*in 1813
The Evil Hour
Such surge of black wings I never saw homing
Fast from a winter day’s pale-gilt entombing
Nor can the continent’s entire woodland house them.
So many throats of known and unknown runnels
Shooting from thorny cliffs or poured through tunnels
I never heard. Such rainstorm to arouse them
We in these parts yet bore not in such torrents,
Nor warring winds enraged so to abhorrence;
The sun was laughed to scorn, his god-head pelted
With sharp bones wrenched from sylvan nature; flamed then
A lightning such, all other lightning (tamed then)
Might be as honey, or kind balms slow-melted.
Then this sad evening, this echo of existence,
And what was near driven to enormous distance.
Poems of Many Years (1957)
Young Fieldmouse
Beseechingly this little thing –
Strayed from deep grass and breezy scented Spring
Into undreamed perils which have struck it down
Already – here in the den of the town
Takes refuge and finds pause in your warm palms
And dares to peer about, till its terror calms.
There is no hope for such a mangled mite,
Whose life depends on what we cannot guess,
Or nourishment, or surgery; none the less
Indulge this child, this stranger with eye so bright,
So dim – so bright again, for love can do
Much, and the illusion is good (in its time) as true.
We try our makeshifts, one by one they pass;
It tries; but in the end, in the long green grass,
The infant body stiffens, and the frame
Of the universe, to us, dies a little with the same.
The Fond Dream
Here’s the dream I love.
Stay, old Sleep, allow me this
Yet one moment, godlike bliss.
Here’s the dream I love.
Tell us then that dream?
O, it’s nothing, nothing at all.
But I was walking young and small
In a scene like a happy dream.
What especial scene?
None especial: pure blue sky,
Cherry orchards a brook runs by,
And an old church crowns the scene.
Only that? If so,
All would be well; but dreams have changed.
Dreamers are banished, joys estranged.
I wake; it is not so.
C.E.B.
Ob. November 1951
Are all your eighty years defined at last
In so few terms? the chair and bookshelves by,
The latest pipe, the cared-for shoes, the stick
(Long since presented with some public thanks)
As good as new, but latterly less astir;
The post and railway times penned as of old
Beautifully for the fireside wall?
Not even your cricket-bag attending now,
Not the bream-ledger, nor the hop-ground picture,
Nor one school register, nor book of chants,
Though these will come to hand as days press on,
When your monastic face that seemed to pass
In a high procession from our local world,
Set on some boyhood vision, never uttered
To any but one, will be but village clay.
At the Great Wall of China
Perched in a tower of this ancestral Wall,
Of man’s huge warlike works the hugest still,
We scan its highway lashing hill to hill,
We dream its form as though we saw it all;
Where these few miles to thousands grow, and yet
Ever the one command and genius haunt
Each stairway, sally-port, loop, parapet,
In mute last answer to the invader’s vaunt.
But I half know at this bleak turret here,
In snow-dimmed moonlight where sure answers quail,
This new-set sentry of a long dead year,
This boy almost, trembling lest he may fail
To espy the ruseful raiders, and his mind
Torn with sharp love of the home left far behind.
A Hong Kong House: poems 1951–1961 (1962)
A Hong Kong House
‘And now a dove and now a dragon-fly
Came to the garden; sometimes as we sat
Outdoors in twilight noiseless owl and bat
Flew shadowily by.
It was no garden, – so adust, red-dry
The rock-drift soil was, no kind root or sweet
Scent-subtle flower would house there, but I own
At certain seasons, burning bright,
Full-blown,
Some trumpet-purple blooms blazed at the sun’s huge light.’
And then? Tell more.
‘The handy lizard and quite nimble toad
Had courage often to explore
Our large abode.
The infant lizard whipped across the wall
To his own objects; how to slide like him
Along the upright plane and never fall,
Ascribe to Eastern whim.
The winged ants flocked to our lamp, and shed
Their petally wings, and walked and crept instead.
‘The palm-tree top soared into the golden blue
And soaring skyward drew
Its straight stem etched with many rings,
And one broad holm-like tree whose name I never knew
Was decked through all its branches with broidering leaves
Of pattern-loving creepers; fine warblings
And gong-notes thence were sounded at our eaves
By clever birds one very seldom spied,
Except when they, of one tree tired,
Into another new-desired,
Over the lawn and scattered playthings chose to glide.’
Millstream Memories
Shattering remembrance, mercy! Not again
Could I delight in the child-bright scenes you wake.
Avoid, and quit my sight. Yet no: maintain
Whatever at last may guard me from the lake
Of darkness; dare not quit me, – stay, destroy
Some schemes and works which warped as time moved on;
Even the small pebble-songs bring rippling joy
Anew where later joy dropped woe-begone.
Gleam at my falling-off, assail my strength,
Deny my true love by far waters: she
Can understand, and all comes true at length, –
Your water-music teaches us to be.
I feared your elemental call, cool, light,
Leaf, life in the pearl? no more: shatter me quite.
Dog on Wheels
This dog – not a real dog, you know –
An Airedale, on four wheels, –
Not my toy, but a friend of mine as things go,
Is alone; we leave to the rest their reels.
I speak to him, he seems to hear.
His face is a little battered now,
And so is mine: to Change both bow.
Let that be: with vision I dream to endow
This dog on wheels.
Poor dear,
Can such things be? Not so.
We are simple, and that uplifted face
Is of its own kind in time and space.
But as I shut my desk and say goodbye,
Downward droops a disappointed eye.
And Away
I sent her in fancy,
For the pastime of pursuing,
Wherever old Time had been
Kind to me;
By snow-enchanted woodlands,
Valley orchards, river windings,
Ancient tracks through hill cornfields,
Ahead smiled she.
I
set her in fancy,
If I might go and greet her
By guildhalls and minsters,
By canal, by quay,
With hymns from glittering belfries,
With tunes from toying cafés,
Flower-markets, flower-costumes,
Away explored she.
I thought she might laugh and
Rejoice, should I suddenly
Stand by her undecided
In a far countree.
I was ghostly or dreaming,
Travelling all the long miles there.
I asked her to know me.
‘Elsewhere,’ stared she.
Eleven Poems (1965)
Darkness
The fire dies down, and the last friend goes,
The vintage matters no more now;
Tomorrow’s development no man knows,
But that we have faced before now;
The night comes on apace.
Darkness. Our revels, if that name serves,
Are ended. Now for the battle of nerves.
The embers cool, the jokes turn sour,
The local’s lost, and hugest power
Comes prowling round the place.
But that’s not new: there are older men
Who have been through that again and again –
There are children who will live to tell
The story of our stupid hell
To a fresh and charming race.
For whom the night shall never need
Our smoky shelterings, day succeed
Unpresaged with our wilful moods
Transformed into enormous broods
Of horror in dreadful chase.
Early 1941
A Swan, A Man
Among the dead reeds, the single swan
Floats and explores the water-shallow under,
While the wet whistling wind blows on
And the path by the river is all alone,
And I at the old bridge wonder
If those are birds or leaves,
Small quick birds or withered leaves,
Astir on the grassy patch of green
Where the wind is not so rough and keen.
What happens to my thought-time,
To my desires, my deeds, this day?
The rainstorm beats the pitiful stream
With battle-pictures I had hoped to miss
But winter warfare could be worse than this;
Into the house, recall what dead friends say,
And like the Ancient Mariner learn to pray.
Ancre Sunshine
In all his glory the sun was high and glowing
Over the farm world where we found great peace,
And clearest blue the winding river flowing
Seemed to be celebrating a release
From all but speed and music of its own
Which but for some few cows we heard alone.
Here half a century before might I,
Had something chanced, about this point have lain,
Looking with failing sense on such blue sky,
And then become a name with others slain.
But that thought vanished. Claire was wandering free
Miraumont way in the golden tasselled lea.
The railway trains went by, and dreamily
I thought of them as planets in their course,
Though bound perhaps for Arras, how would we
Have wondered once if through the furious force
Murdering our world one of these same had come,
Friendly and sensible – ‘the war’s over, chum’.
And now it seemed Claire was afar, and I
Alone, and where she went perhaps the mill
That used to be had risen again, and by
All that had fallen was in its old form still,
For her to witness, with no cold surprise,
In one of those moments when nothing dies.
3 September 1966
‘Going over the ground again’: the poetry of witness
Autumn in the evening and the morning now, and I can’t keep the war out – 10 years ago the deluge, and no doubt if it was one hundred the character of the Somme scenery and those British attempts and works would still be distinct.1
Thus Edmund Blunden to his friend Siegfried Sassoon in 1926, ten years after setting foot in France as a soldier in the Royal Sussex Regiment. This selection is published a hundred years after the end of the First World War, and if the ‘Somme scenery’ and ‘British attempts’ are still distinct to readers, it is due in part to the powerful works of writers such as Blunden and Sassoon. They are both among the 16 war poets commemorated on one stone in Westminster Abbey; of that company, Blunden and David Jones served the longest at the Front, both dying in 1974.2 Their longevity allowed them to see the beginning of a revival of interest in the war poets, a revival that left their work overshadowed by the bright star that Wilfred Owen has become, and by the more immediately engaging ironies and anger of Sassoon. This selection aims to restore Blunden to his place as a deeply thoughtful poet of war and peace, a poet of remembrance: a survivor who was a significant member of what the historian Jay Winter calls ‘the first… “generation of memory” in the twentieth century.’3
In this essay I am drawing on recent critical writing about the poetry of the First World War, as well as cultural studies of memory and trauma in that war, in order to set Blunden’s poetry in a more complex and illuminating context than that which was available in 1982, when I first edited his selected poems. The discussion of war writing was then dominated by Paul Fussell’s study The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), which remains a key critical text. Fussell is an eloquent and sympathetic commentator on Undertones of War, calling it ‘an extended pastoral elegy in prose’. He quotes the poet G.S. Fraser’s judgement that it was ‘the best war poem’, which Fraser sought to demonstrate by printing excerpts as free verse in the London Magazine.4
Blunden derived his understated authority as a pastoral poet from his boyhood in Kent:
[…] it was hardly possible for any of us not to know something of our three rivers, each differing in character, of our hopfields and orchards and sheepfolds, and much else that was apparently eternal. If I wrote eagerly of these things it was not because I was following […] ‘The Georgians’ […] but because my themes were daily experiences.5
In 1916 he managed to publish several small, privately printed collections of poems, declaring his regional loyalties in the preamble to Pastorals: ‘I sing of the rivers and hamlets and woodlands of Sussex and Kent’; his literary ones in the dedication of The Barn to Leigh Hunt (whose biography he was to publish in 1930) and of Three Poems to John Clare.6 These collections were to be his calling-cards after the war, when he approached Siegfried Sassoon, then literary editor of the Daily Herald, and John Middleton Murry, editor of the Athenaeum. Both editors felt they had made a discovery; Sassoon had grown up in the same landscape as Blunden:
Here was someone writing about a Kentish barn in a way I had always felt but never been able to put into verse. I forgot that I was in a newspaper office, for the barn was physically evoked, with its cobwebs and dust and sparkling sun, its smell of cattle cake and apples stored in hay, the sound of the breeze singing in the shattered pane and sparrows squabbling on the roof.7
Rain-sunken roof, grown green and thin
For sparrows’ nests and starlings’ nests;
Dishevelled eaves; unwieldy doors,
Cracked rusty pump, and oaken floors,
And idly-pencilled names and jests
Upon the posts within…
Affectionately precise observation is the mainstay of ‘The Barn’, but it is also the narrative of a supernatural visitation that has disastrous consequences for the farm. Later Blunden would not draw such explicit morals; what persisted, though, was his intuition of unease, a sense of lurking, malign spirits. (In this he resembles Walter de la Mare, whom he admired.) At home in England, he
saw very clearly signs of distress, decay and destruction in the countryside, as well as its idyllic aspects; from the trenches, the countryside behind the lines could be ‘a relaxed, non-resisting landscape that continually offers [the soldier] the picturesque, never the problematical’.8 ‘And where I stand the road is rippled over / With airy dreams of blossomed bean and clover’, Blunden observes, for example, in ‘Bleue Maison’ (p.8). His war experience, paradoxically, offered ‘delight’ equal to that found in his childhood landscapes. With deep fellow-feeling for the Gloucestershire poet Ivor Gurney, he wrote in the introduction to Gurney’s poems:
The country close to the line [in the summer of 1916] was still very little harmed; its husbandry remained quietly perfect; its substantial towns, villages, lonely corners, field-side shrines, avenues, villas, brooks and canals, beneath blue and white skies, and in dewy midnights, were peace itself – and more than common peace to those who found themselves alive and respited for a space. The inhabitants were going on their ways as calmly as if the war was a greater distance off than an hour’s walk, and the ordered life of centuries of good sense could be seen all around.9
What does it mean to say, then, that Blunden was a ‘pastoral poet’, relying on what Fussell calls ‘arcadian recourses’?10 It means more than describing fields and fish, barns and birds. Blunden served two years at the Front, 1916 to 1918, which included the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele. At the end of Undertones of War he presents himself as a ‘harmless young shepherd in a soldier’s coat’, and the shepherd is of course the prime pastoral figure, whose life is defined by its simplicity, its disengagement from the world of getting and spending; it is the very opposite of martial. The shepherd’s twin brother is the amateur fisherman, described by Isaak Walton in The Compleat Angler (1653) – a book Blunden knew from childhood – as a man ‘of mild, and sweet, and peaceable spirits’.11 The classical pastoral depicted a stable world, a world of work, friendship and song, yet it was not without melancholy, because entwined with elegy for that world, disappearing or already lost. As a distinct place, or emblematic of a ‘Golden Age’, the Arcadia of the famous epigraph Et in Arcadia ego is a thing of the past, whether the phrase is interpreted as ‘I, too, once lived in Arcadia’ or ‘Even in Arcadia, I, death, hold sway’. This rich literary hinterland for the figure of the shepherd is further complicated by the Romantic reaction against what had become by the 18th century a more decorative tradition. In Wordsworth’s Prelude he is ‘A solitary object and sublime’: a shepherd not bathed by Mediterranean sunshine but battling snow and winds in Cumbria.12
Selected Poems Page 12