P.T.S.D.
Extract from the Prelude
The young boy is haunted by the awesome elements of nature that surround him:
- ‘An act of stealth And troubled pleasure’
- ‘The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge’
- ‘I struck and struck again’
- ‘the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars’
- ‘measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me.’
- ‘With trembling oars’
- ‘homeward went, in grave And serious mood
- ‘That spectacle, for many days, my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense’
- ‘o’er my thoughts There hung a darkness’
- ‘a trouble to my troubled dreams’
Exposure
Soldiers faced perilous conditions, during the war and these were usually mentally damaging:
- ‘Our brains ache’
- ‘What are we doing here?’
- ‘The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow…’
- ‘We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed’
- ‘Slowly our ghosts drag home’
- ‘We turn back to our dying’
- ‘For love of God seems dying’
- ‘The burying-party… Pause over half-known faces.
Bayonet Charge
The soldier is caught in the action of war and is questioning why he is fighting:
- ‘Suddenly he awoke and was running- raw”
- ‘Stumbling across a field of clods’
- ‘The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye’
- ‘In bewilderment then he almost stopped-‘
- ‘He was running Like a man who has jumped up in the dark’
- ‘His foot hung like Statuary in mid-stride’
- ‘King, honour, human dignity, etcetera dropped like luxuries’
- ‘His terror’s touchy dynamite.’
Remains
The soldier’s experience causes him to suffer from P.T.S.D.:
- _‘probably armed, possibly not’ _
- ‘I see every round as it rips through his life-‘
- ‘he’s there on the ground, sort of inside out’
- ‘tosses his guts back into his body’
- ‘His blood-shadow stays on the street’
- ‘the drink and the drugs wont flush him out-‘
- ‘He’s here in my head when I close my eyes’
- ‘his bloody life in my bloody hands
War Photographer
The photographer captures distressing moments that are experienced in war-zones:
- ‘spools of suffering set out in ordered rows’
- ‘A stranger’s features faintly start to twist’
- ‘a half-formed ghost’
- ‘blood stained into foreign dust’