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Sunday, January 2, 2022

John Lehmann / The Englisth Poets of the First World War

The English Poets

of First World War

by John Lehmann

In November, my thoughts turn to Remembrance Day & I often decide to read about WWI & WWII. This year, I’ve begun with the poets of WWI. I first read Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon & Rupert Brooke as a teenager & I’m still moved by their work & their lives. Since then, I’ve read many anthologies, biographies & critical books about the period & the writers.

John Lehmann’s book, English Poets of the First World War, was published in 1981. I rescued this copy from a library book sale & I’ve been reading it over the last couple of days as well as dipping into some of the other books you can see in the photo below. Lehmann concentrates on 15 major poets & looks at the work they wrote during the war, rather than the poetry & prose they wrote long afterwards, if, indeed, they survived. The poetry of the war fell into two distinct phases.

From the beginning of the war in 1914 until the Battle of the Somme in 1916, it was still possible for patriotic young men to write poetry glorifying war & revelling in the opportunity to be a part of this great adventure. Rupert Brooke’s 1914 Sonnets & Julian Grenfell’s Into Battle are the most famous examples. Brooke & Grenfell both died in 1915 so there’s no way of knowing how their work would have changed as the optimism of the first part of the war was replaced by the despair of trench warfare that seemed neverending. Another poet who was killed in 1915 at the age of 20 was Charles Hamilton Sorley (the photo above is from thesuffolkregiment.org website). I’ve always loved this poem. The image of the dead being oblivious to our pity & grief is intensely moving & comforting as well. Their pain is past.

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Sassoon & Owen are the most famous of the war poets. Their meeting at the hospital at Craiglockhart has been written about many times, both as fact & fiction. That meeting led to Owen’s miraculous last year when he wrote the poems that made his name after his death just a week before the Armistice. Sassoon survived the war & continued writing poetry but his War Poems remained his most famous & best-loved work. He also wrote three volumes of fictionalised autobiography, collected by Faber as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. His poem, Does It Matter?, exemplifies the bitter, almost brutal poetry of the last years of the war. The feeling of hopelessness & pity of the speaker contrasts with the bitter undertone accusing those safe at home of not valuing the sacrifice made by the men at the Front.

Does it matter? – losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter? – losing your sight?...
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter? – those dreams from the pit?...
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they’ll know that you’ve fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.

Wilfred Owen could also write with bitterness of the horrors of war but I find the quiet, elegiac tone of Anthem for Doomed Youth so moving. The final image of the families left at home for long years without the men who will never come home, quietly grieving in that long period of mourning after the war is filled with melancholy.

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 goodbyes.
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.

Isaac Rosenberg was killed in April 1918 (The photo below is fromiwm.org.uk). His poem, Break of Day in the Trenches, is a meditation in a moment of peace before the madness of battle. It reminds me of John Donne & the metaphysical poets in the humour in which he sticks a poppy behind his ear & addresses a rat that has strayed into his trench from No Man’s Land.

The darkness crumbles away -
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand –
A queer sardonic rat –
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German –
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver – what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.

John Lehmann’s book is an excellent introduction to the WWI poets but it might be hard to get hold of. Jon Silkin’s Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (1979) has an extensive Introduction & there should be lots of second hand copies around. There’s an updated Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (2006) edited by Matthew George Walter which is in print but I haven’t seen it. Penguin Classics always have good notes & introductions so I’m sure this would be a good choice. I’ll continue my Remembrance reading throughout the month.

Friday, July 4, 2014

Mattew Hollis / The last Years of Edward Thomas

The Last Years of Edward Thomas

by Mattew Hollis

Matthew Hollis's award-winning book tells the story of the last four years of writer & poet Edward Thomas. I've always loved Thomas's poetry & I've read several books about his life including the memoirs of his wife, Helen, & the memoir written by Eleanor Farjeon about their friendship.This book is different because, although it also concentrates on those last four years of his life, as Farjeon's did, it's really about his evolution as a poet. It's also about his friendship with the American poet, Robert Frost, and the influence of that friendship on his writing.

Thomas is not an easy man to like. Frequently withdrawn, taciturn & depressed, he was frustrated in his working life & very difficult to live with. The family always seemed to be just on the edge of poverty as Thomas worked as a freelance writer, picking up commissions to write books about literature & the English countryside, resenting the hack work all the time. He often took his frustrations out on his family & his moods could be frightening. More than once he threatened to commit suicide. His frustration was partly at his inability (as he saw it) to properly provide for his family & partly because his commissioned writing left him no time or energy to write anything else. Yet he was also a very attractive character, whose friends loved him. Helen adored him & her memoirs, collected as Under Storm's Wing, are very moving. Edward, however, grew to resent her need of him & the constant need to provide for the family. Eleanor Farjeon, the poet & children's writer, loved him & wrote movingly of their friendship in Edward Thomas : the Last Four Years.

Perhaps the most important friendship of Thomas's life was with Robert Frost. Frost had brought his family to England from New Hampshire to see if he could make a name for himself as a poet. In the years before WWI, Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop in London was the place for poets & poetry lovers to meet. Monro's anthologies, Georgian Poetry, were immensely influential & made the reputations of several poets. When Frost & Thomas finally met, they became friends & spent days walking through the countryside talking about everything & anything - their families, their work, the coming war. Frost encouraged Thomas as he began tentatively to write poetry. Once he started, the poetry poured out of him, sometimes he was writing a poem a day.

This is the point where this book really took hold of me & I found it difficult to put it down. Hollis is a poet & his descriptions of the way Thomas wrote his poetry are fascinating,

His first poem had emerged in an unwieldy manner from his prose, but it was, in an important sense, better than his prose. The prose had done everything asked of it: polite, unshowy lines pitched at the level of a quietly spoken conversation; but the poem had that and more besides: it had cadence and it had drama. It was an extraordinary first effort, full of character and good phrasing; tonally, perhaps, it borrowed from his friend, Robert Frost, and by the standards of poetry it carried a prosaic bagginess that he would have to shake off; but in places it soared with an energy and confidence that showed glimpses of the promise to come.

That first poem, Up in the Wind, has all the qualities of Thomas's verse. Quiet, conversational, alive with the details of country life. Thomas is called a war poet but more because he was killed in the war than for any other reason. None of his poetry is explicitly about the war in the way that Sassoon or Owen wrote about the war. The war is often there, in the background, as in my favourite of his poems, As the Team's Head-Brass. The war is there in the quiet conversation of the speaker & the ploughman but the scene is somewhere in England, not France or Flanders.The scene is a field not a trench.

Thomas's most famous poem is probably Adlestrop.

Yes, I remember Adlestrop -
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

Hollis shows how the poem was written, from the notes he jotted down in June 1914 in the field notebooks he always carried with him, to the many attempts at that first verse, changing words until he found the right ones. It was as if all the prose Thomas had written over so many years had all been leading him to the point where he could write poetry. Often it was one of his articles or notebooks that suggested a poem or reminded him of an incident or conversation that he could turn into verse.

When the war broke out, Thomas initially had no thought of joining up. Robert Frost had taken his family back to New Hampshire, along with Thomas's son, Mervyn. The rest of the Thomas family or at least Edward himself, had plans to follow them. Thomas was in his mid 30s and there was no conscription to force him into the Army. Gradually, however, he came to feel that it was his duty to join up. He grew uncomfortable with the thought that other men were fighting for the country he loved so much. There was also a more pressing financial incentive. Freelance literary work had almost completely dried up & if he was in the Army, Helen & the children were guaranteed an income, especially if he served overseas.

Thomas joined the Artists Rifles & eventually became an officer in an artillery regiment. I hadn't realised that he was in camp at Hare Hall at the same time as Wilfred Owen. Hollis speculates that Owen was probably trained in map reading by Thomas but, as Owen hadn't been part of the poetry scene in London before the war, he didn't know of Thomas's reputation as a writer & critic. Thomas had not had any of his poems published &, when he did send them out to magazines, he used the pseudonym Edward Eastaway. Hollis wonders what the effect would have been on Owen's development as a poet if he had come under Thomas's influence at this point rather than the influence of Siegfried Sassoon whom he met at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917.

Thomas could have stayed in England with a staff job but volunteered for service in France where he was killed at Arras on Easter Monday, April 9th 1917. He didn't see his poetry in print but a volume was published soon after his death & his reputation has grown ever since. Now All Roads Lead To France is a fascinating look at the evolution of a poet. It's interesting to speculate about Thomas's future if he'd survived the war. I don't think he would have been defined by his war service & his war poetry as Sassoon was. His subject matter was much broader. I wonder if he would have been a happier, more contented man if he had returned from France to continue writing poetry & maybe visit America & farm with Frost as they had once dreamt of doing. It's another of the great What Ifs of literature.

ABOUT ME

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Nicola Shulman / Graven with Diamonds

Graven with Diamonds

by Nicola Shulman

In the Prologue of Graven With Diamonds, Nicola Shulman writes,“... the present book is not intended as a life of Thomas Wyatt but as a life of his lyric poetry... This is a book about the uses of Wyatt’s love poetry: why he wrote.” It’s a fascinating journey & I learnt a lot about the way poetry was written & read at the Court of Henry VIII.

Wyatt is best known for a handful of lyrics said to be about Anne Boleyn. Wyatt’s relationship with Anne has overshadowed the rest of his life & his reputation as a poet. There’s no clear indication of whether they had an affair or not but there were stories that Wyatt tried to warn Henry that Anne wasn’t as chaste as he may have thought she was. Shulman explains that poetry was used as a kind of initiation rite at Court. If you were one of the inner circle, you could understand the allusions to people & current events or scandals. Wyatt’s poetry is obscure partly because he had to be careful how he wrote, especially in later years as Henry grew more paranoid & suspicious of treason. The allusions are now lost in the mists of time & we can’t know if the interpretations scholars have come up with are anywhere near the truth.

... a verse on a folded sheet could be shared, copied, borrowed, circulated, passed from pocket to pocket for a day or two, declaimed with meaningful looks, or quietly muttered into someone’s ear with a knowing pull at their sleeve. Stanzas might be excised, lines taken alone, or pronouns adapted to fit to make a point – but ultimately, meaning derived from inside knowledge.

Several poems, however, do seem to relate to the period of Anne Boleyn’s ascendency & her fall. The famous sonnet, Whoso list to hunt, is based on a sonnet by Petrarch, but Wyatt’s “translation” has changed the meaning of the original poem. Plutarch’s poem is about a poet following a deer (representing Christ) in a forest until the poet falls into the river & the deer vanishes. In Wyatt’s version, the deer (Anne Boleyn) is the property of Caesar, the King, who has staked his claim with a jewelled necklace,

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,

As well as I may spend his time in vain.

And graven with diamonds in letters plain

There is written her fair neck round about:

Noli me tangere for Caesar’s I am

And wild for to hold though I seem tame.

Shulman places this poem in the late 1520s when Henry’s courtship of Anne was at its height. By 1536, Henry & Anne had been married three years. She had failed to give Henry a son. Her only living child was a daughter, Elizabeth. Henry was restless, wondering just how legal his marriage was & looking towards Jane Seymour as his next potential wife & mother of his heir. The plot that brought Anne down is well-known. Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower along with Anne & the other men accused of being her lovers. Wyatt, who many have since thought had really been Anne’s lover, was not tried &, through the influence of his father & Thomas Cromwell, he was released. Another famous poem is thought to recall the sights he witnessed while he was imprisoned in the Tower.It's thought that he saw the convicted men & maybe Anne herself, as they were led to their executions.

These bloody days have broken my heart.

My lust, my youth did then depart,

And blind desire of estate.

Who hastes to climb seeks to revert

Of truth, circa Regna tonat (it thunders around thrones)

The bell tower showed me such sight

That in my head sticks day and night.

There did I learn out of a grate,

For all favour, glory or might,

That yet, circa Regna tonat.

After Wyatt’s release from the Tower, he became a diplomat in Cromwell’s service. This could also mean being a spy & a possible assassin. His private life had not been happy. His marriage to Elizabeth Cobham had ended in separation. His relationship with Anne Boleyn, whatever it may have been, ended when the King became involved. His later relationship with Elizabeth Darrell seems to have been happier although his diplomatic travels meant they spent little time together. Wyatt’s facility with languages & his courtly manners made him a good candidate for a diplomatic career.

In the late 1530s, Henry was trying to prevent an alliance between the Emperor Charles whose empire spread from Spain to the Netherlands & Francis I of France, fearing that they would invade England if they could put aside their misgivings about each other long enough to decide to make war on him. Wyatt was sent to Charles’s court to try to dissuade the Emperor from an alliance with Francis. One of Henry’s subjects, Cardinal Reginald Pole, was an energetic promoter of a Franco-Spanish alliance. Pole was a member of the White Rose families, Yorkists who had a claim to the English throne (I read about the Pole family last year in Desmond Seward's book, The Last White Rose). They had stayed true to Catholicism & the Pope after Henry’s schism with the Pope & Cardinal Pole was a great promoter of anything that could lead to Henry’s downfall & bring England back to Rome.

It soon became obvious that one of Wyatt’s tasks as a diplomat was to arrange Pole’s assassination. He was unsuccessful & it eventually became necessary for him to leave Spain when Charles grew tired of his plotting & threatened him with the Inquisition. Diplomatic immunity wouldn’t be enough to save a Protestant Englishman if he lost Charles’s protection & favour. On his return to England, Wyatt became caught up in the factional fighting between Cromwell & his enemies. Shulman also thinks that Wyatt’s arrest was one of a series of arrests of diplomats who had failed to carry out Henry’s designs – in Wyatt’s case, Pole’s assassination.

He was again imprisoned in the Tower but again he was released, this time on the intervention of Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard. Although Wyatt had never been a part of the Howard faction at Court (he was a Protestant & allied to Cromwell) Shulman believes that the Duke of Norfolk’s poet son, the Earl of Surrey, who admired & looked up to Wyatt as the greatest poet of the age, may have petitioned the new Queen to ask for his release. Wyatt was pardoned & returned to his estate at Allington. The conditions of his pardon were quite extraordinary. The King made him take back his wife, Elizabeth, who he had left because of her adultery, years before. He was forced to repudiate his mistress, Elizabeth Darrell, & their baby son - yet another misery to plague his unhappy life. He was back in favour at Court but his health had begun to fail &, on a journey to Falmouth to entertain some Spanish dignitaries, he fell ill & died of complications from a fever. He was only 39.

Nicola Shulman has done a wonderful job in this book of explaining Wyatt’s poetry & the way it was written. The obscurity of the references & allusions was necessary at the time but they led to critics disparaging his work as conventional & bland. His relationship with Anne Boleyn has obsessed historians & romancers to the exclusion of everything else & only in recent years has his work been reassessed. Graven With Diamonds is an absorbing account of Wyatt’s life & the dangerous times he lived in.

ABOUT ME

Monday, March 18, 2013

Christina Rossetti / Commonplace

Commonplace

by Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti is one of my favourite poets. She was a member of a talented family. Her brother, Dante Gabriel, was a founding member of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young Victorian artists who wanted to revolutionise the staid world of the Royal Academy. Christina was a model for Gabriel in several paintings but I prefer the beautiful chalk drawings he did of her like the one above.

Her most famous poem, Goblin Market, is an extraordinary poem about sisterhood, love & temptation. She also wrote very movingly of love & loss, especially in the Monna Innominata sonnets. Christina also wrote children’s stories & fables with a religious theme as well as a few other pieces of short fiction.Commonplace is one of these, & Hesperus Press has reprinted it in a beautiful edition with yet another of their stunning cover designs. Commonplace is the story of the three Charlmont sisters, Catherine, Lucy & Jane. They’ve lived in Brompton-on-Sea all their lives. Their father went missing in a boating accident when Catherine was 12 & Jane not yet born. Their mother died in childbirth after making Catherine promise that one of the girls would always be at home to welcome back their father when he returns. Of course, he never does return & by the time Jane is 18, the three sisters are entrenched in their comfortable, middle-class existence in Brompton-on-Sea.

Catherine, in her early 30s, has been a mother to Jane & Lucy & feels the responsibility of her position. Lucy is a gentle soul who has loved & lost & is almost resigned to spinsterhood. Jane is dependant financially on her sisters (her father made no provision for her in his will because he didn’t know his wife was pregnant when he died), spoilt, wilful & determined to marry comfortably to escape her dependency. She hasn’t a romantic or sensitive bone in her body. In these three women, Christina Rossetti explores the options for middle-class women in Victorian England. There are some very funny scenes, especially when Jane decides to marry a pompous name-dropper, much older than herself. This man, Mr Durham, has a daughter, Stella, who has married Alan Hartley, the object of Lucy’s unrequited love. Lucy surprises herself by becoming very fond of Stella & finally seeing through Alan’s shallow charms. All is not lost for her though as an old suitor reappears on the scene.

Rossetti packs a lot into just 60pp. Many other Victorian writers would have found enough plot here for a three volume novel.Commonplace is a slight story, a bit of a curiosity from an author better known for her poetry, but I found it an interesting exploration of the constraints on middle-class women of the time.

ABOUT ME

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Washing Lines / A colletion of poems

Washing Lines

A collection of poems

Selecte by Janie Hextall and Barbara McNaught

by Lin

I came across a review of this book of poetry & immediately knew I wanted to read it. In the note on the back flap of the book, Janie Hextall & Barbara McNaught write that they became friends because of a shared love of poetry. They discovered that they both collected poems & woodcuts about laundry & enjoyed train travel because it meant they could look at washing blowing in the breeze in other people's backyards. Their passion for poetry & laundry led to the creation of Lautus Press - Lautus being the Latin for washed, clean or refined, elegant. The book that resulted from this passion is a beautiful object in itself. Pale lilac cover with French flaps & a lovely woodcut, Wash Day by Clifford Harper, on the cover.

The subject of all the poems & woodcuts (above is September Morning by Anne Hayward) is washing, laundry, cleaning, but the poems range from the traditional to the modern. They use laundry as a way to remember childhood or a symbol of the love of a mother for her sons. Sometimes it's a way of testing the loved one's resolve as in this famous song,

Can you make me a cambric shirt,

Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
Without any seam or needlework?
And you shall be a true lover of mine.

Can you wash it in yonder well,

Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
Where never sprung water, nor rain ever fell?
And you shall be a true lover of mine.

Can you dry it on yonder thorn,

Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Which never bore blossom since Adam was born?
And you shall be a true lover of mine.

In Gillian Clarke's poem, Women's Work, the poet is thinking of her own writing & remembering a long-ago summer,

August Sunday morning,

and I'm casting for words,
Wandering the garden sipping their poems,
leaving cups of them here and there in the grass
where the washing steams in the silence
after the hay-days and the birdsong months.

I am sixteen again, and it's summer,

and the sisters are singing, their habits gathered,
sleeves rolled for kitchen work,
rosy hands hoisting cauldrons of greens.
The laundry hisses with steam-irons
glossing the collars of our summer blouses.

I enjoyed Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Washing-Day, full of the apprehension of bad weather spoiling the wash & the irritation of an uninvited visitor when wash day is in full swing, The woodcut above is Lympstone Washday by Pam Pebworth.

The silent breakfast-meal is soon dispatch'd

Uninterrupted, save by anxious looks
Cast at the lowering sky, if sky should lower.
From that last evil, oh preserve us, heavens!
For should the skies pour down, adieu to all
Remains of quiet; then expect to hear
Of sad disasters - dirt and gravel stains
Hard to efface, and loaded lines at once
Snapped short - and linen-horse by dog thrown down,
And all the petty miseries of life.
...

...Woe to the friend

Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim
On such a day the hospitable rites;
Looks, blank at best, and stinted courtesy,
Shall he receive. Vainly he feeds his hopes
With dinner of roast chicken, savoury pie,
Or tart or pudding: - pudding he nor tart
That day shall eat; nor, tho' the husband try,
Mending what can't be help'd, to kindle mirth
From cheer deficient, shall his consort's brow
Clear up propitious; the unlucky guest
In silence dines and early slinks away.

As well as an enjoyable collection of poems about the delights of cleanliness & domesticity, the Afterword of Washing Lines by Alexander Lee also explores the environmental issues at stake. I'd read about this trend in the papers & was incredulous that some cities in the US ban householders from drying their washing outside. They're forced to use clothes dryers which now consume 6-10% of domestic electricity in the US. The smell of freshly dried sheets is one of the joys of life & I'm lucky to live in a country where I can dry my washing outside all year. Banning the outdoor drying of laundry just seems so ridiculous. It's free & it's environmentally friendly. Alexander Lee has started a movement,Project Laundry List, to encourage outside drying & cold water washing. There's even a National Hanging Out Day!

I've only used a couple of my photos of the gorgeous woodcuts in the book as they make them look quite muddy & don't do them justice. If you enjoy poetry & woodcuts on domestic themes, I recommend Washing Lines. It's a little gem.

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