Selected Poems Read online

  EDMUND BLUNDEN

  Selected Poems

  edited by Robyn Marsack

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  from Pastorals (1916)

  By Chanctonbury

  Early poems from Poems 1914–1930 (1930)

  The Festubert Shrine

  Thiepval Wood

  ‘Transport Up’ at Ypres

  Les Halles d’Ypres

  Clear Weather

  Trees on the Calais Road

  Bleue Maison

  The Waggoner and other poems (1920)

  Almswomen

  The Pike

  The Unchangeable

  A Waterpiece

  A Country God

  In Festubert

  Perch-Fishing

  Malefactors

  Clare’s Ghost

  The Shepherd and other poems of peace and war (1922)

  11th R.S.R.

  Forefathers

  November Morning

  Spring Night

  Sheet Lightning

  Cloudy June

  Mole Catcher

  The Scythe Struck by Lightning

  The Poor Man’s Pig

  Behind the Line

  Reunion in War

  A Farm near Zillebeke

  Festubert, 1916 [1916 Seen from 1921]

  Third Ypres: a Reminiscence

  Death of Childhood Beliefs

  The Canal

  To Nature (1923)

  The Aftermath

  Rural Economy (1917)

  Water Moment

  The Still Hour

  Masks of Time (1925)

  Harvest

  A Dream

  Intimations of Mortality

  Strange Perspective

  Two Voices

  Preparations for Victory

  Zero

  At Senlis Once

  Pillbox

  The Welcome

  The Ancre at Hamel

  English Poems (1926)

  Country Sale

  Winter: East Anglia

  The Midnight Skaters

  The Puzzle

  Achronos

  Warning to Troops

  In a Country Churchyard

  Retreat (1928)

  Solutions

  An Infantryman

  Departure

  The Match

  Undertones of War (1928)

  The Zonnebeke Road

  Concert Party: Busseboom

  Vlamertinghe: Passing the Château, July 1917

  Gouzeaucourt: the Deceitful Calm

  La Quinque Rue

  ‘Trench Nomenclature’

  Another Journey from Béthune to Cuinchy

  Flanders Now

  The Watchers

  Near and Far (1929)

  The Author’s Last Words to His Students

  Familiarity

  A Sunrise in March

  The Kiln

  The Correlation

  The Deeper Friendship

  The Blind Lead the Blind

  Report on Experience

  A Connoisseur

  Values

  Later poems from Poems 1914–1930 (1930)

  Into the Salient

  Premature Rejoicing

  To Joy

  A Japanese Evening

  Under a Thousand Words

  The Sunlit Vale

  To Themis (1931)

  Incident in Hyde Park, 1803

  Winter Stars

  The Kiss

  The Recovery

  Halfway House (1932)

  The Memorial, 1914–1918

  November 1, 1931

  Choice or Chance (1934)

  The Surprise

  The Cottage at Chigasaki

  Lark Descending

  The Branch Line

  The Lost Battalion

  At Rugmer

  An Ominous Victorian

  An Elegy and other poems (1937)

  Late Light

  Writing a Sketch of a Forgotten Poet

  In My Time

  Minority Report

  ‘Can You Remember?’

  On a Picture by Dürer

  Cricket, I Confess

  On Several Occasions (1939)

  To W.O. and His Kind

  Poems 1930–1940 (1941)

  In May 1916: Near Richebourg St Vaast

  Company Commander, 1917

  The Sum of All

  Shells By a Stream (1944)

  What is Winter?

  Timber

  A Prospect of Swans

  Thoughts of Thomas Hardy

  The Vanishing Land

  After the Bombing and other short poems (1949)

  The Tree in the Goods Yard

  After the Bombing

  From the Flying-Boat

  The Halted Battalion

  High Elms, Bracknell

  The Evil Hour

  Poems of Many Years (1957)

  Young Fieldmouse

  The Fond Dream

  C.E.B.

  At the Great Wall of China

  A Hong Kong House: poems 1951–1961 (1962)

  A Hong Kong House

  Millstream Memories

  Dog on Wheels

  And Away

  Eleven Poems (1965)

  Darkness

  A Swan, A Man

  Ancre Sunshine

  ‘Going over the ground again’: the poetry of witness

  Notes

  Index of first lines

  About the Authors

  Also by Edmund Blunden from Carcanet Press

  Copyright

  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 in
dividuality. 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