In the short poems offered for this week, nature is a consistent theme throughout. However, nature is not the friendly companion, or comforting force that it is in All Quiet on the Western Front. In "Dulce et Decorum Est," the soldiers are "cursed through sludge," and "deaf even to the hoots / Of gas-shells dropping softly behind" and somehow manage to march "asleep....lame; all blind." Nature is reduced to structureless mud, the gas shells hoot like owls and drop softly despite being shells shot from artlilery. The soldiers manage to keep moving despite the fact that they're asleep, lame, blind, and deaf. Nothing about Nature in the first stanza should work, but Owen offers it as a reality of Nature after World War I has gotten ahold of it. 

Sassoon's "They" is a short bit of criticism about religious backing for the war, with the maiming of soldiers (a corruption/weaking of natural forms) seen as the ultimate reality of war that the bishop character overlooks in favor of blind faith. I read "Everyone Sang" as the moment when the speaker dies and he joins a chorus of nature, where his "tears; and horror" can be taken away because he is now one with nature. 

Rosenberg, in contrast, offers nature (in the form of a rat) as a bridge between each front in the war. Basically, if the rat "touched this English hand," and goes on to "do the same to a German," then there must be a connection beneath the bloodshed and violence that promises something deeper and better than the horrors of the war. Brooke's "The Soldier" is depressingly accepting of his fate, but connects his burial to an eternal win for England. Even if he dies, his body will turn to dust and bear flowers or grass that is fed off of someone who was raised by the English. So England can lay claim to those growths, and forever claim the land he was buried in. Nature, then, is once again a force that stretches over the war and can offer success despite potential defeat.

Owen's poem is the bleakest and most graphic, and it also provides the most twisted form of nature as a victim of the war. Sassoon's poems show nature as a victim of war (the soldier's maimed bodies) as well as a reward for death that war cannot taint. It is Rosenberg that offers nature as a connection that even war cannot destroy, and Brooke that agrees with Sassoon's "Everyone Sang." This is an interesting dichotomy between the poets, and I'm interested in other poetry of the period. Is nature a pure force in the majority of works, or do most poets see World War I as so destructive that its power even stretches to the immutable presence of nature?