![]() Telephonic troubles: Things the linesman overhears. ![]() In letter to Gordon Bottomley, First World War Poetry Digital Archive. Authorial alterations made in the manuscript of ‘Break of Day’ also pay attention to specific words relating to humour (‘sardonic’, ‘droll’). The speaker of ‘In the Trenches’, written in France around the same time as ‘Break of Day’, describes placing a poppy behind his ear as a ‘jest’. A ‘droll’ rat appears in an untitled poem he composed between June 1914 and February 1915: ‘A rat whose droll shape would dart and flit | Was like a torch to light my wit’, but ‘when the rat would rape my cheese | He signed the end of his life’s lease’. The history of the poem’s composition indicates that these elements are important, with Rosenberg returning to them as his ideas evolved. Reading it in the context humorous literary rats instead foregrounds how the poem’s anger and dark irony is mixed with, on a smaller scale, whimsy, playfulness, and wryness. Rosenberg’s poem is most often encountered side-by-side with serious poems in anthologies. Not only does the subject matter show the war being assimilated into everyday life-it is accepted and adapted to-but the feelings of amusement the texts invite are on the side of endurance they put forward an emotional experience of the conflict that is bearable. The texts have a belittling effect on the conflict: by zooming in on the small things, the war becomes less gargantuan-a matter of small disruptions that are comprehendible and possibilities for laughter. Such works highlight the military space as a dwelling place rather than as solely a space in which to conduct fighting. These include sketches that emphasize the ordinariness of servicemen’s interests, and poetry that dwells on the importance of food and objects to create comfort. Many humorous texts also place the military sphere in the frame of the domestic or quotidian. Humorous texts which are focused on domestic home-front settings during the war range from narratives about jam shortages, to the disrupting effects of the conflict on hens’ laying habits, to competitive patriotism in the British suburbs, and to the attempts of shopkeepers to sell unnecessary wartime gadgets.
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