PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

The West's asleep. Let England shake,
weighted down with silent dead.
I fear our blood won't rise again.
England's dancing days are done.
Another day, Bobby, for you to come home
and tell me indifference won.

Let England Shake

We learned the brutal details of WWI in history class – statistics of the average life expectancy of a soldier, descriptions of the gruelling and never-ending war in the trenches, where every won metre meant a disproportional loss of human life, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory. The thing that stayed with me the most and that really conveyed the sense of utter horror at the incomparable new technological devastation was poetry though.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under I green sea, I saw him drowning.

Wilfred Owen: Dulce et Decorum Est

Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.

Isaac Rosenberg: Break of Day in the Trenches

PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake isn’t specifically about the First World War, but the lyrics convey the same brutal imagery (“I've seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat, / Blown and shot out beyond belief. / Arms and legs were in the trees.” –The Words That Maketh Murder) and sense of pointlessness that make Siegfried Sassoon’s and Wilfred Owen’s poems so poignant. There is a nostalgic remembrance of beauty and innocence lost, which turns the fruitful country into a devastated land (“What is the glorious fruit of our land? / Its fruit is orphaned children.” –The Glorious Land). The idea of the glory that comes with going to war for your country contrasted with the bloody reality of warfare is presented by this incredible voice that has always given me the impression that PJ Harvey, as a narrator of stories, is more of a disinterested party than an engaged spectator.
In “All and Everyone”, she evokes Tennyson’s Light Brigade (“When can their glory fade?”), remains of a time that still believed in the motto Wilfred Owen takes apart in his poems – the ground that is once again becoming a battlefield is already covered in layers of bones from older conflicts – and, as she points out in “All and Everyone”, “nature is cruel” and even though the conflicts linger and war is ever-returning, those who gave their lives will not be remembered, and “the land returns to how it has always been”.