“For the past three years I have used Chris’ recording of the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” on librivox.org to teach my literature students World War I poetry. I clicked on his contact link on the site because I wanted to thank him for recording such a powerful reading of the poem; my students are always moved by his voice. I was saddened to read that Chris died, but I wanted to let his family and friends know that his voice has held the attention of hundreds of my students thus far.”

I think that makes the point very eloquently! Chris would have been so pleased to know that he was helping to introduce a new generation of students to first world war poetry, and indeed his Librivox poems are living on.

Someone told me of your death, Heraclitus. It brought tears to my eyes. I remembered the many times that you and I had sat up talking late into the night. But now you, my dear friend from Halicarnassos, have been a pile of ashes for a long time. And yet your poems live on still. Death, which seizes everything, cannot lay its hands on those.

It struck me quite forcibly that if you changed the names, Heraclitus/ Christopher,  Halicarnassus/ Malvern; and updated “poems” to “blog posts and/or Librivox recordings”, then the same sentiments are as true today as they were over 2000 years ago.  That was an interesting and surprisingly comforting insight to have in the middle of the night.

The poem is written in iambic pentameters. A long time ago I learned to scan Latin poetry, so I thought I knew about this: mixtures of spondees (DUM DUM) and dactyls (DUM DI-DI). I was stunned to find that almost every foot was a spondee or a trochee (DUM DI). When I thought about English doggerel, however, with its characteristic dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum rhythm (recall Hiawatha!) I realized that my preconceptions were just that, and that I should discard them.

But I did look through the poem, just to be sure I knew how to read it, and I found a couple of lines where an odd or archaic pronunciation would be necessary to keep the meter. For example the first two lines are

The frost performs its secret ministry
Unhelped by an wind. The owlet’s cry …

in which the word unhelped must be pronounced with three syllables instead of two to keep the meter of the line intact. Interspersed was similar, requiring four, not three syllables. Imagine me now muttering the poem with my fingers beating on the desk in time with each syllable, as I checked every single word to see whether I should say any more of them in that odd way. I found these: populous, numberless, fluttering, and articulate I said with only two syllables each; tower had only one syllable. There were a few others, but you get the picture.

The other challenge in reading the poem was to prevent myself from reading it line by line instead of in meaningful phrases.

What I’ve described makes it seem as though reading the poem was quite an effort, and you’d be right, it was. But I actually found the effort well worth it. By spending so much time on it, and thinking about how I was going to read it aloud, I found that I understood it so much better than I did on first reading. I thought at first it was a little rambling and pointless; by the end I appreciated the circular route the poet had taken, and understood his desire for his child to have a better life than he had had.

It was definitely a positive experience for me, one I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t decided to volunteer at LibriVox. In fact, even when I did volunteer I never imagined I would read poetry, and still less did I imagine that I would enjoy it. Thanks Hugh.