 | | 'Now with these teeth that powder stones,
I'll pick at one of her cheek-bones:
When husband, son and daughter come,
They'll soon see who was left at home.'
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Innocence lost to survival of the fittest is chronicled in "A Woman's History," in which Mary Price at five years old loses her pet bird and "called her friends to pray to God, / And sing sad hymns for hours"; at fifteen loses her virginity and marries "With no more love-light in her eyes / Than in the glass eyes of her doll"; at thirty-five mourns her dead husband while "neighbors winked to see the tears / Fall on a lover's neck"; and
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| | Now, Mary Price is seventy-five
And skinning eels alive:
She, active, strong, and full of breath,
Has caught the cat that stole an eel,
And beaten it to death.
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Another Georgian, Edmund Blunden, captures the decay and violence of a world of survival in his naturalistic "Malefactors." The observer in the poem addresses the remains of two predators, a kite and a stoat, nailed to the boards of an old, abandoned mill; he speculates on how they were killed by the miller for their intrusion, and then meditates on Time's "revenge""the wheel at tether, / The miller gone, the white planks rotten, / The very name of the mill forgotten"and on the criminality of a fallen world that links man and beast in their mortality. The observer asks, can "There lurk some crime in man, / In man you executioner, / Whom here Fate's cudgel battered down?" Thus, the Georgians in their tragic renderings of natural and human life imagine a cynicism and harshness about the nature of reality that the suffering and death of the First World War confirmed.
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Indeed, the poets who went to war in 1914 were Georgians, and the death of one of the founders of the movement, Rupert Brooke, became the defining tragedy of the literary generation. Brooke became famous before the war for poems like "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester (Cafe des Westens, Berlin, 1912)," which in celebrating the speaker's longing to escape decadent Europe and recover the purity of home, seems to express the very provincialism that the Modernists abhorred in Georgian poetry: "Here I am sweating, sick, and hot, / And there the shadowed waters fresh / Lean to embrace the naked flesh." Yet, there is a
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