The handwritten drafts of this WWI poem are fascinating to see grow, through Siegfried Sassoon’s suggestions — like blind insolence of iron mouths to replace majestic insults… — and on to this final form below. The last line never changes, except for Dusk to dusk.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
If you have installed the desktop beta, you can explore these nine drafts. If you don’t yet have a TextFlow account, here are four you can take for a test drive, with the first draft as reference. Click on it to start TextFlow and explore building a personal edition. Poetry is what you make of it.
This was fun!
Your demo is cool. I wish it was a plug-in for wordpress so I could edit/compose and collaborate using this.
I suppose you’re competing with Google Docs or perhaps Buzzword but a better tool to author content for web logs would be very useful.
So amazing…totally blows my mind
wow
Greg,
Thanks for your input. We are planning a mash-up version of TextFlow that could be integrated with other tools like Wordpress.
The basic principles of TextFlow apply just as well to a document merging tool as to a Wiki style editor. Our focus now is to get our interface right. We hope that by making something that works together with MS Word people can have the benefit of TextFlow straight away, even though its an early beta.
I want it all and I want it now!
are you going to do mindmapping?
Carl
This is fascinating! A new use for textflow that I imagine will become very popular!
My first comment is that the introductory text doesn’t say that this poem is written by Wilfred Owens! it just says WW1 poem.
Pat Baker has written a very good novel called Regeneration that is based on Owen and Sassoon’s friendship during their time at Craiglockart (Edinburgh) recovering from shell shock.
One gets the idea of how Textflow works, no problem there, but as it’s a great poem and I haven’t read Owens for ages (someone borrowed my copy), I was interested in the text and in what Sassoon had suggested, so I spent some time with it.
I had a few difficulties reading out the final version, one can’t just read down the green column. and I had to look at the published version standing as it does in a book, by itself, and compare it with the textflow page, to get it right.
Only the monstrous anger of the guns – shouldn’t that first the be there in grey in the final “green” version?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes It’s easy to think that line isn’t part of the published version and skip it when reading the green column. Shouldn’t that be in green as well, although no changes were made? No, evidently not, according to the rules, but it wasn’t immiediately evident that one should include that lilne in reading the “final draft”. But perhaps that’s just because I’m a newby?
Thanks for your comments, Anne!
The post now contains a fold out link, which contains the whole poem in it’s final form - together with the title and the name of the author. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!
Regarding reading the final version of the poem in TextFlow - what’s important to remember when looking at this, is that the green parts are just pointing out where the final version differs from the first version. Therefore one can’t just read the green parts to get the whole version.
Having said that, it might very well be so that users need a way to be able to read a version in its full form from within an ongoing TextFlow session. Had Owen been able to use TextFlow himself, I would have loved to see him use it along the way to merge Sassoon’s suggestions with his own in order to create the final version.
Congratulations on the release
I have just received my email with activation link.
This project makes me very excited about future of Flex and its 2009 future with SDK 4.0
This project will most likely get even better presentation with 4.0 as it deals with visual enhancements.
Good job Sweden
I want to play with this some more, but wanted to tell you right away that I think you’re on the right track. However, I think the suggestions would be easier to read if they were in rows, not columns. Is there a way to change that?
Also, remember this - someone owns the document, and proper control is key to successful collaboration.
Nice post u have here
Added to my RSS reader