A Night Attack
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| "A Night Attack" | |
|---|---|
| by Leon Gellert | |
| Written | 24 May 1915 |
| First published in | The Bulletin |
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Publication date | 7 June 1917 |
| Lines | 13 |
"A Night Attack" (1917) is a poem by Australian poet Leon Gellert.[1]
It was originally published in The Bulletin in June 1917,[2] and was subsequently reprinted in the author's first single-author collection and in a number of Australian poetry anthologies.[1]
The poem describes the lead-up to a night attack during a war, concentrating on the intense feelings of the men waiting for their orders.
Critical reception
Dan Disney, in his chapter "War, Crisis, and Identity in Australian Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry, emphasised Gellert's human reaction to the night attack as the poet situated "the war as peripherally close to a disembodied, synedochic collective of whispers shifting in abstract parts (the eye, the ear, footsteps, the hand, the mind) towards an impending fight. His poem places readers in heightened states of vigilance, and in so doing centralises anxiety as its motif."[3]