Angela & Uncle Jerry analyse The Great War from Midnights (2022), with Uncle Jerry wrestling with the ethics of using World War One as a romantic metaphor and delivering an extended essay on the floral imagery throughout the song.
Key Insights
Uncle Jerry initially questions the appropriateness of using the Great War as a metaphor for a romantic conflict, given the horrific scale of the actual event and its rich literary legacy. He ultimately concludes that the metaphor works because the Great War was 'great' in the sense of catastrophic and history-making, and because the song maintains the conceit consistently with trenches, bombs, treaties, and battlefield language. Angela & Uncle Jerry identify a deliberate structural contrast between unrhymed verses (representing the chaos of war/memory) and perfectly rhymed choruses (representing moments of retrospective reflection and peace). Uncle Jerry's extended floral essay traces five flowers (violets, crimson clover, poppies, memory garden, morning glories) as a sub-narrative arc from wound through bloodshed to remembrance and, finally, rebirth. The hosts note that morning/mourning is a homonym carrying both sunrise (rebirth) and grief simultaneously, with the morning glory blooming at dawn to symbolise renewal after war.
Literary Analysis
Uncle Jerry frames the entire song as an extended metaphor (conceit) comparing a romantic argument to World War One, sustained throughout every verse, chorus, and bridge. He reads the poem as a war chronicle following a narrative arc from remembered conflict through escalation, crisis, and reconciliation. The floral imagery receives dedicated analysis: violets as wounds that bloom (faithfulness and damage inseparable), crimson clover as love mixed with bloodshed (alliterative and colour-coded), poppies as symbols of death and remembrance (directly connected to John McCrae's In Flanders Fields), and morning glories as images of rebirth (blooming at dawn). Uncle Jerry identifies the homonym 'drew' (drew up treaties vs. drew curtains closed) as Taylor having fun with language, and the homophone mourning/morning as carrying the poem's thematic resolution. He traces oppositional rhetoric throughout: 'it was war, it wasn't fair' echoing the cliché 'all is fair in love and war,' which then carries forward to the Tortured Poets Department tagline 'All's Fair in Love and Poetry.' Angela catches a cross-song echo to Would've, Could've, Should've, which also uses banners and tomb imagery on the same album. Uncle Jerry reads the chorus structure as a regression from the battlefield to a calmer reflective space, supported by the shift from past tense in the verses to the more melodic, rhymed choruses. He identifies PTSD as a framework for the speaker's blurred memories and the bridge's 'soldier down on that icy ground' as the crisis point where the speaker recognises she is also doing harm. The discussion of World War One poetry includes readings of Rupert Brooke's The Soldier and John McCrae's In Flanders Fields, contextualising Taylor's use of the war metaphor within a rich literary tradition.
Concepts Explored
Literary Devices
References
Literary Quotes Referenced
"If I should die
think only this of me
that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England." Rupert Brooke
The Soldier. "In Flanders Fields the poppies blow between the crosses
row on row
that mark our place." John McCrae
In Flanders Fields. "Dulce et Decorum Est pro patria mori
" a Latin phrase meaning 'sweet and appropriate it is to die for your native land
' referenced via Wilfred Owen.
People & Figures Mentioned
Connections Across the Work
Shared themes appear across the archive
Recommended Reading
- The Strange Destiny of Rupert Brooke; Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: The Memoirs of George Sherston; Goodbye to All That; War Poems; Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology; The History and Rhymes of the Lost Battalion; The Soldier; Dulce et Decorum Est; The Great War and Modern Memory; The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
In the Archive
In the archive:
The Great WarView song →4 themes traced
27 motifs traced
37 literary devices explored
5 literary references noted