Geoffrey Dearmer

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Geoffrey Dearmer (March 21, 1893 - 18 August 1996) was a British poet. He was the son of Anglican liturgist and hymnologist Percy Dearmer.

During World War I, Dearmer fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Most of his poems dealt with the over all brutality of war and violence, to which he was a direct eyewitness.

He died at the age of 103. The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for poetry was founded in his memory in 1997.

One of his most famous poems is:

The Turkish Trench Dog

Night held me as I crawled and scrambled near

The Turkish lines. Above, the mocking stars

Silvered the curving parapet, and clear

Cloud-latticed beams o'erflecked the land with bars;

I, crouching, lay between

Tense-listening armies peering through the night,

Twin giants bound by tentacles unseen

Here in dim-shadowed light

I saw him, as a sudden movement turned

His eyes towards me, glowing eyes that burned

A moment ere his snuffling muzzle found

My trail; and then as serpents mesmerise

He chained me with those unrelenting eyes,

That muscle-sliding rhythm, knit and bound

In spare-limbed symmetry, those perfect jaws

And soft-approaching pitter-patter paws.

Nearer and nearer like a wolf he crept --

That moment had my swift revolver leapt --

But terror seized me, terror born of shame

Brought flooding revelation. For he came

As one who offers comradeship deserved,

An open ally of the human race,

And sniffling at my prostrate form unnerved

He licked my face!