Some Desperate Glory (28 page)

It was not only what the poets saw that raised them above the Georgians. Their pre-war and post-war lives show them as extraordinary: often tormented casualties of their age, not typical of it. But they were strong enough to make a world that stands alone, bound by the feelings and vision of eleven fragile young men who were unlikely warriors.

 

AFTERMATH POEMS

‘
Everyone Sang
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
Laventie
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
1916 Seen from 1921
' – Edmund Blunden

‘
The Mangel-Bury
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
It is Near Toussaints
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
The Rock Below
' – Robert Graves

‘
The Zonnebeke Road
' – Edmund Blunden

‘
First Time In
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
Poem for End
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
On Passing the New Menin Gate
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
The Bohemians
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
The Watchers
' – Edmund Blunden

‘
The Silent One
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
I Saw England – July Night
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
The Interview
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
Two Voices
' – Edmund Blunden

‘
Gouzeaucourt: The Deceitful Calm
' – Edmund Blunden

‘
War Books
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
A Fallodon Memory
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
The Last Day of Leave (1916)
' – Robert Graves

‘
Report on Experience
' – Edmund Blunden

‘
Recalling War
' – Robert Graves

 

 

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

 

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away … O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

S
IEGFRIED
S
ASSOON

 

 

Laventie

One would remember still

Meadows and low hill

Laventie was, as to the line and elm row

Growing through green strength wounded, as home elms grow.

Shimmer of summer there and blue autumn mists

Seen from trench-ditch winding in mazy twists.

The Australian gunners in close flowery hiding

Cunning found out at last, and smashed in the unspeakable lists.

And the guns in the smashed wood thumping and griding.

 

The letters written there, and received there,

Books, cakes, cigarettes in a parish of famine,

And leaks in rainy times with general all-damning.

The crater, and carrying of gas cylinders on two sticks

(Pain past comparison and far past right agony gone)

Strained hopelessly of heart and frame at first fix.

 

Café-au-lait in dug-outs on Tommies' cookers,

Cursed minniewerfs, thirst in eighteen-hour summer.

The Australian miners clayed, and the being afraid

Before strafes, sultry August dusk time than death dumber –

And the cooler hush after the strafe, and the long night wait –

The relief of first dawn, the crawling out to look at it,

Wonder divine of Dawn, man hesitating before Heaven's gate.

(Though not on Coopers where music fire took at it.

Though not as at Framilode beauty where body did shake at it)

Yet the dawn with aeroplanes crawling high at Heaven gate

Lovely aerial beetles of wonderful scintillate

Strangest interest, and puffs of soft purest white –

Soaking light, dispersing colouring for fancy's delight.

 

Of Maconachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester's Stephens;

Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evens

Of trench food, but the everlasting clean craving

For bread, the pure thing, blessed beyond saving.

Canteen disappointments, and the keen boy braving

Bullets or such for grouse roused surprisingly through

(Halfway) Stand-to.

And the shell nearly blunted my razor at shaving;

Tilleloy, Fauquissart, Neuve Chapelle, and mud like glue.

 

But Laventie, most of all, I think is to soldiers

The town itself with plane trees, and small-spa air;

And vin, rouge-blanc, chocolat, citron, grenadine:

One might buy in small delectable cafés there.

The broken church, and vegetable fields bare;

Neat French market town look so clean,

And the clarity, amiability of North French air.

 

Like water flowing beneath the dark plough and high Heaven,

Music's delight to please the poet pack-marching there.

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

 

1916 Seen from 1921

Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,

I sit in solitude and only hear

Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,

The lost intensities of hope and fear;

In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,

On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,

The very books I read are there – and I

Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags

 

Its wounded length from those sad streets of war

Into green places here, that were my own;

But now what once was mine is mine no more,

I seek such neighbours here and I find none.

With such strong gentleness and tireless will

Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,

Passionate I look for their dumb story still,

And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

 

I rise up at the singing of a bird

And scarcely knowing slink along the lane,

I dare not give a soul a look or word

Where all have homes and none's at home in vain:

Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt,

The self-sown wheat around was like a flood,

In the hot path the lizard lolled time out,

The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood.

 

Sweet Mary's shrine between the sycamores!

There we would go, my friend of friends and I,

And snatch long moments from the grudging wars,

Whose dark made light intense to see them by.

Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots

Spun from the wrangling wire; then in warm swoon

The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots,

We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.

E
DMUND
B
LUNDEN

 

 

The Mangel-Bury

It was after war; Edward Thomas had fallen at Arras –

I was walking by Gloucester musing on such things

As fill his verse with goodness; it was February; the long house

Straw-thatched of the mangels stretched two wide wings;

And looked as part of the earth heaped up by dead soldiers

In the most fitting place – along the hedge's yet-bare lines.

West spring breathed there early, that none foreign divines.

Across the flat country the rattling of the cart sounded:

Heavy of wood, jingling of iron; as he neared me I waited

For the chance perhaps of heaving at those great rounded

Ruddy or orange things – and right to be rolled and hefted

By a body like mine, soldier still, and clean from water.

Silent he assented; till the cart was drifted

High with those creatures, so right in size and matter.

We threw with our bodies swinging; blood in my ears singing;

His was the thick-set sort of farmer, but well-built –

Perhaps long before his blood's name ruled all:

Watched all things for his own. If my luck had so willed

Many questions of lordship I had heard him tell – old

Names, rumours. But my pain to more moving called

And him to some barn business far in the fifteen acre field.

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

 

It is Near Toussaints

It is near Toussaints, the living and dead will say:

‘Have they ended it? What has happened to Gurney?'

And along the leaf-strewed roads of France many brown shades

Will go, recalling singing, and a comrade for whom also they

Had hoped well. His honour them had happier made.

Curse all that hates good. When I spoke of my breaking

(Not understood) in London, they imagined of the taking

Vengeance, and seeing things were different in future.

(A musician was a cheap, honourable and nice creature.)

Kept sympathetic silence; heard their packs creaking

And burst into song – Hilaire Belloc was all our Master.

On the night of all the dead, they will remember me,

Pray Michael, Nicholas, Maries lost in Novembery

River-mist in the old City of our dear love, and batter

At doors about the farms crying ‘Our war poet is lost',

‘Madame – no bon!' – and cry his two names, warningly, sombrely.

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

 

The Rock Below

Comes a muttering from the earth

      Where speedwell grows and daisies grow,

‘Pluck these weeds up, root and all,

      Search what hides below.'

 

Root and all I pluck them out;

      There, close under, I have found

Stumps of thorn with ancient crooks

      Grappled in the ground.

 

I wrench the thorn-stocks from their hold

      To set a rose-bush in that place;

Love has pleasure in my roses

      For a summer space.

 

Yet the bush cries out in grief:

      ‘Our lowest rootlets turn on rock,

We live in terror of the drought

      Withering crown and stock.'

 

I grow angry with my creature,

      Tear it out and see it die;

Far beneath I strike the stone,

      Jarring hatefully.

 

Impotently must I mourn

      Roses never to flower again?

Are heart and back too slightly built

      For a heaving strain?

 

Heave shall break my proud back never,

      Strain shall never burst my heart:

Steely fingers hook in the crack,

      Up the rock shall start.

 

Now from the deep and frightful pit

      Shoots forth the spiring phoenix-tree

Long despaired in this bleak land,

      Holds the air with boughs, with bland

Fragrance welcome to the bee,

      With fruits of immortality.

R
OBERT
G
RAVES

 

 

The Zonnebeke Road

Morning, if this late withered light can claim

Some kindred with that merry flame

Which the young day was wont to fling through space!

Agony stares from each grey face.

And yet the day is come; stand down! stand down!

Your hands unclasp from rifles while you can,

The frost has pierced them to the bended bone?

Why see old Stevens there, that iron man,

Melting the ice to shave his grotesque chin:

Go ask him, shall we win?

I never liked this bay, some foolish fear

Caught me the first time that I came in here;

That dugout fallen in awakes, perhaps,

Some formless haunting of some corpse's chaps.

True, and wherever we have held the line,

There were such corners, seeming-saturnine

For no good cause.

 

                   Now where Haymarket starts,

There is no place for soldiers with weak hearts;

The minenwerfers have it to the inch.

Look, how the snow-dust whisks along the road

Piteous and silly; the stones themselves must flinch

In this east wind; the low sky like a load

Hangs over – a dead-weight. But what a pain

Must gnaw where its clay cheek

Crushes the shell-chopped trees that fang the plain –

The ice-bound throat gulps out a gargoyle shriek.

That wretched wire before the village line

Rattles like rusty brambles or dead bine,

And there the daylight oozes into dun;

Black pillars, those are trees where roadways run.

Even Ypres now would warm our souls; fond fool,

Our tour's but one night old, seven more to cool!

O screaming dumbness, O dull clashing death,

Shreds of dead grass and willows, homes and men,

Watch as you will, men clench their chattering teeth

And freeze you back with that one hope, disdain.

E
DMUND
B
LUNDEN

 

 

First Time In

After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line

Anything might have come to us; but the divine

Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony

Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory

Soft foreign things. Then we were taken in

To low huts candle-lit, shaded close by slitten

Oilsheets, and there but boys gave us kind welcome,

So that we looked out as from the edge of home.

Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions