Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  There is, therefore, a recognised tradition in which a poet might place himself as ‘shepherd’, and hold on to that as both literary standard and lived experience. For Blunden, there was a childhood Arcadia in the gentler landscapes of Kent and Sussex, ‘village England’; here was a felt and vital continuity with a life close to that of previous generations.13 ‘Almswomen’ (p.9), ‘Forefathers’ (p.23) – these poems from the 1920s memorialise rural ways of life ruptured by the First World War. Sassoon greatly admired ‘Almswomen’, ‘The Pike’ and ‘Perch-Fishing’ but wrote, on receiving The Waggoner, ‘for God’s sake don’t let them make you into a professional Georgian.’14

  It has been easy to relegate Blunden to the Georgian ranks, forgetting how the Georgian poetry anthologies edited by Edward Marsh in 1912 and 1915 once ‘implied vigour, revolt and youth’, even if after 1917 they suggested ‘retrenchment, escape and ennervation’.15 Certain critics did make an exception of Blunden in their dismissal of what T. S. Eliot called the ‘rainbows, cuckoos, daffodils and timid hares’ school (Egoist, March 1918), a watered-down pastoralism, but when Middleton Murry complained that there was ‘nothing disturbing’ about the Georgians (Athenaeum, December 1919), he ignored exactly that element in Blunden’s poetry, as in other poetry that appeared under this convenient label.

  In her thought-provoking essay ‘War Pastorals’, Edna Longley writes:

  As English people became the most town-based in Europe, there was a surge of cultural compensation: a back-to-nature movement; renewed attention to all forms of folk tradition; ideological investment in country life, ‘village England’ and the vanishing farm-labourer as bearers of national identity. [Edward] Thomas belonged to this cultural tendency.16

  She points out that Thomas’s poems also admit ‘omens from wild nature. Wind, rain, and other waters often symbolize Thomas’s sense that human beings do not control their environment, cannot read it, cannot control themselves’.17 Thomas was writing poetry in the last three years of his life, in his late thirties, after decades of earning his living through reviewing and writing dozens of books and articles; he was already a mature writer. Blunden’s poetry in The Waggoner (1920) and The Shepherd (1922) was the work of a man in his mid-twenties, deeply rooted in the English countryside and then uprooted by a war he first encountered as a teenage officer, sieved through a sensibility soaked in poetry: classical, Metaphysical, Augustan, Romantic – not to forget traditional ballads and Shakespeare. He loved the worked landscape of his home counties but, like Thomas, he understood and had seen what was uncontrollable in nature and man.

  Therefore these early volumes are not entirely a picture of the countryman ‘in clover’. In ‘Sheet Lightning’ (p.26) the distant storm and pent-up heat loose tongues and violence; the millstream wreaks its vengeance in more than one poem. The pike is a ‘murderous patriarch’; the ‘immemorial bream’ plan ‘the doom of man’; the ‘orts’ of snake, kite and stoat hang from fences; and on a windy November morning the beggar ‘leaves the last of many homes – / Where mouldered apples and black shoddy lie’.

  Moreover, the metaphors of war leach back into these poems of peace. ‘The Pike’ (p.11) is an example: the weir has ‘bastions’ and its apparent calm is destroyed by the fish’s sudden, murderous offensive. The wind in ‘Spring Night’ blows ‘So mad… so truceless and so grim / As if day’s host of flowers were a moment’s whim’ (p.25). The familiar ‘host’ would go unnoticed except that the striking ‘truceless’ alerts us to its original military connotation; soldiers’ lives as brief as flowers are subject to the scythe. In ‘Perch-Fishing’ (p.17) a boy’s angling skills are eclipsed by Blunden’s transfer of sympathy to the bereft mate, thinking of ‘a thousand things the whole year through / They did together, never more to do’. The human lament for slain comrades is palpable; the agony persists. These are early days yet for a subject that he never leaves behind.

  The inability to separate out peace from war is not unique to Blunden. Longley points out the same entanglement in the poetry of Ivor Gurney, a more damaged survivor, starting from his first collection, Severn and Somme (1917).

  The issue of pastoral and war is not confined to whether invocations of rural landscape figure naively as nostalgia or knowingly as irony. What matters is the ability to hold pastoral (the sum of literary negotiations with Nature) and war in the same frame. […] Nonetheless, Blunden’s retrospects belong to the transference whereby [Rosenberg’s] ‘torn fields of France’… also signify a violated England and violated English pastoral, while the trenches haunt the English landscape.18

  As the years wore on, the challenge of holding these two elements in the same frame did not diminish for Blunden.

  In his study of the genre, Marinelli suggests that ‘Essentially the art of pastoral is the art of the backward glance, and Arcadia from its creation the product of wistful and melancholy longing. The pastoral poet reverses the process (and the “progress”) of history.’19 Longley extends this perception by arguing that the over-arching genre of Great War poetry is elegy, against Eliot’s contention that there were only two kinds of war poetry, ‘Romance’ and ‘Reporting’,20 and elegy of course mourns what is lost. What is lost in war is not only the youth of the boy soldiers, but also many of the friendships made by war. Blunden’s loyalty to these was unswerving. The loyalty was reciprocated: at his funeral, a wreath of Flanders poppies was placed on his coffin by his runner from Ypres and Passchendaele, Private A.E. Beeney.

  Blunden’s war losses were compounded in 1919 by the death of his first child at only forty days. He had married Mary Daines very soon after meeting her in 1918; she was one of thirteen children of a village blacksmith, and only eighteen years old. In an unpublished autobiographical essay, he wrote that ‘Anything more remote from the army life in which I had been submerged for some years could not be imagined […] the rows of brick cottages without a shellhole in their roofs or in their gardens, the church and the clockface on the tower.’21 ‘In a Country Churchyard’ (p.70), one of several elegies to his first daughter, presents death as change, motion; the formal stanzaic pattern – like the deceptively unyielding church tower – barely controls the agitation beneath:

  So lies thy skull? This earth, even this

  Like quicksand weaves.

  Sleep well, my darling, though I kiss

  Lime or dead leaves.

  With the despairing ‘even this’, Blunden implies a similarity between the churchyard and the burial grounds he had known, where ample use was made of quick-lime to hasten decomposition and conceal the stench.22 All creation is subject to the same ‘deadly flowing’.

  Blunden found that he could not settle to an academic life and left Oxford; like Thomas before him, he became a literary journalist. He edited, with Alan Porter, 150 Poems Chiefly from Manuscript by John Clare (1920), the first publication of 90 of the poems. Robert Graves, with whom he had become friends in Oxford, felt that Blunden’s identification with the 19th-century poet was dangerous to his mental equilibrium:

  He represents to you the victim of village life, unsuccessful in his attempts to win recognition in spite of the help given him by Old Blues on the London. Where Clare failed you are out to succeed and thus avenge him. You have avenged him most miraculously and restored him to popular recognition.23

  Blunden’s introduction to the edition suggests that their similarities went further than their village origins, precision of observation and an underlying faith – sternly tried in both men – in some principle of order. He remarks that ‘imagination, colour, melody and affection were Clare’s by nature,’ but that ‘sometimes his incredible facility in verse […] was not his best friend’. The intimacy with Clare’s work led Blunden to write ‘The Death Mask of John Clare’, which despite its evocation of the asylum years is resolutely serene, and its antithesis, ‘Clare’s Ghost’ (p.20). Here peace is pitched out, the wild night calls up and embodies all the restlessly uncompromising aspects of genius: ‘deathless discontent’.r />
  He was teaching in Japan by the time he published his third post-war collection, Masks of Time, in 1925. Blunden declared that its second section brought together ‘some verses relating to war experience and its reverberations, verses intended to take their place in a series which should be a comprehensive view of their great and strange subject, in so far as the author is fitted to give it’. The note of modesty was absolutely characteristic of the man,24 but the ambition was clear. Having tried to set down his experience in prose immediately after the war, and abandoned it, he embarked on writing Undertones of War in Tokyo, with a couple of maps as his only reference points. The novelist and war veteran H.M. Tomlinson, when he reviewed the memoir, called it a book ‘by a ghost for other ghosts’.25

  Ten years after the ending of the First World War, there was a stream of memoirs and novels by ‘other ghosts’. Blunden’s was unique in its tone and in providing a ‘Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations’, 31 poems beginning with ‘A House in Festubert’:

  It hived the bird’s call, the bee’s hum,

  The sunbeams crossing the garden’s shade –

  So fond of summer! still they come,

  But steel-born bees, birds, beams invade.

  – Could summer betray you?

  where the materials of war are treacherously naturalised, and ending with unexpected nostalgia in ‘The Watchers’ (p.86):

  When will the stern fine ‘Who goes there?’

  Meet me again in midnight air?

  And the gruff sentry’s kindness, when

  Will kindness have such power again?

  Blunden later added a poem to the second edition of Undertones (published in June 1930), ‘Return of the Native’, dated Ypres 1929. He echoes the title of Thomas Hardy’s novel to indicate the extent of his ongoing exile from ordinary life, the impossibility of constructing a less costly relationship with the past that obsesses him. The poem has a Hardyesque tone, too, in its contemplation of the immutable aspects of land and weather despite man’s attempt at intervention.26 Nature has coolly reasserted itself over ground whose every inch had been contested:

  Leaving us with this south-west breeze to whisper

  In bushes younger than ourselves, and cool

  Foreheads still touched with feverish wonderings

  Of what was once Time’s vast compulsion, now

  Incapable to stir a weed or moth.27

  Such reassertion is both comforting and chilling; can this be held in the same frame? ‘The Unchangeable’ (p.12), by its very title, suggests that they can: ‘Though I within these last two years of grace / Have seen the bright Ancre scourged to brackish mire’, it begins; ‘Spite of all this, I sing you high and low, / My old loves, Waters…’ the poet declares. It is not simply a matter of ironic contrasts, although they are made, or of judging that old conventions are entirely inadequate to the new situation. Value resides in the language itself. Invoking traditional forms (the opening of the Aeneid, for example, ‘Arms and the man I sing…’) in descriptions of trench warfare provided both a sense of continuity and a reminder of loss. Blunden’s style of archaism, apostrophe, rhetorical questioning, and the personifications scattered throughout his texts – Love, Fancy, Decline – are not mere decoration, they are essential to his meaning. They can be dismissed as ‘literary luggage’28 (and certainly they sometimes strike the reader as excess baggage), but Fussell offers a spirited defence:

  With language as with landscape, his attention is constantly on pre-industrial England, the only repository of criteria for measuring fully the otherwise unspeakable grossness of the war. […] Blunden’s style is his critique. It suggests what the modern world would look like to a sensibility that was genuinely civilised.29

  Blunden liked to acknowledge poetic ancestors and connect generations: there are echoes of Coleridge’s poetry in Blunden’s to the very last; and Coleridge himself was ‘deep in the verse of [William] Collins’, as Blunden pointed out in the introduction to his edition of Collins’s poems in 1929. He found ‘How Sleep the Brave’ to be ‘the most consoling and unstrained elegy for our dead in Flanders’; he did not attempt analysis, having learned to love Collins’s poem ‘under conditions which have tested poetic preference with searching and tyrannous insistency’. Edna Longley comments that poets’ ‘war letters and diaries abound in incidental canon-making’: Gurney singling out Milton, Keats and Shakespeare; Owen adding to those Homer, Dante and Shelley; Rosenberg mentioning Homer and Whitman, alluding also to the Romantics in his work. Shakespeare, Blunden wrote later, ‘knew very well what happens to men and round them in real war; he is exact in all points.’30 Blunden and Thomas shared a love of Hardy (whom Owen regarded as ‘potatoey’), and we see Blunden’s indebtedness to Hardy in metrical and stanzaic patterns (for example, ‘Familiarity’, p.88) and also in his habit of attaching the negative prefix to words: ‘undelight’, ‘uncreation’, ‘unpurposed’, ‘unmurdered’. Longley maintains that ‘In Great War poetry, literary allusion becomes at once ironical, interrogative, and revisionary.’31

  Modernist poetry is marked by its willingness to incorporate quotation, and Blunden could well have said with Eliot, ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’.32 His poems are seeded with quotation, but Modernism resides in a perceived disconnection, and Blunden’s practice is to make the connections work hard, to embed fragments. It seems as though he has been carrying in his head the cadence of a remembered line, and then uses it, almost conversationally, to launch a poem, as in the opening of ‘At Senlis Once’ (p.60) with Milton’s ‘How comely it was, and how reviving…’.

  A fine example is ‘Vlamertinghe: Passing the Château, July 1917’ (p.77). The title, as Jon Silkin remarked in his perceptive readings of Blunden’s poems in Out of Battle, would be appropriate to some diary entry of a leisurely Grand Tour: here the soldiers’ experience, those who ‘live with death and lice’, is contained within traditional sonnet form.33 Yet the opening line taken from Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ – ‘And all her silken flanks with garlands drest’ – extends the experience immediately. Blunden’s poem is an answer to the question raised in stanza four of the ‘Ode’: ‘Who are these coming to the sacrifice?’ There Keats’s wondering spectator composes an origin for the sacrificial procession, sees a town deserted in the stasis of art: ‘and not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e’er return’. In Blunden’s poem there may indeed be no return for the soldiers going up the line, prematurely and incongruously set among flowers, offering their own reproof to the poetry dressing nature in ‘damask’ and ‘vermilion’. Here, the juxtaposition of flowers and war, so often remarked on as to become almost banal in accounts of the Great War, gains from Keats’s presence in the first line. The famous last lines of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ – ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,– that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’ – gives the soldiers and the flowers a symbolic power that complicates the relationship between truth and beauty in such a setting. Blunden has returned, to speak of sacrifice and desolation. The jarring ‘mate’ in the penultimate line reminds us of the comradeship he reaches for as a survivor; there is even a touch of anger in that intonation.

  While Blunden could not be called a Modernist poet by any stretch of that term, critics have pointed out the ways in which the war poets had modernity thrust upon them. Sarah Cole, in her discerning exploration of male friendship in the Great War, argues that the war poets

  tend to have a slightly equivocal status in modernism – canonical yet a little off-centre, in the sense that their texts tend not to perform the kinds of radical experimentation often valorised in and as modernism.34

  In prose, Blunden acknowledged how difficult it was to hold the experience together:

  Towards Hooge one brazen morning, running in a shower of shells along ‘The Great Wall of China’ […] Kenward the corporal and I saw a sentry crouching and peering one way and another like a birdboy in an October storm. He spoke, grinned
and shivered; we passed; and duly the sentry was hit by a shell. So that in this vicinity a peculiar difficulty would exist for the artist to select the sights, faces, words, incidents which characterised the time. The art is rather to collect them, in their original form of incoherence. (Undertones, Chapter XVIII)

  King Lear, to which he alludes again and again (‘my perpetual great poem’35), has just this challenge of incoherence at its core. Poetry provided a coherence and order that were vital to Blunden: ballads, sonnets, iambic pentameter, a variety of quatrains, regular rhymes– all these were links with tradition, were testament to the poet’s ability to control and contain what was otherwise formless and uncontrollable. John Greening, arguing that ‘Third Ypres’ (p.38) is Blunden’s greatest poem, sees it as a battle for poetic style:

  It is just as much the enactment of mental collapse as The Waste Land, but where Eliot adopts a new scale, a new language ensemble, Blunden clings to the old octave, believes in tonality and the traditional musical forces.36