Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate, has written a new poem about the First World War to mark the recent deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, two of the last surviving Britons to fight in the conflict.

Ms Duffy read her verses aloud on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning, as mourners in Brighton prepared for Mr Allingham's funeral with full military honours, which began at lunchtime today. Mr Patch is due to be buried next week.

Entitled Last Post, her wistful verses imagine time running backwards, so that the thousands of soldiers who died in the trenches get to their feet, alive once more, and go home to be reunited with their sweethearts.

Duffy intersperses the fantasy with lines from Wilfred Owen's harrowing war poem Dulce et Decorum Est, one of the first works to reveal the full horror of deaths in the trenches by gassing.

LAST POST

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin

that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud...

but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood

run upwards from the slime into its wounds;

see lines and lines of British boys rewind

back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -

mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers

not entering the story now to die and die and die.

Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori.

You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)

like all your mates do too -

Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -

and light a cigarette.

There's coffee in the square,

warm French bread

and all those thousands dead

are shaking dried mud from their hair

and queueing up for home. Freshly alive,

a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released

from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,

your several million lives still possible

and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.

You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.

If poetry could truly tell it backwards,

then it would.

Erica Wagner, Times Literary Editor:

“You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile,” the new Poet Laureate writes near the end of her poem to mark the funerals of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch. Perhaps the poet she means is Wilfred Owen, whose Dulce Et Decorum Est resonates in the lines above: Owen was killed in 1918, and in Duffy’s moving reversal of history, time unscrolling backwards like a rewound film, Owen too would step back into time, into his own life.

But the poetic toll of the Great War cannot easily be narrowed down, so her poet might be John McRae – who wrote In Flanders Fields – or Isaac Rosenberg, or Charles Hamilton Sorley. It might be Edward Thomas or Arthur Graham West. All of them were lost, one way or another, to the trenches: Harry Patch and Henry Allingham escaped death, but never the effect of that awful war.

Duffy admits that poetry’s power is limited in the face of such suffering. “If poetry could tell it backwards,” she begins, in the knowledge that it cannot, that hers is a dream of life regained.

It is no less affecting for that, shifting swiftly from the almost science-fiction image of the “bad blood/ run upwards from the slime into its wounds” to the comfort of “coffee in the square,/ warm French bread/ and all those thousands dead/ are shaking dried mud from their hair/ and queuing up for home”. The reader (or listener – click here to hear Duffy reading her poem) can almost taste the coffee in the square and smell the bread. The glistening horses fit for heroes or kings is an image of mythic power.

Since the outbreak of the First World War, poets have tried to capture its horror, its essence, the desire to escape from the mud of the trenches. That mud clings still, and Duffy’s poem is the latest in a noble line of art that aspires to a kind of salvation.

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