I spent Thursday recovering from a brace of winter vaccinations. I was tired and achy enough that I even missed attending my treasured monthly Midstream Poetry reading, but besides whatever mojo the shots might give me from winter respiratory crud, it made me grateful upon waking up Friday with my usual level of old-guy energy. I took a crisp 34 degree F. bike ride for a veggie sandwich and tea at a local bakery, and then spent a good deal of the day finishing some live LYL Band recordings from last September. Only then did I recall that I should do something for Veteran’s Day — or Armistice Day as it used to be called here in the United States. Armistice Day is still the name in much of the rest of the world that experienced WWI, and perhaps because I’ve been thinking a bit more about British poets this week, I quickly settled on two poems by British authors.

The post just before this one, Housman’s “Soldier from the wars returning”  was the first poem I wanted to do, and it’s a straightforward poem of simple gratitude for a veteran’s service. The second one is a little stranger, and I made it stranger yet. Can we be sure Robert Louis Stevenson wished his poem “The Dumb Soldier”  to be read as a whimsical piece about a child’s toy? He published it in A Child’s Garden of Verses  after all.

There were no sensitivity readers for children’s books then,* but the nature of the poem’s story is not benign. It starts right out with the poem’s speaker burying a soldier, which from the text alone we don’t know yet is a toy. When we read “leaden eyes” we might get the hint that it’s a cast metal toy soldier — but if we were to hear this poem as I performed it, without context, sung by an adult, even that detail might not tell us clearly what is going on.

I leaned into that strangeness. I trimmed a couple of stanzas for better performance length and chose to truncate the final one, leaving off the reveal that this is a toy soldier that will return to the child’s shelf. This left this a more ambiguous buried soldier then unable to tell us anything about what they’ve seen.

Here’s the chord sheet for my version of Stevenson’s poem. To read his original text, here’s a link.

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Although written decades before the first Armistice Day in 1918, this mode of the silent war dead is clearly apt for that holiday as celebrated outside the U.S.**

It was late Friday night before I was ready to perform these two poems as songs. I had music written, and for practicalities sake, I was able to quickly use my studio space to record the pair of songs with just acoustic guitar for accompaniment. Neither of these are perfected or sophisticated performances, they are more or less what you’d hear if I was to present them off the cuff. You can hear my version of “The Dumb Soldier”  with an audio player below, unless you don’t see any such player. Some ways of reading this blog won’t display that, so I give you this highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player in those cases.

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*”Dumb” used as a term for someone who cannot speak is now a highly impolite term. Given the sacrifice and suffering of war, that term’s objectionableness might be a lesser concern.

**Since the U.S. had an existing holiday, Memorial Day, for remembering those who died in military service, the U. S. Armistice Day became Veteran’s Day to celebrate all who served, particularly the living. Housman’s poem, couched though it may be in the particulars of WWI, speaks to that element of the holiday. As a mid-century child, I can recall Armistice Day was still used occasionally in my youth for November 11^th since veterans and others who had experienced that war were numerous.