DonnAbh Gorm

Publication Instance Details #514

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	No	No	No	No

Details

Human Rights Issues	War HR & Colonisation/Colonial Legacies
War / Genocide Referenced	War: First World War
Languages	Irish
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	The speaker of the poem is in Vienna, and describes it as a museum of a city, with lots of statues dotted around. The statues, he notes, are of war generals who survived the war after encouraging thousands of young men to go and die. The soldiers became clay, while they became bronze or marble effigies of themselves. The speaker notes how the ages of empires are fading away now, and are not understood any longer by schoolchildren. The battle of Austerlitz during the Napoleonic wars is mentioned, as is the Russian general Brusilov's victory over the Austro-Hungarians at Galicia in World War I. The poem as a whole reflects on the folly of war, especially for the young men who died at the behest of rich generals who themselves would leave the war unscathed. The title of the poem, 'Blue Danube', is a famous waltz composed by Strauss in Austria. It was written after a war with Prussia which Austria had lost, and Strauss composed the waltz to lift his country's spirit.