Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  There are various references to Blunden by Woolf in her diaries and letters; in 1929 he was at a party given by the Woolfs along with VW’s nephew, Julian Bell. In her diary for 12 May 1929 Woolf refers to him as ‘little Blunden, the very image of a London house sparrow’ (A Moment’s Liberty, p.259). In a letter to Vita Sackville-West on 13 November 1929, she recounts asking Bell who were the best living poets: ‘He replied at once Vita and Blunden’ (A Reflection of the Other Person: the letters of Virginia Woolf 1929–1931, London, The Hogarth Press, 1978, p. 108). Bell published a volume of poetry, Winter Movement, in 1930, and received ‘a charming letter’ from Blunden, who reviewed the book anonymously for the Times Literary Supplement in 1931 (Peter Stansky & William Abrahams, Journey to the Frontier, Julian Bell and John Cornford: their lives and the 1930 s, London: Constable, 1966, p.71). Bell was to die in Spain in 1937, aged 29, when the ambulance he was driving was bombed by the Nationalists. Ironically, Blunden was one of five to have taken Franco’s side when asked to declare himself in Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War, compiled by his friend and fellow veteran Edgell Rickword (Charles Hobday, Edgell Rickword: a poet at war, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989, pp.194–5).

  10. Blunden, ‘War and Peace’, Fall In, Ghosts, pp. 47, 46.

  11. Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: combat and identity in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p.113 quoting from C.E. Carrington, Soldiers from the Wars Returning (London, 1965), p.252.

  12. Edmund Blunden, War Poets 1914–1918, published for the British Council and the National Book League (Harlow: Longmans, Green & Co., 1958; reprinted with additions to the bibliography 1964, 1969), pp.33–4.

  13. Selected Letters, 1, p.208 (20 December 1928).

  14. Quoted by Webb, p.243.

  15. ‘Line upon Line’, The Mind’s Eye, p.112. Blunden wrote that ‘the earliest enjoyment of pictures I can recall came from a brightly tinted Japanese piece of finches on a bough…’, ‘Country Childhood’, pp.551–2.

  16. Blunden, Nature in English Literature (London: The Hogarth Press, 1929), p.58. Field mice make a notable appearance in the midst of battle in ‘Third Ypres’: ‘(These / Calmed me, on these depended my salvation.)’

  17. Webb, p.318. Blunden unexpectedly won the vote to be Professor of Poetry (succeeding Robert Graves) against Robert Lowell; the American poet wrote him a gracious letter of congratulation.

  18. On the day he died, Sassoon read a letter from a soldier who had served with him as a 16-year-old on the Somme. Having heard Sassoon declare ‘I mean to put up a really good show’, his son wrote to the veteran that he felt sure ‘the thoughts in his mind of the old days in the trenches helped him over those last few hours’ (Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: a biography, London: Picador, 2005, p.518). The Great War was there to the end.

  19. Letter to Douglas quoted in Desmond Graham, Keith Douglas 1920–1944 – a biography (Oxford University Press, 1974), p.218n. The ‘truth of war’ and the idea of fighting poets as the only writers able to convey it are discussed in the essay ‘Going over the ground again’ at the end of this volume.

  NOTES TO THE POEMS

  1 ‘By Chanctonbury’

  Written in 1915, first published in Pastorals, a book of verses (London: Erskine Macdonald, June 1916). Chanctonbury is a hill on the South Downs, in West Sussex. It is the site of a prehistoric hill-fort, Chanctonbury Ring, and used to be crowned with beech trees (mainly destroyed in the storms of 1987).

  2 ‘The Festubert Shrine’

  EB: It was a pretty little chapelle. Festubert had not many antiquities. But it had the air of a comfortable old village, with plenty of good trees and gardens.

  EB writes wistfully in the Preface to Poems 1914–1930 that he wishes he’d had other poems available to him when making his choice: ‘the numerous pieces which I remember to have occupied and diverted me in the summer of 1917, while we were making ourselves ready to capture and consolidate the large extent of Belgium then borrowed by Germany. The labours of that summer, however, down to my neat transcripts of “ode, and elegy, and sonnet,” vanished in the mud.’ Webb lists 18 poems as surviving from the trenches, of which this is one.

  3 ‘Thiepval Wood’

  EB: At that moment, north of Ancre was comparatively calm. One watched the great commotion at the south side.

  Another of the surviving trench poems. The scene is described in Chapter IX of Undertones.

  Line 1: ‘heavies’ – heavy artillery

  Line 4: ‘slatting’ – Wright gives ‘to drip, run down; to beat against’ as a Sussex usage.

  4 ‘“Transport Up” at Ypres’

  EB: This pleased George Maycock M.C., our Transport Officer.

  In his essay ‘Fall In, Ghosts’, EB writes that Maycock ‘dramatized, or enjoyed the dramatic in, the dreariest situations of the grey old confusion’ (Fall In, Ghosts, p.84).

  Line 3: EB – corrected to ‘Boulevard Malou’ and ‘then’ crossed out

  Line 8: ‘picric’ – an acid used in explosives

  5 ‘Les Halles d’Ypres’

  This is one of EB’s poems that survived from the trenches, and it is now on a plaque beside the Cloth Hall in Ypres. He recounts his first visit to Ypres in Chapter XV of Undertones: ‘There was in the town itself the same strange silence, and the searing pallor of the streets in that daybreak was unlike anything that I had known.’ He had ‘longed to see Ypres’, believing that it could not be as desolate as described, but ‘The bleakness of events had found their proper theatre.’

  6 ‘Clear Weather’

  Greening points out that EB was near St Omer, where the Royal Flying Corps was based.

  Line 2: ‘glintering’ – not given in Wright or other dialect dictionaries

  Line 3: ‘gas gongs’ – gongs and bells were placed along the front line so that sentries could raise the alarm about gas attacks. The first significant German gas attack was at Ypres in 1915; by 1916 it was released through shells rather than cylinders, allowing it to carry further.

  Line 10: EB – ‘bandogs’ crossed out and ‘yard-dogs’ pencilled in; a bandog is a working dog that guards and protects property

  Line 15: the Albatros was a German biplane, whose use on the Western Front peaked in November 1917.

  Line 19: ‘maxims’ – machine guns

  7 ‘Trees on the Calais Road’

  EB: In training… about May.

  Webb suggests that this poem was written in June 1917 (Edmund Blunden, p.335).

  Line 6: Miserere – ‘have mercy’

  8 ‘Bleue Maison’

  EB: Again not far west of Saint Omer. There is a place called something like Bleue Maison, but I fancy I have got it a bit out of order. What beautiful moments of just seeing what the world was like, while awaiting what, God knows what.

  Line 7: ‘curlock’ – variously spelt as ‘curlick’ and ‘carlock’, a type of wild mustard

  Line 8: ‘St Elmo’s fire’ – a weather phenomenon a bit like lightning, due to a gap in electrical charge, often associated with ships’ masts or aeroplane wings

  9 ‘Almswomen’

  EB: Composed by way of filling in time at Deve Cottage; the old ladies were actual, and the poem was therefore appreciated when it was read, almost as soon as written down.

  Deve was the family home of Blunden’s first wife, in Suffolk, and the poem describes Mary’s great-aunt and her friend (TDC).

  The poem was dedicated to Nancy and Robert Graves, who were neighbours of Blunden on Boar’s Hill, Oxford. Blunden’s friendship with Graves was damaged by the publication of Goodbye to All That in 1929. Blunden wrote to Sassoon on first reading it: ‘I don’t think a worse book was ever flung together. His unreliability, obvious in all passages where I was able to test from my own information, destroys his war scenes. His self-importance and cold use and slaughter of others ruin the possible solace of a personality’ (Selected Letters, 1, p.241).

  Webb writes that the poem began as an ‘exercise’ in t
he manner of Pope or Goldsmith, and was printed both in the London Mercury and the Nation. Writing to Sassoon in 1921, EB remarks: ‘I am awaiting a real inspiration and a poem as obviously commanding as (after so much notice) I feel “Almswomen” is. I can’t say that it pleases me to the same extent as it does better judges’ (Selected Letters, 1, p.18). He wrote to his mother in 1924: ‘Why should all my poems be neglected in order that Almswomen may abound? O sentimental condition of humanity!’ (Webb, p.115).

  Line 19: EB glossed ‘Esau’s hands’ in The Waggoner as ‘old-fashioned creeping garden plants, shaped like starfish’; Robert Bridges commended his use of English country names for common plants.

  Line 31: ‘saracens’ – an onslaught of hailstones (TDC)

  11 ‘The Pike’

  EB: Generalised – Cheveney, Heaver’s Mill, etc.

  Line 4: EB glossed ‘elver-peopled’ in The Waggoner: Young eels are fond of the silk-weed on old watergates, and the clefts in the masonry behind the weed.

  Line 17: changed to ‘waterpit shelving and dark’ in Poems 1914–1930

  12 ‘The Unchangeable’

  Line 3: ‘chace’ – obsolete spelling of ‘chase’, in its meaning of unenclosed land set aside for breeding and hunting wild animals

  Line 9: ‘lags’ – Wright explains this as a Sussex and Somerset term for ‘a long marshy meadow usually by the side of a stream’.

  In Poems 1914–1930 the last line was changed to ‘Dance to the bubbling brooks of elfin song’.

  13 ‘A Waterpiece’

  EB: This pool was one of several on the River Beult about 1909. My father had had some steps cut down to the edge, but only those who knew the way through the wood would find it.

  Line 2: ‘pearl-smooth’ was dropped in Poems 1914–1930; EB – ‘silent’ pencilled as substitute

  Robert Bridges was one of the founders of the Society of Pure English, and Poet Laureate from 1913 until his death in 1930. He was one of several poets living on Boar’s Hill, Oxford, when EB lived there. In one of the Society’s tracts he writes about The Waggoner (1920) because in it the ‘element of dialectical and obsolescent words is very prominent’:

  The poetic diction and high standard of [Blunden’s] best work give sufficient importance to this procedure; and though he may seem to be somewhat extravagant in his predilection for unusual terms, yet his poetry cannot be imagined without them, and the strength and beauty of the effects must be estimated in his successes and not in his failures.

  In the following remarks no appreciation of the poetry will be attempted: our undertaking is merely to tabulate the ‘new’ words, and examine their fitness for their employment.

  Line 6: ‘Hobby-horse as a local or rustic name for dragon-fly can have no right to general acceptance’ (Bridges).

  Line 13: ‘idola’ – plural of ‘idolum’, a phantom or insubstantial image

  14 ‘A Country God’

  EB: on leave, early 1918

  Line 2: ‘stolchy’

  Stolchy is so good a word that it does not need a dictionary. Wright gives only the verb stolch ‘to tread down, trample, to walk in the dirt’. The adjective is therefore primarily applicable to wet land that has become sodden and miry by being poached by cattle, and then to any ground in a similar condition. Since poach is a somewhat confused homophone, its adjective poachy has no chance against stolchy. (Bridges)

  This statement by Bridges is contradicted by the later general uncertainty over the meaning of the word. Google comes up with references to articles querying its use by W.H. Auden in a late poem, ‘A Bad Night’; perhaps Auden used Wright’s dictionary, or had even come across the word as used by Blunden.

  Line 21: ‘bergomask’ – a rustic courtship dance; it is danced in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 5, Scene 1).

  Line 24: ‘brish’ – to mow lightly or trim, according to A Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect and Provincialisms in use in the County of Kent, compiled by W.D. Parish & W.F. Shaw (Lewes: Farncombe & Co., 1898).

  16 ‘In Festubert’

  EB: I dreamed much, when I was allowed a short sleep at Festubert. My feelings were still at home, and there were some likenesses in the scene round me, if my old village had also been under bombardment. As for dreams, indeed some took me beyond the German lines into queer battles for farms with moats around them & heavily sandbagged ruins of village streets.

  W.B. Yeats chose six poems by EB in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935, notoriously not including Owen and other war poets on the grounds that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’. ‘In Festubert’ was included, along with ‘Report on Experience’.

  Line 4: EB – pencilled change to ‘Of incident and memory’

  Line 7: ‘hizzing’ is changed to ‘whizzing’ in Poems 1914–1930, however Bridges points out that ‘hizzing is an old word now neglected. Shakespeare has “To have a thousand with red burning spits / Come hizzing in upon ’em”.—Lear, III. vi. 17., and there are other quotations in OED.’ Bridges also picks up ‘daps’: ‘This word is well known to fishermen and fowlers, meaning “to dip lightly and suddenly into water” but is uncommon in literature.’

  Line 12: ‘glinzy’ – glossed by EB in The Waggoner as ‘slippery’

  Line 14: changed to ‘Thieves break into a pyramid’ in Poems 1914–1930

  17 ‘Perch-Fishing’

  EB: The 2 large perch were taken by me at Langridge’s Pond, Yalding, & surprised Mr Langridge, who I think is still there – but the pond is nothing today.

  G.W. Palmer was a mathematician at Christ’s Hospital and President of the Grecians’ Reading Society, whose members were encouraged to read modern authors such as Shaw, Stevenson and Conrad.

  Line 10: tansies – a yellow flower from the daisy family, thought to be useful as an insect repellent because of its strong smell; in Poems 1914–1930 this was altered to ‘bennets’ – Herb Bennet is a member of the rose family, also yellow, and common in hedgerows and woodland.

  Line 40: ‘river-shrimps’ was replaced in Poems 1914–1930 by ‘straying greaves’, i.e. bits of fat made into fish-bait.

  20 ‘Clare’s Ghost’

  EB: Written in war surroundings, from Framfield memories.

  Framfield was where the Blunden family lived for a time, while Blunden was at Christ’s Hospital. He discovered Clare’s poetry in Arthur Symons’ edition, and later devoted a great deal of time to bringing Clare’s poetry into print; the edition which he edited with Alan Porter, for example, brought to light 90 poems that were previously unpublished. This poem came back from the trenches, but EB’s copy of Clare’s poems – chosen as a school prize – did not; he reports that his friend the war artist Xavier Kapp went off with it in spring 1916 (Undertones, Chapter III).

  21 ‘11th R.S.R.’

  EB: How happy the battalion was in ordinary country places!

  EBS: The Sussex soldiers were chiefly countrymen.

  EB published ‘A Battalion History’ of the 11th Royal Sussex Regiment in The Mind’s Eye (1934). The battalion was variously known as the ‘First Southdowns, otherwise Lowther’s Lambs… composed principally of Sussex men’. Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Lowther raised three battalions in 1914, recruited from volunteers with officers from the regular army, and the 11th RSR was sent to France in March 1916. EB concludes his essay in a mood of wistful remembrance, with a quotation from Shelley: ‘It is all so long ago now; and yet when I think of the 11th Royal Sussex on a winter evening, under all its ordeals or in any of its recreations, Bare winter is suddenly changed to spring’ (Fall In, Ghosts, p.113).

  23 ‘Forefathers’

  EBS: written at Oxford, summer 1923

  Line 29: changed to ‘There is silence, there survives’ in Poems 1914–1930.

  24 ‘November Morning’

  EB: Congelow again. The shoddy was for the hopgardens.

  TDC explains that Congelow was a farm house just outside the village of Yalding (Kent), which the Blundens rented for a few years from
1904.

  Line 5: changed to ‘of sackclothed skies and cold unfruited grounds’ in Poems 1914–1930 .

  Line 6: ‘slats’ changed to ‘beats’; ‘weazen’ – shrivelled

  Line 12: ‘shoddy’ – wool from shredded rags

  26 ‘Sheet Lightning’

  EB: Some notion of Yalding about 1910

  EBS: Recollection of a cricket outing about 1906

  Line 20: ‘higglers’ – in the Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect and Provincialisms in use in the County of Sussex (compiled by Revd W.D. Parish, Lewes: Farncombe & Co., 1875), the definition is ‘a huckster – so called from higgling over his bargains’; more generally, a pedlar

  Line 28: ‘ribbands’ changed to ‘the bright scarf’ in Poems 1914–1930

  28 ‘Cloudy June’

  EBS: On the road to Abingdon, Oxford

  Line 21: ‘yapping’ replaced by ‘barking’ in Poems 1914–1930 .

  Line 22: ‘wheeze and play’ replaced by ‘talk and play’ in Poems 1914–1930.

  Line 23: ‘my swooned passions drown’ replaced by ‘passions in such night drown’ in Poems 1914–1930 .

  29 ‘Mole Catcher’

  EB: Once more, much was from Bert Daines’s recipe for a good molecatcher.

  Bert Daines was EB’s brother-in-law from his first marriage. EB described Bert as ‘a repository of Anglian anecdote, fable, dialect and wickedness. He would tell me with perfect contentment whatever he knew of country life and occupation…’ (TDC)

  EBS: objected to by J.M. Murry as being too true

  John Middleton Murry was the editor of the Athenaeum 1919–21, a literary review that published the work of T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf among others. He was also an Old Blue. Blunden sent him an article on John Clare, to which JMM responded enthusiastically – ‘beautifully written (in both senses)’; people were always struck by EB’s elegant handwriting – and that encouraged him to send in some poems. JMM wrote excitedly to his wife, Katherine Mansfield: ‘He sent me a little book of poems this morning. They are immature, but it’s the right kind of immaturity: trying hard at big things: poetry full of the country and of nature. […] isn’t that the real stuff? I’m sure it is. I think he’s our first real discovery, and he comes from my school!’ (Webb, p.116) KM was less impressed, but Murry went on to publish ‘Molecatcher’ in the Athenaeum, 9 July 1920.