that ended the great war.

Answer: Soldiers killed at the battle of Ypres

"We are the dead. Short days ago/We lived...". Though the images are grave (literally, as there are "crosses, row on row"), this is not a poem against the war. To the contrary, McRae's dead do not want to have died in vain. Their souls "shall not rest" if others fail to take up their torch. Mcrae himself did not live out the war.

He died of pneumonia in 1918 while working as a surgeon in Boulogne. He lives on through his poetry and the symbolic use of red poppies (mentioned in this poem) as a memorial to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Answer: An Irish Airman

"An Irish Airman Forsees His Death" was written in memory of Major Robert Gregory, the son of Lady Gregory (a close friend of Yeats). Like many Irishmen of the time, the airman is bitter about having to fight in a war he feels he is not a part of (Ireland was still part of England during World War I, so when England entered, it dragged Ireland with it).

As he puts it "Those that I fight I do not hate,/ Those that I guard I do not love." Nevertheless, he does not regret having to fight. To him, the rest of his life would be a mere "waste of breath" compared with the "lonely impulse of delight" he feels in the clouds.

Answer: Randall Jarrell

The ball turrett was a plexiglass sphere on the underside of a bomber. One man (usually a short and small one) would squeeze inside and fire machine guns at any fighters attempting to attack the bomber. Jarrell remarked of the gunner "hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the fetus in the womb" and made this comparison in the opening lines of this very short poem.

A mere four lines later the poem ends with the death of the gunner, who says "they washed me out of the turret with a hose."

Answer: W H Auden

Although originally from Great Britain, Auden had taken up a University Position in the United States, and he observed the early part of the war from "One of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street." Auden believed it would be up to later scholars to determine what had "driven a culture mad" to produce a man like Hitler.

Although Auden was never pleased with the poem, calling it "trash which [he was] ashamed to have written," it has become one of his most famous. It has gained new popularity in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, perhaps because of its imagery of skyscrapers that use "Their full height to proclaim/ The strength of Collective Man," and its statement that "Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return."

Answer: What Were They Like?

"What Were They Like?" is constructed as a series of six questions followed by (somewhat bitter) answers to those questions. For example, the second question, "Did they hold ceremonies/ to reverence the opening of buds?" is answered "Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom, / but after the children were killed / there were no more buds." It was meant to emphasize the humanity of the Vietnamese people, and how American soldiers were ruining that humanity. I hope you enjoyed this quiz!