Thoughts on "Route March"

Here are my thoughts as I progress through "Route March" by Charles Hamilton Sorley.

1. Reading through it a couple of times, the general feeling I have toward it is: the world is one of death, and not one that is sad about this fact.
2. What the poem is generally about: the characters in the poem are soldiers, and they are marching towards their inevitable death. And yet there is a jolly tone about it.
3.
Who: The narrator seems to be one who has seen war, and is traveling with the soldiers.
To Whom: The narrator is speaking to another soldier.
What: The soldiers are marching towards their death. They are in a time of war- and yet the poem alludes to many other moments where people died. So it is always a time of war and death.
Where: They are on Earth, a place where people are always dying and no one every cries.
How/ what patterns : Literary elements:

• tone: joyful, yet with a harsh sardonic lilt
• diction: there are two kinds -->
• gleeful, happy
• singers
• "bursting into song", "sing with joyful breath", "gladness that you pour", "never doubts nor fears", "pour gladness on earth's head", "so be merry"
• death, dark, gruesome
• "going to die perhaps", "you are going to death", "knows of death, not tears", "hemlock", "road to death", "so be dead"
• rhyming/rhythm: said like a song, a children's rhyme: something happy, it is the cruel song of the world- gives it that ironic tone: they should be happy they are dying, because that's how the rest of the world feels, and has been, for a long time. Also, that the marching men are dancing forward to their death, not a grim movement, but a joyful one. This could mean that the narrator feels that the marching men do not . The rhyming also brings the happiness and the death into one.
• Structure: There are these indented parts, which are sort of like the chorus: although they are not the same, they talk of the current action of the marching men: it's not just a commentary on the world, it's talking directly to the soldiers, sort of where everyone joins in and sings along.
• The last two stanzas end with "so be merry, so be dead"--> that direct contradiction

4. Main idea: combination of joy and death

5. Thesis statement: 

Sorley, in his Route March, combines death with joy in order to comment on the war-like attitude of the world and its jadedness towards sorrow, using diction and rhyming to bring the two contradictory ideas together creating an ironic tone.

6. Brief Outline:

1. Intro
1. Charles Hamilton Sorley
2. Route March
3. Thesis Statement
2. Diction
1. Combination of joyful diction and morbid diction
1. Eg. repetition of singing
1. "the singers are the chaps", "so sing with joyful breath",  "ringing swinging glad song-throwing"
2. And directly the next line after each of these joyful lines --> "who are going to die perhaps", "for why, you are going to death", with other words like "Earth will echo still.../ lies numb and voice mute"
3. Contrasts connotations of singing and death and puts them together, to show what we should feel about it and what the world really does feel about it
2. Allusions
1. Jesus Christ and Barabbas
1. from what I understand, Barabbas was executed, like Jesus Christ- so I need to brush up on my knowledge about this, but I think there is both a good and a bad feeling here
2. Hemlock for Socrates
1. Socrates, declared a good and wise man, poisoned by others who were jealous of him. The state of the world is always one of killing and war, not of peace and happiness. Things always end in death.
3. Rhyming
1. Rhyming in couples
1. Sing-song feeling vs. grim subject.
2. Marching soldiers often sing as they go to war.
1. Words create a rhythm of them marching to a joyful song- the common soldier's attitude towards war, they do not know what is coming. There is quite a bit of repetition as well
1. "gladness", "singing", "marching", "so be merry, so be dead"--> create that rhythm of doing the same thing over and over again- marching.
3. Rhyming helps bring death and singing together
1. the couplets are often contradictory of each other: saying that the two are not so different
1. "Pour gladness on earth's head / So be merry, so be dead".
4. Tone
1. Diction: pushing the joyful attitude onto the action/situation of death
2. Rhyming: same thing --> combining joy and death into one
3. Tone: ironic and sardonic: satirizing and criticizing the view that the world has, one of war and death and yet happiness because of this
1. They should be sad, but they are happy
1. As the tone suggests, the morbid subject is "sung" in a happy manner
5. Conclusion:
1. The world has gone awry, according to the author- makes the audience, listeners, and readers question what they feel about death:
1. In the news today even the numbers don't mean anything- do we realize how many die in war, and that everyday we act as if we are in war, and not in peace?