This was my favorite of all of his epitaphs: it's just so sad. I love WWI because there was such a beautiful innocence about the world that got completely smashed apart.
The Beginner
On the first hour of my first day
In the front trench I fell.
(Children in boxes at a play
Stand up to watch it well).
My dad made me read a book last summer called The Great War and Modern Memory, which talked about the changes in literature that happened as a result of WWI. Before WWI, modern europe believed in progress and though they were moving forward. There hadn't been a major war since the Second Treaty of Paris that ended the Napoleonic Wars, when almost all of the major and minor european countries agreed upon a Balance of Power between the nations. After awhile, war became something that was glorified - people read The Iliad and imagined heroes - Achilles and Agamemnon. And all the time leading up to the war, as we've read - was filled with romanticism. People wrote poetry about knights and kings, heroes - and that which came along with them - the beautiful, innocent princesses, the lovely lady waiting for her soldier to return home, scarred but valiant. All of that was an illusion, of course - a world before poison gas, tanks, trenches, airplanes, and effective artillery.
So, once these valiant heroes marched off to war, they realized how truly horrible it was - and the type of prose and poetry that entered WWI, all flowery and nature-oriented, was transformed. After the war, disillusionment and stark prose characterized modern writing. Images of death and pointless brutality, or senseless death, were rampant. And that's where this comes into play - stories of innocence that meet with senseless, immediate death. A boy who looks over the top of the trench to see the battle - to see the artillery burst like stars in the air, to see the land transformed from a place of trees into a cratered, surrealist moonscape - for that he is killed, a child, innocent, and most of all, foolish.
And that's the thing I really see that characterizes these poems - a sense of sardonic humor, that grins at the absolute misery of reality, and thinks How could we have been so foolish?
I also agree with Liz. There seems to be a sense of innocence that is lost in this poem and even in the other poem with the fairies. It is the war that sabotages the innocence and purity of the world as it engulfs their lives with violence and evil. This is obvious in "The Beginner" as the children witness the spectacle of war and unknowingly allow it to wash away their innocent spirits. Even in the poem with the fairies, the fairies seem to take up a very child-like and fairytale-like quality that kind of embody the naivety of children. Although the fairies were supposed to represent a clash between the Gaelic revival and reality in Yeats' poetry, they also signify the innocence and naivety that was no longer present in society then.
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