Last Post

by Carol Ann Duffy

Last Post is a poem written by Carol Ann Duffy. The poem, named after the "Last Post" (the bugle call used at British ceremonies remembering those killed in war), makes explicit references to Wilfred Owen's poem from the First World War Dulce et Decorum Est. It imagines what would happen if time ran backwards and those killed in the war came back to life.

Genres: Poetry

2 pages

About the author

Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.

She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold this position.

Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Last Post" is one of my favourite poems - reflecting on the horrors of the last century by paraphrasing Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" with a powerful twist, turning time backwards, to make history "unhappen".

The soldiers falling in the trenches see blood running upwards into wounds, they walk back to their lives before World War I, before those four years changed the course of history drastically, destroying the self-confidence of the 19th century forever.

As I recently read Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, published in 1915, the imminent irrevocable loss of all those characters' values and convictions is central to my historical understanding of the story. Sometimes I catch myself longing for that world where people could be so confident and sure that what they knew and felt was right, that their ideas on nationality, imperial power, gender, education and life style were absolute and non-negotiable. 100 years later, in Carol Ann Duffy's poem, the idea of rewriting history to turn back to "the good old time" is appealing, a dream poets can make come true, on paper at least.

"If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would."

The poem plays with the idea of turning back to paradise, closing Pandora's box, putting the apple back on the tree in the Garden Eden. But it doesn't work. I read this poem for a World War I unit with grade 8 students, and compared it to Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum. When I asked students to write their own historical poems backwards, choosing an event they would like to "unhappen", they were eager to do so, and produced fantastic pieces of fiction, showing Chernobyl unexplode or the Twin Towers rise from the ground again, people flying back into the windows they had jumped out of. But while sharing the poems, one girl exclaimed in distress:

"But this is worse! Now we have to live through 9/11 again!"

And she was right. Telling history backwards meant going through the pain again, or unwinding history until the human capacity to speak is lost in humankind's cradle, as another student suggested, leading history backwards to the Big Bang and beyond, thus annihilating the whole human story.

So whenever I get nostalgic for long lost life styles and ideas, when I am frustrated with the shallowness and stupidity and pure violence of my time, when I fancy living at an earlier point in history when life was less complicated, I remind myself to reread this poem, and to think of the actual consequence of turning back time:

"If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would."

It can. But only if it remains imaginary time travel. A short visit, with all the knowledge and understanding of my own time. For travelling back to an earlier stage and thus losing the experience we have gained from mistakes, can never be better than trying to build a future based on our knowledge of history. So I will stop longing to be a character of the Belle Epoque, and enjoy that fact that I can pay a visit through literature any time I want.

Here is the poem in its entirety:

"In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud ...
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too -
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would."

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home-
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce- No- Decorum- No- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too-
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert-
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.

ETA - I have come back a day later and raised it from 3 to 4 stars as the images going backwards stayed with me overnight. So much could be righted if we had this ability to rewind.