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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
To mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and served in France and Flanders. This selection of his poems includes a substantial sampler of his war verse (the last poem he wrote was on revisiting the battlefields of the Somme). And yet, it is not easy to draw a line between the poems on war and those on other subjects, so deeply did his wartime experience suffuse and haunt his writing. Memories of what was 'shrieking, dumb, defiled' constantly test a vision of 'faith, life, virtue in the sun'. Here is a poet of range and depth deserving of rediscovery.
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EDMUND BLUNDEN
Selected Poems
edited by Robyn Marsack
Contents
Introduction
… my experiences in the First World War have haunted me
all my life and for many days I have, it seems,
lived in that world rather than this.1
As the official commemoration of the First World War comes to a close in the centennial year of 2018, this selection of Edmund Blunden’s poems raises a question: can we draw a line, even a hundred years after the event, and say, ‘It’s over’? For this soldier-poet it was never over, and his poems show us that, long after the battles were lost and won, memories of war could crowd out everything else. This is how war works, leaving its indelible traces on the mind as well as the body. Remembrance is traumatic, involuntary, and yet curiously welcome: ‘I know that I did better one or two nights on the River Ancre than I ever can with my ink bottle’, Blunden wrote to his friend Siegfried Sassoon.2 His pen, though, has helped to shape subsequent generations’ perception of the Great War.
Edmund Blunden grew up with a love of rivers – ‘Happily through my years this small stream ran; / It charmed the boy…’ (‘Epitaph’) – and the beginning of his life could scarcely have been more idyllic. Although he was born in London, in 1896, and had an enduring affection for the city, in 1900 his father became headmaster of a Church of England primary school in Yalding, Kent: here the ground of Blunden’s imagination was established. Here was village England in its heyday: the twelfth-century church, where Charles Blunden was choirmaster and played the organ; the village street, a mix of cottages and eighteenth-century houses; the River Medway and its tributaries for angling; hopfields and orchards; a watermill at Cheveney; cricket matches on the green. As the Blunden family expanded (by 1910 there were nine children), they moved from the village schoolhouse to Congelow, a farmhouse in which Blunden discovered a cupboard full of his father’s old books and magazines to supplement his reading. He explored the countryside by bicycle as he got older, little realising how his observational skills might be valued later:
… these rides were delightful, for every crooked lane and smithy and timber-yard and country-box came before me in its individuality. That sense is gone nowadays. It stayed with me some years, even in the battlefields of Flanders, where generally I saw and felt every communication trench and every sandbagged ruin as a personal, separate figure, quite distinct from every other one.3
Like his father, he took up cricket with a life-long passion.
It became obvious that he was outgrowing the village school, however, and it was suggested that he try for a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, a charitable school founded in 1552 which had recently moved its boy boarders from London to Horsham, in the middle of the Sussex Weald. The pupils’ Tudor uniforms of yellow stockings, blue breeches and long blue coats gave rise to the name ‘Old Blues’ for alumni, amongst whom were Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb. Blunden arrived, with some trepidation, in 1909. ‘Forefathers’, published in 1920 (p.23), evokes the village world he left behind, and its ‘unrecorded, unrenowned’ inhabitants. While entry to Christ’s Hospital was predicated on ‘honest origin and poverty’,4 Blunden was moving into a world of greater sophistication, into a tradition of record and renown. He became passionately attached to the school and its literary traditions, and flourished there. If his schooling set him apart from his family and their mixed fortunes, it did not alter his devotion to the Kent of his childhood, as he later wrote in ‘The Deeper Friendship’ (p.92):
Were all eyes changed, were even poetry cold,
Were those long systems of hope that I tried to deploy
Skeletons, still I should keep one final hold,
Since clearer and clearer returns my first-found joy.
This deep-seated love of the countryside was the wellspring of much of his poetry, and it was expressed in close observation of wildlife and landscape: ‘The rose-finned roach and bluish bream / And staring ruffe steal up the stream’; on a November morning ‘The rooks with terror’s tumult take their rounds, / Under the eaves the chattering sparrows pine’; in ‘Cloudy June’, ‘nightjars burr and yapping fox steps by / And hedgehogs wheeze and play in glimmering brown’; he could recall at will the sight of ‘the hill’s hopgrounds to the lowest leas / In the rook-routed vale’. It made him deeply receptive to the poetry of John Clare, which he discovered as a schoolboy and was later to help bring back to notice; it also fostered a taste for eighteenth-century poets such as William Collins and Thomas Gray. A real countryman’s knowledge, including an ear for the dialects of Kent and Sussex, and wide reading was enriched by a sensitivity to spiritual experience, underpinned by a boyhood in the church choir and familiarity with the King James Bible.
He loved Shelley, and Henry Vaughan – his last literary pilgrimage included a visit to Vaughan’s grave – and there are poems in tribute to all these forebears scattered throughout his work, as well as scholarly articles, reviews and editions. It is perhaps difficult for us now to understand how such formative influences might work on an adolescent boy: a patriotism of land and language, a combination of eighteenth-century decorum and romantic yearning, country skills and scholastic pleasures. So that what seems to a modern reader artificial, archaic, or sentimental – and there are these strains in Blunden’s work – was the result of a deeply literary sensibility working over an experience of extraordinary historical continuity.
The reign of King Edward seemed […] a golden security. Everything did: the Daily Telegraph, the fishmonger at his due hour […], the flower show, and the never-delayed 2.23 to Maidstone on Saturday afternoon. The ripened apple-orchards and the light smoke from the September hop-kilns were always there.5
His skills and passions were all in place by 1914, when this apparently stable world was inexorably altered. Blunden completed his schooling, and cycled over to join the Royal Sussex Regiment in August 1915. He was supposed to be taking up a scholarship in Classics at The Queen’s College, Oxford. Instead, aged 19, he was shortly to find himself en route to the Somme: ‘shellholes, telegraph wires in hanks, rusty ruins of factories, gunpits, a forbidding loneliness, the canal like green glue, stagnant and stinking.’6
He had already started writing and privately publishing poetry. One of the many incongruous scenes in his classic memoir, Undertones of War (never out of print since its publication in 1928), is that of his commanding officer asking him to dinner with the officers on the strength of a good review of Pastorals in the Times Literary Supplement; he was ‘overjoyed at having an actual author in his battalion’.7 Blunden was known as ‘Rabbit’ – shy, endearing, a fast runner – in those killing fields; elsewhere, he was often compared to a bird, even down to the graceful trace of his handwriting.8
Blunden was at the Front longer than any other of the war poets, surviving the Somme and Passchendaele. Memories and nightmares remained with him to the end of his life, along with breathing problems and escape through alcohol: now he would be diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He tried Oxford, but like many returned servicemen could not settle into the path he had been expected to follow. In 1918 he had married Mary Daines, and their first child had died aged five weeks in 1919. They went on to have two more – Clare and John – but the family did not accompany him when, to improve their financial situation, he took up the post of Professor of English at the Imperial University of Tokyo.9 There were already difficulties in the marriage, predictable perhaps because of their youth and very different experiences, and Blunden’s burgeoning literary career and friendships with which Mary mainly felt uncomfortable. Sassoon was an exception. Blunden had met Sassoon in 1919 and they maintained a close friendship and voluminous correspondence; Sassoon also supported him through periods of financial difficulty. While they shared passions for book collecting, cricket and Kent, their war experience was the cementing factor.
Lonely in Japan, Blunden writes in his 1926 essay ‘War and Peace’: ‘And if this winter is not contrary to the last, I shall often seem to be in Flanders, while the smoky gloom of dull weather gloats upon the dark unfruiting clay…’ – ‘unfruiting’ is typical of the negative prepositions that crop up in the poems, perhaps showing the influence of Thomas Hardy.
The war itself with all its desperate drudgery is not the predominant part of these memories – I need a more intense word than Memories; it is Nature as then disclosed by fits and starts, as then most luckily encountered ‘in spite of sorrow’, that so occupies me still.10
This is an expression of the deep contradiction at work in his poetry and prose: that such remembrance is both confining and enlarging. It does not let Blunden go, and at some level he does not want it to, because it provides reminders of solace and comrades to whom he remains unswervingly loyal. Yet, as Marlowe wrote, ‘this is Hell, nor am I out of it’. Charles Carrington, Blunden’s exact contemporary and also a Somme veteran, put it brutally: ‘I could not escape from the comradeship of the trenches which had become a mental internment camp.’11
What could Nature provide in the way of solace or security when the identities of soldier and civilian blurred? Blunden was too keen an observer, too sophisticated a writer, to see a simple opposition between the war as machine and the garden as paradise. Indeed some of his best-known poems – ‘The Pike’ (p.11), for example, and ‘The Midnight Skaters’ (p.67) – show how destruction and death shadow even the peaceable pastimes of angling and skating, and martial vocabulary detonates in countryside scenes. Yet woods, streams, flowers and birds do provide elements of unchanging pleasure, and in ‘Old Homes’ (English Poems, 1925) Blunden returns to the vision of Yalding as sacred ground and talisman:
Beyond estranging years that cloaked my view
With all their wintriness of fear and strain;
I turned to you, I never turned in vain.
Blunden did make friends in Japan, slowly; his students were devoted to him, and he had an affair with a student teacher seven years his senior, Aki Hayashi. She followed him to England when he resumed the ups and downs of married life there in 1927. Love on his part turned to loyalty and such material support as he was able to give; her complete and lonely devotion was life-long. He returned to literary journalism at the same exhausting rate of production he had maintained before the Japanese interlude, contributing 400 essays and reviews to journals over about three years, as well as editions of various poets’ works. Blunden’s edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen was published in 1931, the same year that his marriage formally ended. The Owen volume supplanted Siegfried Sassoon’s earlier edition, and was to remain standard for many years: a work of scholarship, it was also a tribute to a comrade in arms.
When Blunden later wrote a pamphlet about the war poets, he picked out ‘The Show’ as evidencing Owen’s ‘spiritual and mental dignity’ in its ‘unveiling of a stupendous, automatic, painful scene of modern war – almost the hieroglyph of the end… of our civilisation’; he also remarked on Owen’s ‘deeply considered technique’ which ‘was part of the offering that this soldier poet made to eventual peace and mercy.’12 The ‘poetical supplement’ to Undertones of War, and the war poems that continued to seed themselves through subsequent volumes – ‘Premature Rejoicing’ (p.98), ‘November 1, 1931’ (p.111), ‘The Lost Battalion’ (p.114), ‘On a Picture by Dürer’ (p.123) are just a few – can also be seen in this light. The ‘considered technique’ of Blunden’s poetry in general, ranging from conversation piece to monologue, sonnet to ballad, from the double-accented metrical simplicity of ‘The Puzzle’ (p.68) to the intricate modulations of ‘Late Light’ (p.118), is one aspect of his attempt at controlling his experience, but also expresses a continuity with preceding literary tradition that might extend a bridge into the age of peace.
Like two other outstanding Great War writers, Ivor Gurney (whose poems Blunden edited for publication in 1954 at the composer Gerald Finzi’s urging) and David Jones (who served almost as long at the Front as Blunden), surviving the war involved ‘going over the ground again’, as he writes in ‘Another Journey from Béthune to Cuinchy’ (p.81). In Blunden’s case this was also literal, as he was appointed Kipling’s successor on the Imperial War Graves Commission. The remembrance of war continued to make him an uneasy tenant of such peace as the 1930s provided. There was a certain stability in his new position as Fellow and Tutor in English at Merton College, Oxford, and in a new marriage with the writer Sylva Norman in 1933. He published a collection of 300 poems, Poems 1914–1930, at the beginning of the decade, followed by more volumes of poems and essays; he gave the Clark Lectures at Cambridge, on Charles Lamb and his contemporaries. He was established as the author of Undertones, which went into eight impressions in two years. Sassoon wrote to him: ‘You and I are popular prose-men now, but let us always remember that Poetry is our heavenly spouse.’13
After the gradual ending of his marriage to Sylva Norman, who did not share his desire for family life, Blunden left Merton to become a staff writer on the Times Literary Supplement. His third marriage, to his student Claire Poynting, a lover of literature and cricket, was celebrated as the Second World War ended in 1945. It brought him great happiness: ‘she is like some clear horizon, like my first view of the sea coast as a child, a better light and day’, he wrote in his diary.14 After the war, Blunden returned to Japan for two years as a Cultural Liaison Officer, accompanied by his wife and young child. His students and audiences were respectful and welcoming, and he undertook a demanding schedule of work there. While ‘A Japanese Evening’ (p.99) hints at barriers to understanding, it registers a discretely sensuous awareness of another culture. Blunden found much that was sympathetic in the ‘beautiful and dexterous and delicate detail of existence’ in Japanese art,15 and the tranquil austerity of the sacred places he visited.
Reverting to the precarious world of literary journalism was not ideal for a man with a growing family – there were four daughters by 1956 – and so in 1953 Blunden became Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. He was notably generous with his time and scholarship to students and colleagues. He writes to Sassoon of visitors passing through Hong Kong such as Vera Brittain, Graham Greene, and the cricketer John Arlott, whom he received with pleasure. The poems of these hardworking years abroad draw on his memories of Kent and Sussex, as well as describing his domestic surroundings, as in ‘A Hong Kong House’ (p.144) and the poignant sonnet ‘Dog on Wheels’ (p.146). Blunden relished the antics of flies and birds, marked the death of snail and mouse, ‘All tenants of an ancient place’ as Clare wrote; like him, Blunden was always ready to give ‘“every weed and blossom” an equality with whatever this world contains’.16
He had been made CBE in 1951, and in 1956 was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Yet as his biographer Barry Webb makes clear, these were years of strain below the surface of achievements and lively family life. He was conscious of failing physically and poetically, and the combination was destructive of any peace of mind, as were the recurrent war dreams. He gradually lost the war comrades who had meant so much to him; Annie, the German sister-in-law he had loved; Aki Hayashi; and Gerald Finzi, who had set his poems to music. It was time to go home.
Blunden retired to Long Melford, Suffolk, in 1964. He continued to lecture, to write (less and less poetry), to visit northern France and Flanders. Two years later he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford; ironically, as Webb notes, given a public platform at the time he was least confident to mount it.17 He stepped down for health reasons in 1968, a year after the death of his 100-year-old mother and of Sassoon,18 and died at Long Melford in 1974. His headstone in the village churchyard is engraved with words from his poem ‘Seers’, modest to the end: ‘I live still, to love still / Things quiet and unconcerned.’
Blunden wrote to his student Keith Douglas, the poet who was to die in Normandy in 1944, that ‘the fighting man in this as in other wars is at least the only man whom truth really cares to meet.’19 This conviction, shared by many subsequent critics, has perhaps helped to obscure Blunden’s achievements. Readers of First World War poets think of them as ‘fighting men’, writing from the muddy trenches, their poetry essentially validated by that experience. What if a poet’s truth is survival, and all that carries of guilt, of acute sensitivity to loveliness as well as loss? For Blunden, literature – its making and its long tradition of makers – is a chief part of what steadies the poet in an inherently unsteady world, along with deep roots in English country life. He offers us his perceptions, consolations, devastations as a poet of remembrance whose witness needs revaluation; whose poems throw their long shadows and moments of illumination far beyond this centenary year of 2018.
Robyn Marsack
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The poems are mainly printed in the order of their first publication in collections; where this varies it is noted, along with significant changes to poems in subsequent editions. For the poems connected with Undertones of War, interested readers should consult John Greening’s edition, where changes in words and punctuation have been scrupulously annotated. (References to Undertones here have been given by chapter not page, as several editions of the book are available.) Pre-1920 poems are dated where possible, from a variety of printed and manuscript sources; Martin Taylor’s selection of Blunden’s war poems, Overtones of War (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 1996), has been most useful. Dates without square brackets are as printed in the collections.
Acknowledgements
Material from the annotated version of Edmund Blunden’s Poems 1914–1930 quoted in the notes is published by permission of the Harry Ransom Center The University of Texas at Austin. I appreciated Elizabeth Garver’s assistance in obtaining this.
I am grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for a Writing Fellowship at the University of Glasgow during the making of this edition, and for the access that gave me to the resources of the University Library.
My warmest thanks to Madeleine Airlie, for her direction to texts on trauma; John Greening for his advice; Diana Hendry for her support; Edna Longley for her insight and comments; Jonathan Meuli for his copy-editing and proofing; and especially to Margi Blunden, whose knowledge and advocacy of her father’s work is invaluable. I feel privileged to have had her insights to add to those of Claire Blunden, who was so encouraging when I undertook the first edition of EB’s poems in 1982.
from Pastorals (1916)
By Chanctonbury
We shuddered on the blotched and wrinkled down,
So gaunt and chilled with solitary breeze.
Sharp stubborn grass, black-heather trails, wild trees
Knotting their knared wood like a thorny crown –
Huge funnelled dips to chalklands streaked with brown,
White railway smoke-drills dimming by degrees,
Slow ploughs afield, flood waters on the leas,
And red roofs of the small, ungainly town:
And blue fog over all, and saddening all –
Thus lay the landscape. Up from the sea there loomed
A stately airship, clear and large awhile:
Then, gliding grandly inland many a mile,
It left our Druid height that black graves plumed,
Vanishing fog-like in the foggy pall.
Early poems from Poems 1914–1930 (1930)
The Festubert Shrine
A sycamore on either side
In whose lovely leafage cried
Hushingly the little winds –
Thus was Mary’s shrine descried.
‘Sixteen Hundred and Twenty-Four’
Legended above the door,
‘Pray, sweet gracious Lady, pray
For our souls,’– and nothing more.
Builded of rude grey stones and these
Scarred and marred from base to frieze
With the shrapnel’s pounces – ah,
Fair she braved War’s gaunt disease:
Fair she pondered on the strange
Embitterments of latter change,
Looking fair towards Festubert,
Cloven roof and tortured grange.
Work of carving too there was,
(Once had been her reredos),
In this cool and peaceful cell
That the hoarse guns blared across.
Twisted oaken pillars graced
With oaken amaranths interlaced
In oaken garlandry, had borne
Her holy niche – and now laid waste.
Mary, pray for us? O pray!
In thy dwelling by this way
What poor folks have knelt to thee!
We are no less poor than they.
May 1916
Thiepval Wood
The tired air groans as the heavies swing over, the river-hollows boom;
The shell-fountains leap from the swamps, and with wildfire and fume
The shoulder of the chalkdown convulses.
Then jabbering echoes stampede in the slatting wood,
Ember-black the gibbet trees like bones or thorns protrude
From the poisonous smoke – past all impulses.
To them these silvery dews can never again be dear,
Nor the blue javelin-flames of thunderous noons strike fear.
September 1916
‘Transport Up’ at Ypres
The thoroughfares that seem so dead to daylight passers-by
Change character when dark comes down, and traffic starts to ply;
Never a noisier street than the Boulevard Malou becomes
With the cartwheels jolting the dead awake, and the cars like rumbling drums.
The crazy houses watch them pass, and stammer with the roar,
The drivers hustle on their mules, more come behind and more;
Briskly the black mules clatter by, to-day was Devil’s Mass;
The loathly smell of picric here, and there a touch of gas.
From silhouette to pitchy blur, beneath the bitter stars,
The interminable convoy streams of horses, vans, and cars.
They clamour through the cheerless night, the streets a slattern maze,
The sentries at the corners shout them on their different ways.
And so they go, night after night, and chance the shrapnel fire,
The sappers’ waggons stowed with frames and concertina wire,
The ration-limbers for the line, the lorries for the guns:
While overhead with fleering light stare down those withered suns.
[January 1917]
Les Halles d’Ypres
A tangle of iron rods and spluttered beams,
On brickwork past the skill of a mason to mend:
A wall with a bright blue poster – odd as dreams
Is the city’s latter end.
A shapeless obelisk looms Saint Martin’s spire,
Now a lean aiming-mark for the German guns;
And the Cloth Hall crouches beside, disfigured with fire,
The glory of Flanders once.
Only the foursquare tower still bears the trace
Of beauty that was, and strong embattled age,
And gilded ceremonies and pride of place –
Before this senseless rage.
And still you may see (below the noon serene,
The mysterious, changeless vault of sharp blue light),
The pigeons come to the tower, and flaunt and preen,
And flicker in playful flight.
[January 1917]
Clear Weather
A cloudless day! with a keener line
The ruins jut on the glintering blue,
The gas gongs by the billets shine
Like gold or wine, so trim and new.
Sharp through the wreckage pries the gust,
And down the roads where wheels have rolled
Whirls the dry snow in powdery dust,
And starlings muster ruffled with cold.
The gunners profit by the light,
The guns like surly yard-dogs bark;
And towards Saint Jean in puffs of white
The anti-aircraft find a mark.
And now the sentries’ whistles ply,
For overhead with whirring drone
An Albatros comes racing by,
Immensely high, and one of our own
From underneath to meet it mounts,
And banks and spirals up, and straight
The popping maxims’ leaden founts
Spurt fire, the Boche drops like a weight:
A hundred feet he nose-dives, then
He rights himself and scuds down sky
Towards the German lines again,
A great transparent dragon-fly.
[Early 1917]
Trees on the Calais Road
Like mourners filing into church at a funeral,
These droop their sombre heads and troop to the coast,
The untimely rain makes mystery round them all
And the wind flies round them like the ghost
That the body on the blackened trestles lost.
Miserere sobs the weary
Sky, sackclothed, stained, and dreary,
And they bend their heads and sigh
Miserere, Miserere!
With natural dole and lamentation
They groan for the slaughter and desecration,
But every moment adds to the cry
Of that dead army driving by.
1917
Bleue Maison
Now to attune my dull soul, if I can,
To the contentment of this countryside
Where man is not forever killing man
But quiet days like these calm waters glide.
And I will praise the blue flax in the rye,
And pathway bindweed’s trumpet-like attire,
Pink rest-harrow and curlock’s glistening eye,
And poppies flaring like St Elmo’s fire.
And I will praise the willow’s silver-grey,
And where I stand the road is rippled over
With airy dreams of blossomed bean and clover,
And shyest birds come elfin-like to play:
And in the rifts of blue above the trees
Pass the full sails of natural Odysseys.
1917
The Waggoner and other poems (1920)
Almswomen
for Nancy and Robert
At Quincey’s moat the squandering village ends,
And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends
Of all the village, two old dames that cling
As close as any trueloves in the spring.
Long, long ago they passed threescore-and-ten,
And in this doll’s house lived together then;
All things they have in common, being so poor,
And their one fear, Death’s shadow at the door.
Each sundown makes them mournful, each sunrise
Brings back the brightness in their failing eyes.
How happy go the rich fair-weather days
When on the roadside folk stare in amaze
At such a honeycomb of fruit and flowers
As mellows round their threshold; what long hours
They gloat upon their steepling hollyhocks,
Bee’s balsams, feathery southernwood, and stocks,
Fiery dragon’s-mouths, great mallow leaves
