Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is

Monday, November 11, 2004. Today's poem is called The Burial of Sir John Moore after Karunia

by Charles Wolfe. And it is the poetic treatment of an actual event, occurred in British military history. In the early 1800s, at the

height of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon had attempted a coup in Spain, but the Spanish rose up

against him and the British, who were always looking for a leg up on the French, decided to

join them in their fight. But the British and the Spanish who have their own history of bad blood struggled in

their attempts at cooperation. And eventually in 1809, the British army under Lieutenant General

Sir John Moore, worn down and greatly outnumbered, was forced to evacuate the Spanish peninsula.

But when they arrived at the coast, the troop transport ships that were meant to take them

back home to Britain had not yet arrived. And Sir John had to turn and mount a hasty defense against

advancing French troops while they waited for their rescue.

This entire event bears a strong similarity to the later famous Dunkirk retreat from France by the British troops.

Moore's defensive maneuver was largely effective, saving many lives while they waited for evacuation, and he fought heroically

in the battle but was mortally wounded. And before leaving the continent, his troops had to bury him

hastily. So with heavy hearts in the cover of darkness, they interred him quickly there in Spanish

soil and left him without even

grave marker, although later Spanish allies would come along and do a little bit to acknowledge

and mark the grave, and then eventually a permanent memorial would be set up for him.

After this event, the famed British poet Robert Sothe wrote a prose account

of the burial, which was in turn read by a young Charles Wolfe, who was a recent graduate of Trinity

College Dublin and had just been installed as an inauspicious country parson in Ireland, and he was so moved by the

account that he decided to write his own verse tribute, and that is our poem today.

...