Carol Ann Duffy Poem Commemorates Armistice Day

The Guardian nods to a new poem by Carol Ann Duffy, published earlier this week, which commemorates the centenary of Armistice Day. Her poem, a sonnet, "was commissioned by the director and producer Danny Boyle as part of his commemoration of Armistice Day, Pages of the Sea, which will see thousands of people gathering on beaches in the UK and the Republic of Ireland at low tide on 11 November," writes Alison Flood. Picking up there: 

As well as readings of Duffy’s poem, the event will see the portrait of a casualty from the war, designed by sand artists Sand in Your Eye, drawn into the sand on beaches around the country, until it is washed away by the tide.

“I hope that Carol Ann Duffy’s poem will be something that you’ll read privately as individuals, or with friends, or publicly among people on the beach on 11 November,” said Boyle. “Poetry in [the] first world war was such an extraordinary art form – it reported, in the way that television does now, on experiences that were unimaginable to the people at home.”

The event is named after the last line in Duffy’s sonnet, in which the poet mourns those lost in the war a century ago. “History might as well be water, chastising this shore; / for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice. / Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea,” she writes in the poem, entitled The Wound in Time.

Those gathered on beaches – from St Ninian’s beach in Shetland to Porthcurno in Cornwall - will also be asked to draw silhouettes of people in the sand, “remembering the millions of lives lost or changed forever by the conflict”, and to select someone to say a personal goodbye to from an online gallery of portraits of those who served.

Organisers of the event, commissioned and produced by 14-18 NOW, said that the vast majority of the eight million people from Britain and the Commonwealth who served in the first world war left by sea.

Read Duffy's commemorative poem at The Guardian.