30 ‘The Scythe Struck by Lightning’
EB: Worked up from an anecdote in an ancient magazine.
Line 11: ‘And Elijah said unto Ahab, Get thee up, eat and drink, for there is a sound of abundance of rain’–1 Kings 18:41.
32 ‘The Poor Man’s Pig’
Line 5: ‘fresh-peeled osiers’ in Poems 1914–1930
33 ‘Behind the Line’
EB: Some of us were driven back by the world of peace and its puzzles to the company of the years of terror.
EBS: Liked by H.M. Tomlinson, a veteran well able to share the somewhat strange fascination of ‘sand-bagged rooms’ etc.
The novelist and journalist H.M. Tomlinson (1873–1958) was literary editor of the Nation, which opposed the war, and had been an official war correspondent in France until 1917. His anti-war novel, All Our Yesterdays, was published in 1930. Undertones of War was dedicated to his brother, Philip Tomlinson.
Line 10: ‘that strange with fire’ in Poems 1914–1930
Line 11: ‘pyramid-fosse’ – a fosse-trench had a parapet made of the excavated earth; on the Loos battlefield, for example, ‘Fosse 8’ was a slag heap, which was somewhat pyramid-shaped.
Line 16: ‘double storm’ in Poems 1914–1930
33 ‘Reunion in War’
EB: Imagined, but based on some mood during leave.
EBS: imaginary, but spiritually truthful
Line 5: ‘glebe’ – land attached to a parish church; here, the path to the churchyard
Line 36: ‘bullace tree’ – a variety of plum
Line 52: ‘cereclothed’ – a cerecloth is a winding sheet for a corpse.
Line 57: altered to ‘To trace with foolish fingers’ in Poems 1914–1930
Line 59: ‘twitch’ – Wright gives this as ‘couch grass’, and notes that John Clare writes ‘twitchy nest’ in his poem ‘To the Lark’. EB’s use of dialect words was certainly sanctioned, as it were, by the example of Clare, whose poetry he edited and championed.
36 ‘A Farm near Zillebeke’
EB: Early 1917, farm near ‘Vince Street’, it had not long to wait.
EBS: In the Ypres Salient, March 1917. The ‘farm’ could not be approached by daylight.
He describes the scene in Chapter XVII of Undertones:
From that point, two trenches went on to the firing line, and it depended on incident or instinct which one we took. Vince Street, the north one, was solidly made and commanded a pretty view of a farm called Dormy House, in the court of which a cart stood with a load of musty straw, scarcely to be considered extant.
Line 6: ‘hame’ – a curved bar holding a harness trace
37 ‘Festubert 1916’ [‘1916 Seen from 1921’]
EBS: where I first entered the trenches
The more familiar (second) title was adopted in Poems 1914–1930.
Lines 8–9: EB plays on the description of the 12-syllable Alexandrine verse form, ‘That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along’ in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, II, line 156.
Line 12: changed to ‘I seek such neighbours here’ in Poems 1914–1930
Line 21: ‘redoubt’ – a fort outside the main defensive line, often temporary
Line 25: the site of the early poem ‘The Festubert Shrine’
38 ‘Third Ypres’
EB: July 31, 1917 & the next day or two.
EBS: The huge & hopeless battle of 1917
This describes the involvement of the battalion in the Third Battle of Ypres, which he also recounts in Chapter XXI of Undertones. The 11th Royal Sussex were relieved on 3 August, having suffered 275 casualties on the first two days (i.e. over a quarter of its strength), including two of EB’s old school friends. While EB and others survived the shelling of a pill-box, the HQ of the nearby 13th Royal Sussex battalion was hit and wiped out on 2 August.
Line 5: fascines were bundles of rods or brushwood used to strengthen trenches or lay paths across marshy ground
Line 10: ‘sap’ was replaced by ‘hook’ in Poems 1914–1930.
Line 16: ‘setting themselves in array’ – EB used ‘Yea, how they set themselves in battle-array / I shall remember to my dying day’, from John Bunyan’s introductory verses to The Holy War (1682), as an epigraph to Undertones.
Line 17: ‘fourms’ was glossed by EB as ‘hares’ lurking-places’ in The Shepherd.
Line 33: to ‘plash’ a hedge is to interweave branches and twigs to make a strong barrier.
Line 45: EBS identifies the runner as Wrackley (or Rackley); in Undertones Chapter XXI EB writes of his death, ‘a sensitive and willing youth, just as he set out for the companies; struck, he fell on one knee, and his stretched-out hand still clutched his message.’
Line 70: ‘pollard’ – a tree that has had its top and some branches lopped off (pollarded) to encourage new growth
Line 86: ‘sties’ – although printed ‘sites’ in several editions, Greening seems correct in this reading, which also aligns with the draft, see http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/document/9409/9291 (accessed 15 March 2018)
Line 96: EBS notes that the doctor ‘was afterwards killed in a similar occurrence, which I escaped by a few yards’.
Line 103 ff: John Lewis-Stempel points out that mice – as opposed to rats and lice – were generally regarded with sympathy by the soldiers and could be a trigger for ‘comforting childhood memories’, in Where Poppies Blow: the British Soldier, Nature, the Great War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2016), pp.173–5.
Line 106: EBS identifies the sergeant as ‘W. Ashford, killed in 1918’; EB writes of him affectionately as the person who introduced him to champagne; fearless and always smiling (Fall In, Ghosts, p.84).
Line 120: this becomes ‘Still swept the rain’ in Poems 1914–1930.
42 ‘Death of Childhood Beliefs’
EBS: Remembrances of Yalding, Kent – an ancient village full of hops and cherries
Line 2: ‘sallows’ – small willow trees
Line 20: EBS: ‘And visions, as poetic eyes avow, Hang on each leaf, and swarm on every bough’
Here he slightly misquotes Thomas Gray’s fragment which appears in a letter to Horace Walpole: ‘While Visions, as Poetic eyes avow, / Cling to each Leaf, & swarm on ev’ry Bough’ (Thomas Gray and William Collins, Poetical Works, edited by Roger Lonsdale, OUP, 1977).
Line 23: Defeated in the battle of Worcester in 1651, the future King Charles II hid in an oak tree during his escape to France. The ‘Royal Oak’ stood in the grounds of Boscobel House, Shropshire.
Line 31: Christians who made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the Middle Ages would bring back a palm leaf as a souvenir, referring to Christ’s entry into Jerusalem when the road was carpeted with palms.
Line 33: King David, to whom authorship of many of the biblical Psalms is ascribed
Line 37: a will o’ the wisp in British folklore is both a ghostly light that leads travellers astray, and the spirit who holds the light.
Line 55: Armageddon in the New Testament is the last battle between good and evil before the Last Judgement; used more generally for apocalyptic conflict.
44 ‘The Canal’
EBS: At the same place [Yalding]. The metre altered from Campion’s ‘Rose cheek’d Laura’.
Verses 9 &10 Several suicides by drowning occurred in this canal, or the similarly sullen Medway near it.
Thomas Campion (1567–1620) wrote songs and poems, and in his Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) controversially maintained that rhyme should be used sparingly: ‘the facility and popularity of rhyme creates as many poets as hot summer flies’; he put emphasis on the pattern of accent.
46 ‘The Aftermath’
Line 21: ‘euphrasy’ – the white-bloomed plant Euphrasia or Eyebright, an old cure for all eye maladies
Line 32: the dove is a symbol of peace, and EB no doubt has in mind Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem of that name, which ends: ‘And when Peace here does house / He co
mes with work to do, he does not come to coo, / He comes to brood and sit’; perhaps also the close of Hopkins’s sonnet ‘God’s Grandeur’, ‘Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.’
47 ‘Rural Economy (1917)’
The poem’s metaphors rest on the Greek legend of Jason the Argonaut, who to gain the Golden Fleece had to plough a field with fire-breathing oxen, and then sow it with dragon’s teeth, which sprouted into soldiers. He defended himself by tricking them into fighting each other.
Line 3: Thule, or ultima Thule as it was called by ancient geographers, was the name for the northernmost country, beyond the borders of the known world.
Line 26: ‘ruseful’ became ‘thoughtful’ when the poem was reprinted as part of the supplement to Undertones.
49 ‘The Still Hour’
EB: Swain, M.C. was our Captain Quartermaster, but in the March Offensive of 1918 was Adjutant & killed. A character! unfrightenable.
Line 7: ‘the lubber fiend’ – this English folkloric figure appears in Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’, line 110: ‘Then lies him down the lubber fiend / And stretched out all the chimney’s length, / Basks at the fire his hairy strength’. Bush glosses it as ‘drudging spirit’. The same spirit goes by the name of ‘Lob’, the title and subject of a poem by Edward Thomas that Blunden would have known; Thomas calls him ‘one of the lords of No Man’s Land’. Edna Longley provides an illuminating entry on the poem in her annotated edition of Edward Thomas, Collected Poems (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2008), pp. 211–23.
Line 47: RSM Arthur Daniels, killed in action 31 July 1917; EB describes him as ‘kind, witty and fearless’ in Undertones, Chapter XVII.
Line 60: Lieutenant Basil Swain, of whom EB writes in Chapter I of Undertones: ‘Fear he respected, and he exemplified self-conquest’.
53 ‘A Dream’
Line 5: Pactolus was the river in which the gods allowed King Midas to wash off his golden curse, and afterwards the river always flowed over golden sands.
Line 6: in Claire Poynting’s copy, EB crossed out ‘gold sands amorous’ and wrote ‘golden sands turned lover’ (TDC).
Line 16: perdu – lost, used in King Lear Act IV, Scene 7 by Cordelia, referring to Lear out on the heath as ‘poor perdu!’ OED gives the 18th-century meaning of ‘a soldier placed in a position of special danger, or ordered on a forlorn hope’.
56 ‘Strange Perspective’
Line 1: perhaps EB had in mind the lines from Horace’s Odes, III.29, ‘Happy the man…’; Dryden’s famous paraphrase runs:
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
Line 3: in later editions is followed by ‘And turns very tansies, fire-flowers, tindery.’
57 ‘Two Voices’
EB: He: Capt. Wallace, our Adjutant. ‘King Edward’s Road’? Before the march to the Somme.
The poem was first published as ‘The Survivors (1916)’ in Weekly Westminster, 2 August 1924.
The ‘kind of holiday feeling’ inspired in the soldiers in August 1916 by the words ‘going south’ is referred to in Undertones Chapter VIII, and expanded upon in EB’s 1929 essay, ‘The Somme Still Flows’:
War is not all war, and there lies the heart of the matter. ‘Going South’ was at first more like a holiday adventure than the descent to the valley of the shadows. I still make myself pictures of that march, and could not guess at any summer days more enchanting. The very fact that, after ceaseless rumours and contradictions, we were now certainly destined for the Somme battle made us shut our minds to the future and embrace the present. (Fall In, Ghosts, p.63)
Lines 2–3: appeared as ‘In the farm parlour cool and bare; / plain words, which in his hearers bred’ in Undertones (1928), but were printed as the present version in Poems 1914–1930.
58 ‘Preparations for Victory’
EB: On the Ancre in the days preceding our attack on the Beaumont Ridge, 3 Sept. 1916.
The advance on Beaumont Ridge gained the British scarcely 20 yards, with heavy casualties.
Line 1: perhaps there is an echo here of Psalm 91, as it appears in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘Thus to my soul of him I’ll say, he is my fortress and my stay, / My God in whom I will confide. / His tender love and watchful care shall free thee from the fowler’s snare, / And from the noisome pestilence…’
Line 17: Caliban – Prospero’s slave in Shakespeare’s Tempest
Line 23: ‘Grey’ is replaced by ‘Pale’ in Undertones.
59 ‘Zero’
EB: The first moments of the attack at Hamel.
The attack in September 1916 is described in Chapter IX of Undertones:
The east was scarlet with dawn and the flickering gunflashes; I thanked God I was not in the assault, and joined the subdued carriers nervously lighting cigarettes in one of the cellars, sitting there on the steps, studying my watch. The ruins of Hamel were crashing chaotically with German shells, and jags of iron and broken wood and brick whizzed past the cellar mouth. … There were wounded Highlanders trailing down the road.
The title was altered to ‘Come On, My Lucky Lads’ in Undertones, which EB elsewhere noted as ‘Worley’s expression’, referring to the Wiring Sergeant with whom EB kept in touch until Worley’s death in 1954, and whom he regarded as one of the heroes of his memoir. In Poems 1914–1930 the title reverts to ‘Zero’. ‘Zero time’ is the time set for an attack.
Lines 2–4: ‘sky’ is later replaced by ‘gloom’ and ‘dye’ by ‘bloom’.
Line 20: ‘clothed and in his right mind’ – Mark 5:15, about the man who had been possessed by devils and was restored to health by Jesus
See draft in the First World War Poetry Digital Archive at http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/items/show/9786 (accessed 3 March 2018).
60 ‘At Senlis Once’
EB: Senlis was a village of a few hundred people only. Our stay there was cut short. It was a damp gloomy day or two, when the thatch and plaster all seemed mouldy – and yet…
Line 1: from a chorus in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, line 1268:
Oh how comely it is and how reviving
To the spirits of just men long oppressed,
When God into the hands of their deliverer
Puts invincible might…
61 ‘Pillbox’
EB: Again, the Menin Rd ‘do’. We were in captured pillboxes etc.
Greening (pp.340–1) quotes from a letter to Worley written by EB in 1929: ‘We are both miraculously preserved, if you think of the many occasions when there was nothing between us and the machinery of war’. He also reproduces the inscription in the copy of Undertones that EB gave to Worley: ‘When this set of recollections was written I was in a far country… so, much was only half right and much was forgotten. If I could have had Frank Worley at that Japanese hotel in 1925 or 6, a real History of our early experience should have emerged.’
Line 3: It has been suggested that this conflates the Menin Road fighting in September 1917 (Chapter XXIII) with an incident from 1916, involving Sergeant F.A. Hoad from Eastbourne (Helen McPhail & Philip Guest, On the Trail of the Poets of the Great War: Edmund Blunden, Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1999, p.69).
Line 9: ‘a blighty’ – ‘a wound which [a Briton] hopes is serious enough to invalid him back to England [Blighty]. …The word is said by some “authorities” to be derived from the Hindustani word, Belaiti, which means “something foreign” or “over-the-sea”’ – according to Lorenzo N. Smith’s Lingo of No Man’s Land, a World War I Slang Dictionary, 1918 (reprinted in 2014 by the British Library, with an introduction by Julie Coleman).
Line 16: In
Greek mythology, Charon ferries the souls of the dead across the Styx to Hades.
62 ‘The Welcome’
EB: In the smaller battle of the Menin Rd. at the end of Sept.1917.
An early draft of this poem can be seen in the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, at http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/9285 (accessed 24 February 2018)
63 ‘The Ancre at Hamel’
Reprinted in Undertones as ‘The Ancre at Hamel: Afterwards’.
Line 9: ‘water’ changed to ‘river’ in Undertones, then back again in Poems 1914–1930.
64 ‘Country Sale’
EB: This was a ‘sketch from life’. I regret not buying an early Pilgrim’s Progress which was among the oddments. Where? Somewhere near Lydgate.
Line 28: Thomas Baskett printed the Book of Common Prayer in various formats in the mid-18th century; Charles Lamb remarks in his Essays of Elia on the pictures in the edition of Baskett he was familiar with at Christ’s Hospital.
66 ‘Winter: East Anglia’
EB: A Jack Daines poem [brother of Mary Daines]
The poem was first collected in To Nature under the title ‘Winter Piece’. The earlier version ended:
And, frost forgot, the chase grows hot
Till boys such spoil despise
But the cornered weasel stands his ground,
Shrieks at the dogs and boys set round,
And like a fighter dies.
67 ‘Midnight Skaters’
EB: Back to Congelow [the farmhouse rented by the Blunden family from 1904].
Greening (Plate 38) reproduces a sketch EB made to illustrate the poem, along with his note about his childhood experiences:
…and about 1907 I was once or twice bold enough to go out with one or two of our labourers and their girls to a small pond in the hop-garden nearest us, on nights of great frost, & slide. (One or two of them skated, but I only in a Pickwickian sense.) The pond was commonly reputed terribly deep, whence ‘gulfs of wonder’, and the reflection of the hop-poles might be fancied to ‘sound’ or plumb those gulfs.
Selected Poems Page 16
