Many of those back home were women, and their experiences were sometimes like that of a blind John Milton who consoled himself with the idea that “they also serve who only stand and wait.” 3 And while women on the home front waited for the war to end and participated in a host of efforts to aid in that cause, they, too, wrote about it. That was the way World War I (WWI) impressed itself on its generation: as a patchwork of experiences for combatants in the front lines and a different patchwork of waiting and worrying for family and noncombatants back home. “The Patchwork Quilt” combines curious images of domesticity and femininity-“patterned silks and old brocade / Small faded rages in memory rich,” curious, because they’re not the images you’d expect in (especially male) “war poetry”-with the more recognizable symbols of manly soldiering: the muddied khaki uniforms of the British and the field grey of the Germans, the latter torn and clotted with blood. ![]() 1 The poet and memoirist Robert Graves (1895–1985) wrote a revealing poem in 1918 that summed up his war poetry and his war experience. English poetry of the Great War is famous for its (sometimes naive) patriotism, its black humor and satire, and its ability to paint the ugly reality of twentieth-century war in a way that has haunted readers and influenced subsequent writers ever since.
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