I just came across that phrase in a wonderful book I’m reading, Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. It’s about WW I, specifically, so far (I’m on book 2) about The war poet Siegfried Sassoon.
Robert Frost said he could tell when a line was real poetry, because if he thought of it while shaving, it made the hairs of his beard stand up. I know that shivery feeling in connection with poetry, and always wished I had some body hair that could I could SEE noticeably rise! That was the way it was referenced in this novel, but the author said it was a German phrase: heiliger Schauer.
So I looked that up. But in German, what it refers to is the feeling you might get before..a kill. Before a righteous kill, one you believed yourself divinely ordained to commit. It’s a sensation up your spine, if we still had fur it would look like a dog’s dorsal fur rising when she freezes and sights in her prey—or her enemy.
“Even the wisest man grows tense/With some sort of violence,/Before he can accomplish fate, / Know his work, or choose his mate.” Those lines by Yeats have always been kinda a….mantra for me. Growing tense with a unique, unfamiliar violence: it’s a force, but one contained in your own body. It’s the coiled spring.
I’m falling in love with the WW I poets all over again as I read these books. Even though most of them, like Sassoon, were firmly gay. Reading about early 20th century England, it seems like almost ALL the men were, or at least bi. In one of her books Jo Walton cast all upper class Englishmen as either Athenian, meaning they were gay but would marry a woman and breed, or Spartan, meaning they’d never want anything to do with women.
None of the men I’ve known well and loved well, none of my peers, I mean, have been soldiers. My father, and one friend of mine his age, were veterans but both said, when I asked, that they wouldn’t talk about WWII.
Re-reading Sassoon’s and Owen’s and Graves’ poems , I see those boots of yours, ST. I think of your post about your friend. I’m honored to have made your acquaintance, even only remotely.
Anyone who saw and liked. 1917, and/or last year’s Peter Jackson film They Shall Not Grow Old, I recommend Pat Barker’s trilogy to,you.
And I hope the poetry will evoke the heiliger Schauer (in its pleasurable, non-homicidal manifestation).
ST UnWoked & UnVaxxed! 
Beautiful, Hypatia, just beautiful
LikeLiked by 3 people
Not exactly on topic but I saw 1917 in Feb and wrote this about it:
1917 is an everyman as unwilling hero type movie. The setting is war but the story is not about war per se. I expected all blood & guts with the same old tired commentary about how the old, rich (usually white) guys always be sending the young guys out to die. There is some death, duh!, but the movie has “A Message to Garcia” (written by Elbert Hubbard in 1899) vibe. My understanding is the director wrote the movie based on stories his grandfather (WW I British soldier) told him.
ST Unleashed! Rating: Two thumbs up with a rising tide for the perennially sexy & always vivacious Miss BKK.
I have not yet seen They Shall Not Grow Old.
Finally, I’ll be back after my coffee to make a hopefully more coherent comment.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Memo for the Record: I am neither an upper-class Englishman nor bi-curious.
Haven gotten that off my chest, now I will go drink my coffee in peace.
LikeLiked by 3 people
As ever, luminous, Hypatia; and, as usual, I headed in a different direction: awe in those moments when I recall that the Holy fashioned and *loves* me. A feeling that I could almost rise, long enough to reach my knees….
LikeLiked by 3 people
“I’m honored to have made your acquaintance, even only remotely.”
LikeLiked by 3 people
I just wrote a long comment about Jim Nabors, and got “Sorry this comment cannot be posted”…😡😡😡Anyway— it wouldn’t be worth rewriting unless anybody remembers him as “Gomer Pyle”. Does anybody?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Yes’m, I do remember him in that role; for which he was designated as an honorary Marine – and recall this episode, in particular. Thanks for the motivation, ST!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Of course I remember Gomer Pyle, USMC. I even modeled my career on him.
Please re-write your comment. I have seen that “Sorry this comment cannot be posted” message also, but only when the author of the OP had reverted it to draft. Not sure why it happened to you this time. Maybe there was a perturbation in the force?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Glory of Women
BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON
You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
You can’t believe that British troops “retire”
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Whoa! Let me catch my breath….
LikeLike
Sassoon did not pull his punches. He would have probably gotten himself banned from L! & L2 also.
LikeLiked by 3 people
“Sassoon did not pull his punches. He would have probably gotten himself banned from L! & L2 also.”
And we would’ve welcomed him to the Unleashed with open arms.
LikeLike
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer is a novel by Siegfried Sassoon, first published in 1930. It is a fictionalised account of Sassoon’s own life during and immediately after World War I.
The book portrays Sherston’s emotional and intellectual coming of age, as he learns “that he is but one insignificant person caught up in events beyond anyone’s comprehension”.
LikeLiked by 3 people
It seems to me that poetry is for those who cannot write prose. Except I think I can understand Sassoon’s poetry without the aid of a secret decoder ring. I just read “Counter-Attack” and the meaning seems painfully clear.
I think I avoid poetry because so much of it puts me, the reader, in the grey zone of not being sure what the author is trying to say.
Hypatia, how do you deal with the ‘poetic license’ of poetry?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Simon , re :poetic license” I think maybe you mean flowery language? Doesn’t sound like the way we talk? (Or do you mean, as the phrase is sometimes used, that in writing verse,,poets dont tell the truth about the subject: it’s license to dissemble.?)
If the former: I have a lot of poetry memorized, and when you speak the lines aloud, , and figure out how you should speak them—where to pause, what words to emphasize, if you want to make the point that the author is making..idk, the rhyme just falls into place, and the language no longer seems opaque. And contrary to what everybody thinks, I think people do like poetry (otherwise poems wouldn’t be in the canon) but they just have to be presented with it in a setting where it’s ok to listen and like it.
Yours is a poetic soul, I KNOW it!
LikeLiked by 3 people
Do you know this sonnet, whereShakesoeare is lampooning both high-flown flowery language AND the”poetic license” wherein poets compare their ladies to goddesses, Describe them as paragons of physical perfection:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red.
If snow be white, why then, her breasts are dun:
If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses growing, red and white,
Yet no such roses see I in her cheeks.
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak—yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by Heav’n! I think my love as fair
As any she belied by false compare!
Now, y’gotta admit: that poem doesn’t “pull any punches”, either!
LikeLiked by 3 people
ST, is that clip FROM the TV show? I mean it must be, why else in uniform? And I remember the actor who played the sergeant.
If you like Sassoons poems (and from the above it looks like you do) you should read Barker’s novels.
But what Gomer made me think of is, it seems like the American military during the wars was a “rough democracy” which obliterated regional and economic differences. Whereas when you read British novels, any of them, what really comes through is class antagonism. And it seems like they perpetuated the divisions in their military: initially all the officers were “gentlemen”. After the war the proles in the trenches really resented that. Sheesh, if you’re English, you can apparently tell everything about another person just by the way they pronounce a few vowels Gomer was a hick, a rube, but he was , so fundamentally…good, he could melt the hardest ol’ military heart..
I’ve always felt Hanks’ Forrest Gump owed a lot to Nabors.
P.S: why the Impossible Dream? Or is that the only time Nabors got to show off his angelic voice on the sitcom?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Impossible Dream ‘speaks’ to me as poetry seems to move you. When I hear the words of this song as sung here by ‘Gomer’ I think it perfectly conveys the eternal embers burning within the chest of every warrior.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Please forgive my poetic license in the comment above.
LikeLiked by 3 people
For the most part, America’s military is a meritocracy. If it were a true meritocracy, we would probably have never heard of John McCain or Douglas “I shall return” MacArthur.
Speaking of which, MacArthur had the ‘yellow fever’ too. No wonder he returned to the Philippines posthaste, and I would argue without strategic imperative.
https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/features/douglas-macarthur-dimples-cooper-a2289-20190718-lfrm2
LikeLiked by 3 people
I’ll make one more point if I can, before I go scrub my kitchen floor:
When you read Rupert Brooke, or Sassoon, or Housman, or Graves, they’re nostalgic for the “Greene and pleasant” England where they grew up. The contrast with the filthy, dark, noisome trenches was all the more painful. But in this novel, the author has a working-class character make the point that if you were from industrialized London, or the “dark Satanic Mills” of Manchester, the trenches weren’t that much uglier (although obviously the physical discomfort was infinitely worse.) than the environs you grew up in.
I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for WW I to seem even sadder to me than it did during my first period of fascination with it, decades ago now. But: live ‘n’ learn…
LikeLiked by 3 people
The loss of innocence and the exposure of the self-serving, jingoistic flavor of ‘civvie street’ patriotism at the time – and the lack of any goal beyond: “Humiliate the Hun” – didn’t serve everyone. It may’ve sown the seeds for WWII, to some extent, too.
LikeLiked by 1 person