Volume XV
Number 2
May, 2009
Title of the poem: When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead
Author: Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895–1915)
First published: in a posthumous collection of the poet's work titled Marlborough and Other Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1916).
Copyright: Public domain

When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.

Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,
"Yet many a better one has died before."
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Charles Hamilton Sorley
1915

[**Note: Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley (19 May 1895–13 October 1915) was a British poet. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, he was the son of William Ritchie Sorley. He was educated at Marlborough College (1908–13). At Marlborough College, Sorley's favourite pursuit was cross-country running in the rain, a theme evident in many of his pre-war poems, including "Rain" and "The Song of the Ungirt Runners." Before taking up a scholarship to study at University College, Oxford, Sorley studied in Schwerin, Germany, up to the outbreak of World War I. After a brief detention in Trier, Sorley returned to England and volunteered for military service, joining the Suffolk Regiment. He arrived at the Western Front in France as a lieutenant in May, 1915, and quickly rose to the rank of captain. Sorley was shot in the head by a sniper at the Battle of Loos and died at age twenty on October 13, 1915.

Robert Graves, a contemporary of Sorley's, described him in his book, Goodbye to All That, as "one of the three poets of importance killed during the war." (The other two were Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.)

In his work Sorley may be seen as a forerunner of Siegfried Sassoon and Owen, and his unsentimental style stands in direct contrast to that of Rupert Brooke. Sorley's last poem was recovered from his kit after his death, and includes some of his most famous lines:

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go

Sorley's sole work was published posthumously in January, 1916, and immediately became a critical success, with six editions printed that year. Sorley is regarded by some, including the Poet Laureate John Masefield (1878–1967), as the greatest loss of all the poets killed during the war. Despite the horrors of World War I, Sorley felt it had freed his spirit.

On November 11, 1985, Sorley was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."]

**Wikipedia contributors, "Charles Sorley," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sorley (accessed April 9, 2009).