Selected Poems Read online

  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 wild
fire 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

  For salves, and lemon-plants in bushy sheaves,

  Shagged Esau’s-hands with five green finger-tips.

  Such old sweet names are ever on their lips.

  As pleased as little children where these grow

  In cobbled pattens and worn gowns they go,

  Proud of their wisdom when on gooseberry shoots

  They stuck eggshells to fright from coming fruits

  The brisk-billed rascals; pausing still to see

  Their neighbour owls saunter from tree to tree,

  Or in the hushing half-light mouse the lane

  Long-winged and lordly.

  But when those hours wane,

  Indoors they ponder, scared by the harsh storm

  Whose pelting saracens on the window swarm,

  And listen for the mail to clatter past

  And church clock’s deep bay withering on the blast;

  They feed the fire that flings a freakish light

  On pictured kings and queens grotesquely bright,

  Platters and pitchers, faded calendars

  And graceful hour-glass trim with lavenders.

  Many a time they kiss and cry, and pray

  That both be summoned in the self-same day,

  And wiseman linnet tinkling in his cage

  End too with them the friendship of old age,

  And all together leave their treasured room

  Some bell-like evening when the may’s in bloom.

  [1918]
>
  The Pike

  From shadows of rich oaks outpeer

  The moss-green bastions of the weir,

  Where the quick dipper forages

  In elver-peopled crevices,

  And a small runlet trickling down the sluice

  Gossamer music tires not to unloose.

  Else round the broad pool’s hush

  Nothing stirs,

  Unless sometime a straggling heifer crush

  Through the thronged spinney where the pheasant whirs;

  Or martins in a flash

  Come with wild mirth to dip their magical wings,

  While in the shallow some doomed bulrush swings

  At whose hid root the diver vole’s teeth gnash.

  And nigh this toppling reed, still as the dead

  The great pike lies, the murderous patriarch

  Watching the waterpit sheer-shelving dark,

  Where through the plash his lithe bright vassals thread.

  The rose-finned roach and bluish bream