Chapter 5
Giving Sorrows Words: Grief in Women’s Poetry
Grief and mourning are, unsurprisingly, dominant themes in women’s wartime poetry. The ways in which poets present these themes often provide insights into how women negotiated the death of a loved one. Many women took comfort from concepts of chivalry and sacrifice, maintaining, as they would do into the 1920s and beyond, their belief that this war was fought to save civilisation. Others reject these concepts; the horrors had been so great, the grief so total that they sought and found new language in which to confront their disintegrating world.
Poetry shows women adopting, adapting, sometimes rejecting, established mourning tropes and traditions, as they seek to come to terms with slaughter on a scale that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier.
‘Lending grief its sad ostentation’: Mourning wear in grief poetry
In the nineteenth century, clothing outwardly signified bereavement and mourners’ respect for the deceased. In the Edwardian era, assistants in department stores as well as etiquette books guided the newly-bereaved through every aspect of fashionable mourning. Black garments were supposed to shield wearers, primarily women, from the public gaze and there was a certain security in adhering to well-established codes of conduct and behaviour. These, like so many other areas of life, would almost immediately on the outbreak of war, undergo seismic shifts.
When the War was barely one week old, and no casualties had yet been sustained, a Joan Seanton suggested to The Daily Mail that it would lower morale should black be worn for those killed in action. With insight into rising food prices, she felt that it would be better for the poor to buy food than mourning wear; however, she seems to have overlooked how many of the makers of mourning clothes were indeed ‘the poor’. The correspondence that ensued was but the opening salvo in a long-running battle fought in the letter columns of national and local papers, about the desirability or otherwise of wearing what Hamlet so bitterly referred to as ‘The trappings and the suits of woe’. Poets including Constance Maynard also entered the lists.
WATCHING THE WAR
Feel as you will,
Let there be no expressing,
Streets filled with black
Would be far too depressing.
Mothers and wives
Leave your anguish unspoken,
Silence! wear colours,
With heart and life broken.
Constance Maynard
If mourning wear was discouraged in England, in Germany a prohibition relating to mourning clothes seems to have been strictly enforced. However Constance Maynard accepts that such clothes provide many mourners with psychological benefits.
MOURNING IN BERLIN
Comfort is found
In every nation
In lending to grief
Its sad ostentation.
Constance Maynard
If mourning rituals helped some of the bereaved cope, externally at least, other poets were equally convinced that a public show of grief would lower the morale of soldiers home on leave. Violet Spender’s admonition to remain outwardly cheerful masks deep sorrow for her own brother Albert, who was killed at Ypres on 20 November 1914. (Alfred Schuster’s name is on the Menin Gate, as his body was never found.)
IN MEMORIAM A.F.S.
Life he did gladly give
Who much rejoiced to live
And, beyond all on earth,
Loved her who gave him birth.
Then prize the gift he gave
Ye, whom he died to save!
See things as with his sight:
Feel some of his delight
In works of God and man:
The books he liked to scan,
The pictures, culled with care,
His home, the open air,
The friends he loved to greet
With understanding sweet,
With whom he gladly shared
The joys for which he cared
Till ever, bright and brave,
That last great gift he gave!
*************
God! Help us bear the cross
We take up with his loss,
Nor let our faces sad
Make other folks less glad.
Rather with voices gay,
Cheer them upon their way
Giving whate’er we can
Violet Spender
“Oh Son, oh Child”: Interments and maternal grief
In all cultures, some ceremonial farewell to the dead occurs and by the outbreak of the War, funerals in Great Britain had become elaborate undertakings; the more elaborate the funeral, the greater the apparent respect for the dear departed. During the War, if death had followed a period of hospitalisation rather than occurring on the battlefield, some family members were able to attend funerals on either the Home or Western Fronts (the latter not infrequently at government expense).
Nevertheless, the majority of the bereaved were deprived of any final leave-taking. Newspapers sought to reassure mourners that battlefield interments were dignified and photographic evidence of soldiers’ funerals near the Front was supplied. However, not all were convinced by the media coverage of wartime interments.
THE DEAD
The battlefields are grey and scarred
Beneath the quiet sky;
Oh! Though the earth be stony hard
’Tis there the dead men lie.
Not under friendly English grass,
In the soft clay at home;
But tumbled in a bloody mass
Together in one tomb.
Shell and shrapnel, gas and flame,
Their burial service were;
Each had a name but no man’s name
Is on his sepulchre.
Each had a name but each man’s name
Is melted into one –
Wiped out by shrapnel, gas and flame:
And each a mother’s son!
Margaret Sackville
By the early part of the twentieth century, falling infant mortality rates meant that for the first time in human history, parents had reasonable expectation that their children would outlive them. As hostilities continued, although parents may have anticipated a son’s death, grief for their child was naturally overwhelming.
In their poetry, the majority of mothers frame sons’ deaths and interments in heroic discourse, amongst them Alexandra Grantham who takes some comfort from envisioning her son’s funeral, following his death in combat during the evening of 28 June 1915 on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Her imaginings are far removed from the reality of this most bitter of campaigns but, in the opening lines of this sonnet, written weeks after 20-year-old Hugo’s death, she has captured the peacetime atmosphere of early morning Helles, a place she had undoubtedly never visited.
SONNET XXXI
Superb the sun arose from sapphire sea,
Flung forth sheer gold on cliff and olive hill,
While western islands lay in slumber still,
There at the Dardanelles they buried thee.
Thy grave in a dewy nullah they had made,
Tenderly they laid thy wounded body low,
Solemnly commended thee to God, then slow
And sad moved off – ended work of priest and spade.
And as to morning duties back they turn,
For ever from speech with thee passed quite away,
Who knows, whilst spreading sunbeams hotter burn,
What glorious dawn of what stupendous day
Breaks in thy tomb, on what immortal quest
Has soared the soul they deemed at perfect rest?
Alexandra Grantham
[Editor: Grantham refers to Hugo as ‘thee’ not in some archaic or pretentious use of the language but, as a native German-speaker, she would have used the familiar form ‘du’ [thou] to address her child.]
The psychology of grief and mourning has been widely studied in the twentieth century and it is known that mothers who cannot recover their
child’s body will go to considerable lengths to find out details of his or her last moments. Army padres were often inundated with requests, pleading to know if their son had sent a last message. As a hospital letter writer in France, May Bradford encouraged moribund soldiers to mutter a few words that she could relay to their families. Nurses strove to transmit patients’ final words, aware that these would give comfort in the long months ahead.
Despite such efforts, many mothers envied the woman who had been by their son’s side, listening to his last words and holding his hand as he died.
THE WOMAN AT HOME
Each at her post we stand.
Mine is the safer, easier part
And yet there is an iron band
Of envy round my heart
For her, the weary nurse who spent
Those last dear moments at his side,
The woman who in pity bent
And kissed him when he died.
Amelia Josephine Burr
This lack of farewell also weighs upon the mind of Private Harry Coxford’s mother.
IN MEMORIAM
Somewhere in France our hero sleeps,
Somewhere in England his mother weeps,
Could we have heard his last farewell
The grief would not have been so bad
For those who loved him well.
Sleep on dear son in a soldier’s grave
A grave we may never see,
But as long as life and memory last,
We will always think of thee.
Mrs Coxford
In Christian tradition, the dead are buried as close to their home as possible; in 1914, the local churchyard was still the favoured final resting-place for beloved family members. This was a way of keeping them within the family fold. Twenty-four-year-old Private John Vincent Toye was killed in Gallipoli; his mother felt that her grief would have been lessened had he been buried near to his family in Londonderry.
IN MEMORY OF PRIVATE JOHN VINCENT
TOYE 10028 KIA 2-7-1915
Had he reached home though sorely maimed
Our own precious dear
And friends stood round his bedside as the end
Was drawing near.
***************
Some comfort then we could have got
We knew where he was laid
Bedecked the gravetop with our tears and keep
It bright arrayed.
***************
Each evening as the sun went down
We could have wandered there
And bending low before our god
Have said a silent prayer.
***************
Until we meet on heaven’s bright shore
We bid adieu for evermore
Till all our earthly sorrows cease
God rest his soul in peace.
Sarah Toye
Sarah Toye’s grief was such that when records were being compiled by the City of Derry War Memorial Committee in October 1926, she appended a handwritten copy of the poem to the form that the bereaved were sent to ensure that their loved one’s name was accurately recorded on the memorial. She requested that this be kept in the book of record; this wish was respected and it remains there to this day.
Not being with her eldest son Hugo as he died also caused Alexandra Grantham great anguish, as this poem, published in her local newspaper three weeks after his death, makes plain:
TO MY SOLDIER SON
I could not fold thy stricken hands
I could not close thy broken eyes,
Nor smooth thy hair, nor kiss thy brow
Too far, too dead thy body lies.
No mother’s care to tend and watch.
But thou was first amongst the brave,
Thy headstone Glory and God’s Love
Resplendent on thy soldier’s grave.
Alexandra Grantham
Perhaps to ease their pain, some mothers cast their poetic minds back to happier times when their child was safe at home with them. Alys Trotter remembered a carefree 1909 cycling holiday in Picardie with her 14-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter, oblivious to the fate that awaited Nigel at La Fosse, near Béthune, in October 1914. Like Grantham, she addresses her son directly as a way of helping to keep his memory alive. Naming and speaking to the dead, as well as recalling their virtues, is therapeutic in grief work.
‘PICARDIE’
There’s a pathway through a forest in the Picardie I know,
A port where girls haul up the boats with men and fish in tow,
And the hills run down to the market town where the country-women go.
And behind it is the village, and the coast-line lies below,
And down the road, the dusty road, the carts ply to and fro
By the stately frieze of forest trees beyond the old Chateau.
There were three of us on bicycles upon the road that day,
You wore your coat of hunting green, and vanished down the way.
“Le petit Chasseur, la mère et soeur”*, we heard the women say.
You vanished as a speck of green among the shadows blue,
And children trudging up the hill stood still and called to you:
“Le petit Chasseur, qui n’a pas peur”**, they laughed and called to you.
O boys, you wield a bayonet now and lift the soldier’s load!
O girls you’ve learnt to drive the plough and use the bullock-goad!
But the hunter’s laid, still unafraid, near the trodden Béthune road.
There’s a pathway through the forest in the Picardie I know,
And O I’ll dream and wander there; and poppy fields will glow;
And I’ll watch the glare of the dusty air where the market wagons go.
Alys Fane Trotter
[Editor:* ‘The young Hunter, his mother and sister’]
[Editor: ** ‘The young Hunter who has no fear’]
Whilst many mothers poeticize their own sons, there is a significant body of poetry by women who imagined that the War was stealing their future motherhood. Professional nurse Nina Mardel anticipated what grief psychologists call an ‘empty pathway’ stretching ahead. Believing that she will never be a mother, she seeks comfort from her deep Christian faith.
I SHALL NEVER FEEL
I shall never feel
The clasp of little arms about my neck –
A soft form cradled near my empty heart,
Oh ravening cruel need! There is no want,
They say but has its purpose in God’s plan.
Yet I could sob my very life away
For empty heart – and empty mother-arms.
Day wears to day! I try to fill my life
With work, ambition, helping other’s pain,
But when wide-eyed through the long night I yearn,
My very self one burning aching want,
I can but kneel with useless arms outflung
And feel his gentle hand upon my head,
And kiss His garment’s hem and pray for strength
To live my life and lock the inner door.
Nina Mardel
‘Seldom they enter into song or story’: women’s deaths
A predominant theme of women’s grief poetry is the loss of a son. Bizarrely, no preserved poetry appears to relate to a daughter’s death, although there are some prose tributes to dead daughters ranging from letters preserved in archives to the occasional memoir published by grieving parents. Even if mothers bereaved of daughters rarely if ever took up their poetic pens, women’s deaths inspired some poetry.
Unsurprisingly the first female death to be poeticized was that of Nurse Edith Cavell. She was executed in October 1915 for having contravened the neutral status of medical personnel and assisted British soldiers to escape from occupied Belgium. In the heightened atmosphere of the time and the ensuing outrage, no poet explores the illegitimacy of her actions and the legality of the execution. Using hyperbolic religious language, war-monger Helen Key glories
in Cavell’s so-called ‘martyrdom’. One cannot help but feel that Cavell herself would have been deeply uncomfortable with the sentiments Key portrayed.
EDITH CAVELL
Weep for her sigh for her cry for her? No!,
She has shown how closely a woman may go
Up the mountainous path of the wayfaring Christ
To keep with her Captain her wonderful tryst.
She has shown how boldly a woman may soar
Through the scud and the storm to the warmth of the shore;
She has shown how proudly a woman may die –
Clean truth on her lips, clear faith in her eye.
To think on her name is to thrill and to glow
But weep for her, sigh for her, cry for her, No!
Fight for her, ache for her, wake for her? Yes!
Brothers! This murder is yours to address,
Butchered by bullies at dead of the night,
Alone and defenceless she fought her last fight.
Our Empire of ages, our lordship of seas
Could give her no wages, could win her no ease –
But hot foot for vengeance her Brothers will press –
Ache for her, wake for her, break for her? Yes!.
Helen Key
Similarly hyperbolic, although not bellicose in tone, Mary Henderson captures in verse the military funeral of Dr Elsie Inglis, the founder and inspirational leader of the Scottish Women’s Hospital (SWH). Inglis died from cancer in November 1917, the day after she returned to England from serving in Russia. Crowds thronged the Edinburgh streets for a last glimpse of Scotland’s heroine.
IN MEMORIAM ELSIE MAUD INGLIS
Scotland has gathered you, dear daughter, to her breast;
Beneath the shadow of the Castle Rock you passed to rest.
Yet we who followed in that long, long line
Of those who came to honour at the shrine
Of one who held her life a little thing,
Loving her country and her country’s king,
Her country’s honour and her country’s name,
Loving its glory, bitter for what shame
Might blur the brightness of Great Britain’s fame –
We know you are not dead.
The hands, indeed,
So quick to minister where there was need,
The hands we loved, may not touch ours again,
Tumult and Tears Page 13