Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  69 ‘Achronos’

  The poem was first published in Poetica, March 1925 as ‘Epochs’; then as ‘Eras’ when the poem was first collected in Masks of Time, and was altered to ‘Achronos’ – Greek, meaning ‘timeless’ – in English Poems, with minor revisions.

  Line 14: perhaps EB was thinking here of the Middle English poem Pearl, whose author, like Blunden, was a father bereft of his daughter.

  Line 15: the firstborn sons of the Egyptians, killed as recounted in Exodus.

  69 ‘Warning to Troops’

  EB: I was haunted by a music from the church door at Béthune.

  Line 11: Psalm 58:4, ‘they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear’

  70 ‘In a Country Churchyard’

  EB’s first daughter, Joy, was born in July 1919 and died in August aged 5 weeks, apparently from contaminated milk. ‘This was a grief beyond anything I had felt in the War. It has never been quite overcome’ (undated draft, quoted in TDC).

  The poem has verbal echoes of Hamlet Act V, Scene 1 where Hamlet considers the skull of Yorick.

  Line 43: ‘strig’ – stalk of any fruit or flower; ‘twitch’ – couch grass (Wright). In Poems 1914–1930, this line and l.44 are changed to: ‘And bones like bits of hated quitch / Recount fate’s plot.’ ‘Quitch’ is also a name for couch grass, which grows stealthily and quickly.

  Line 51: simoom – a hot, dust-laden wind blowing in the desert

  72 ‘Solutions’

  Line 13: Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), published 36 volumes of his Histoire Naturelle, which was widely translated into English.

  73 ‘An Infantryman’

  EB: Having nothing much to do one afternoon near Mailly (I think) James Cassels and I went for a long walk in the rain. The poem is on him. 1916.

  EB writes in Chapter X of Undertones that he and Cassels ‘were an affectionate pair and poetically minded’. They worked side by side in the battalion until Cassels transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1917. The Royal Sussex Regiment’s archive has the annotated copy of Undertones EB inscribed to Cassels:

  his old friend wishes all that the Happy Warrior should have: no Raids, no Box Barrages, no sudden storms of Paper Warfare; but good Billets, a brisk Pony, various allowances, a sympathetic Quartermaster, and sunshine from Poperinghe to Péronne (Greening, p.314)

  74 ‘Departure’

  Line 5: Phoebus – god of the sun in Roman mythology

  74 ‘The Match’

  First published as ‘The Prison’ in London Mercury, May 1928, and in revised form in Nation & Athenaeum, 17 November 1928, before being collected in Retreat.

  Line 7: ‘oeillades’ – amorous glances; again King Lear provides a reference, Act IV, Scene 5: ‘She gave strange oeillades and most speaking looks to noble Edmund.’

  75 ‘The Zonnebeke Road’

  EB: Hard weather. Potijze trenches, and they were poor.

  Line 14: ‘chaps’ – jaws or cheeks

  Line 18: Haymarket was a communications trench near Potijze in the Ypres Salient, for walking cases only following a raid (TDC).

  The last line of this version is an improvement on its original form in Masks of Time: ‘And freeze you out with hate and save my brain.’

  76 ‘Concert Party: Busseboom’

  EB: This was as it actually happened, on an early spring evening in 1917, – the 47th Division I think gave the Revue, in a large hut not far from Vlamertinghe.

  77 ‘Vlamertinghe: Passing the Château, July 1917’

  EB: It was still a fine-looking Château, with a 12-inch battery close to the front view.

  He describes it in Undertones, Chapter XX:

  [the road] took one presently through a gorgeous and careless multitude of poppies and sorrels and bull-daisies to the grounds of Vlamertinghe Château, many-windowed, not much hurt, but looking very dismal in the pitiless perfect sun. Its orchards yet clung to some pale apples, but the gunners were aware of that, the twelve-inch gunners, whose business seemed like a dizzy dream.

  Line 1: Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, stanza 4:

  Who are those coming to the sacrifice?

  To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

  Leadst thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

  And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?

  Line 13: A draft of the poem shows that that EB had first written ‘If you ask me, Vid…’ then crossed out the name of his friend, substituting ‘Jack’; replaced by ‘mate’ in the printed version. See http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/items/show/9722 (accessed 24 February 2018).

  78 ‘Gouzeaucourt: the Deceitful Calm’

  EB: We were taken out of the Passchendaele battle, at least out of the intolerable business of holding the ground taken, in Jan 1918, and went down to the 5th Army Front, which was to be overrun by the Germans on 21 March.

  In early 1918, EB departed from Gouzeaucourt for six months’ training in Suffolk. He writes in the last chapter of Undertones:

  One or two nights had been particularly anxious and bombarded ones, and the future here would evidently be much the same as that of Ypres. It was some comfort to be told that the battalion would be relieved in a night or two; in that belief, which was a delusion, I said good-bye and went away.

  Line 18: ‘greater’ changed to ‘plainer’ in Poems 1914–1930, and in subsequent Penguin editions of Undertones to ‘simpler’.

  79 ‘La Quinque Rue’

  EB: It was a strange road to a newcomer at night in ’16.

  Greening notes the changes made in subsequent editions of Undertones and in Poems 1914–1930, chiefly the addition of a line after line 20: ‘What need of that stopped tread, that countersign?’ and a change to the present line 22: ‘I know your way of turning blood to glass’.

  80 ‘“Trench Nomenclature”’

  EB: These names were all real. I should like to collect more, for many were curious. Gunner’s Siding. Crow’s Nest. White City. Fifth Avenue. Over the Way. Oscar Copse and Wild Wood.

  Line 3: Jacob’s vision in Genesis 28:12: ‘And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.’

  Line 4: ‘Non Angli sed angeli…’ (not Anglo-Saxons but angels) – words attributed to Pope Gregory when he saw British slave children in Rome in 573, here reversed.

  Line 5: ‘Brock’s Benefits’ were fireworks displays by the old-established manufacturers Brocks, put on regularly at the Crystal Palace in London from 1865 to 1936 (with a break 1910–20).

  Line 7: ‘Picturedrome’ was an early cinema chain; Greening notes that one was built in West Sussex in 1914. J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), the great painter of light effects on sea and land.

  Line 14: ‘Minnie’ from minenwerfer – ‘the German 198lb trench mortar high explosive shell… At night it has a tail of fire like a rocket. It kills by concussion’ (Lingo of No Man’s Land); ‘quean’ – badly behaved woman, or prostitute.

  Line 17: ‘What’s in a name?’ asks Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene 2.

  81 ‘Another Journey from Béthune to Cuinchy’

  EB: Imaginary dialogue between E.B. 1916 & E.B.1924 or later.

  Cuinchy is a village midway between Béthune and La Bassée, where EB’s battalion was active in May–June 1916.

  Line 39: ‘old Perpendicular’ refers to the church spire in the Gothic style

  Line 49: EB describes their HQ in Chapter IV of Undertones:

  Kingsclere’s shuttered windows, and masses of sandbags, looked better than C Company’s cellar. Kingsclere had a cellar, too, a delicate retreat from the glaring heat-wave outside, and a piano in it, and marguerites and roses in jars on the table. But there was an air of anxiety and uncertainty about the headquarters staff as they came and went.

  Line 55: darnel – rye grass

  Line 60: ‘don’t mench!’ – polite reply to the assumed thanks, ‘Don’t mention it!’


  Line 64: ‘red-hatted cranks’ – Military Police were distinguished by an arm band and a red cap-cover hence their nickname Red Caps (TDC).

  Line 67: It’s a Mad World, My Masters was a proverbial phrase, and the title of a comedy by the Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton.

  Line 73: British soldiers’ daily rations in 1914 included ‘1/10 gill [142 ml] lime juice if fresh vegetables not issued’; this was to keep scurvy at bay. (See https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/British_&_German_rations, accessed 22 February 2018)

  Line 86: ‘dagged’ – clotted with dirt

  Line 94: Coldstream Lane – EB describes the spot in Chapter IV of Undertones:

  Over Coldstream Lane, the chief communication trench, deep red poppies, blue and white cornflowers and darnel thronged the way to destruction; the yellow cabbage-flowers thickened here and there in sickening brilliance.

  Line 111: ‘shell’ is changed to ‘crump’ in Poems 1914–1930.

  85 ‘Flanders Now‘

  First published as ‘Old Battlefields’ in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, March 1927.

  87 ‘The Author’s Last Words to His Students’

  First published in Japanese Garland (London: The Beaumont Press, 1928).

  After his initial dismay, EB found much to which he could respond in Japan. In his 1930 essay ‘Japanese Moments’ (The Mind’s Eye, pp.89–96), he maintains that ‘Japan does not disappoint the stranger; she corrects his fancies, perhaps a little grimly, and then begins to enrich him with her truths’; what he valued in his students was their responsiveness to the literature he taught, ‘our imaginative inheritance is honoured’.

  The Beaumont Press was run by Cyril W. Beaumont (1891–1976), a pioneer dance historian. At 19 he began to run the bookshop, bought for him by his father, at 75 Charing Cross Road. A severe knee injury prevented his being called up. In 1917 he decided to launch his own imprint: ‘It seemed to me a pity that modern writers should not be afforded an opportunity of having their works published in a choice form during their lifetime.’ He produced 26 books between 1917 and 1931. For example, Richard Aldington wrote to him from the trenches offering his poems, and these were published in 1919 as Images of War, alongside books by D.H. Lawrence and Herbert Read. He published Blunden’s To Nature (1923), Masks of Time (1925), Japanese Garland, A Summer’s Fancy (1930), and To Themis (1931), which was the final Beaumont Press publication; also Blunden’s edition of newly discovered poems by John Clare, Madrigals & Chronicles (1924). These books were illustrated by Randolph Schwabe (1885–1948), a war artist in both wars and Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College London from 1930 until his death.

  See Katherine Sorley Walker, ‘Cyril W. Beaumont’, Dance Chronicle, vol. 25, no. I; Gill Clarke, Randolph Schwabe (Bristol: Sansom & Co, 2012), which reproduces some of the illustrations for Blunden’s collections.

  89 ‘A Sunrise in March’

  Line 10: Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was in charge of the cavalry in the New Model Army created in 1645 to fight against the army of King Charles I in the Civil War.

  90 ‘The Kiln’

  Line 4: In Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, the Athenian nobleman loses his fortune and after giving a final ‘banquet’ in his mansion, goes to live in a cave.

  92 ‘The Deeper Friendship’

  Line 4: ‘my first-found joy’ – the village of Yalding, his relationship with which he described as ‘a love affair’ (Webb, p.25)

  94 ‘Report on Experience’

  EB: ‘Unpremeditated’, & almost thrown away.

  Line 1: cf. Psalm 37:25: ‘I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken…’ (This psalm also includes the words ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’, and ‘For the arms of the wicked shall be broken: but the Lord upholdeth the righteous.’) Also King Henry’s words in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part I, Act III, Scene 5: ‘When I was young, – as yet I am not old –’.

  Line 9: Seraphina – possibly from Martin Chuzzlewit, where the same Psalm is quoted; see Greening’s note in Undertones (p.279), where he also points out that on his return from Japan, EB discovered that his first wife had been having an affair.

  95 ‘A Connoisseur’

  Line 5: Merlin – the wizard who features in the Arthurian legend and medieval Welsh poetry.

  Line 14: Squire Harkaway – perhaps taken from London Assurance, a comedy by Dion Boucicault, first produced in London in 1841.

  Line 16: Croesus – last king of Lydia (modern-day Turkey) in the 6th century BC, who was renowned for his great wealth.

  EB was a serious book-collector, but worked within a strict budget. His friend Rupert Hart-Davis wrote, ‘He knew every edition of every book, important or obscure, the handwriting of every writer and of many lesser individuals, and he had a diviner’s instinct of where treasure might lurk’ (quoted by Webb, p.247).

  97 ‘Into the Salient’

  EB: We went north into the Ypres salient & town, and it was a little time before we knew how overlooked by the German positions every place was.

  Line 1: sallows – small willow trees

  Line 10: Hill 60 was manmade, literally 60 metres above sea level, and offered an important vantage point in the flat landscape south-east of Ypres. It was mined and shelled, and passed to and fro between the Germans and the Allies. (See http://www.firstworldwar.com/today/hill60.htm, accessed 22 February 2018.) EB was there in late February 1917, as he relates in Chapter XVII of Undertones.

  98 ‘Premature Rejoicing’

  EB: Illustrates my meeting with Realists in August 1916.

  Line 5: Titania, the fairy queen in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  98 ‘To Joy’

  This was first collected in To Nature, but in Poems 1914–1930 Blunden replaced the original archaisms: ‘My blood away to give thee warm / Thou ne’er on earth hast made one step, / …o’ the storm.’ He did in fact provide blood for a transfusion (TDC). There are poems in memory of the child scattered throughout EB’s work; the composer Gerald Finzi set this one to music.

  101 ‘Under a Thousand Words’

  Line 4: La Boisselle was a notorious sector on the Western Front, where the French had stemmed the German advance in September 1914. While there was stalemate above ground, beneath it there was tunnelling by the French and Germans, and underground warfare. The area was known as the ‘Glory Hole’. When the British took over the sector, they employed professional miners to deepen the tunnels; above, the infantry sides were separated by a mere 45 metres. At the start of the Battle of the Somme there were two massive mines, known as Y Sap and Lochnagar, flanking the village, but they did not neutralise the German defences and the 34th Division, attacking on 1 July, suffered the worst losses of any unit that terrible day. The ruins of La Boisselle were eventually captured by the British on 4 July. (See http://www.laboisselleproject.com/history accessed 21 February 2018.) EB refers to the village in his essay ‘The Somme Still Flows’.

  Lord Macaulay: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Epitaph on a Jacobite’ begins ‘To my true king I offered free from stain / Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain’; EB must also have been thinking of Macaulay’s valiant ‘Horatius’, who ‘kept the bridge / In the brave days of old.’

  102 ‘The Sunlit Vale’

  Published in the London Mercury (October 1929) as ‘The Failure’.

  Line 6: Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), flower of the Elizabethan age as poet, courtier, scholar and soldier, died of wounds received in the battle of Zutphen. As he lay dying, he is reported to have given water to another soldier, saying ‘Thy necessity is greater than mine.’

  103 ‘Incident in Hyde Park, 1803’

  The poem is based on a true case, that of James Macnamara (1768–1826). He addressed the jury:

  Gentlemen, I am a Captain of the British Navy. My character you can only hear from others; but to maintain any character, in that station, I must be respected. When called upon to lead others into honourable d
anger, I must not be supposed to be a man who had sought safety by submitting to what custom has taught others to consider as a disgrace. […] I hope to obtain my liberty, through your verdict; and to employ it with honour in the defence of the liberties of my country.

  https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18030420-2&div=t18030420-&terms=macnamara (accessed 30 March 2018)

  107 ‘The Kiss’

  Line 20: ‘kobold’ – a spirit living in caves or mines in German folklore.

  Last line: ‘aconite’ – a first flower of spring, the yellow winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis).

  110 ‘The Memorial, 1914–1918’

  Greening’s notes to this poem in his edition of Undertones are particularly illuminating. He points out that Sir Edward Lutyen’s Thiepval Memorial to over 79,000 missing on the Somme opened a couple of months before the poem was published, but that Blunden may also have had in mind a more generic concept of WWI memorials. Sassoon derided the new Menin Gate as ‘a pile of peace-complacent stone’ after its unveiling in 1927 (quoted by Gavin Stamp in his fascinating study The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, London: Profile Books, 2006, p.105).

  Line 15: ‘corons’ – Greening suggests that this refers to the wreaths around the names of the battles or the dead.

  Line 17: ‘aether stream’ – Greening notes that Broadcasting House had been opened in London in March of the same year, and that the idea of some emanation from beyond the grave was hugely influential during the War. The English physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, who helped develop radio, was convinced that the spirit world existed in the ether, and wrote about the consoling messages he received from his youngest son, who died at Ypres in 1915.

  111 ‘November 1, 1931’

  The date is EB’s 35th birthday. The epigraph to Halfway House is Henry Cary’s translation of the opening of Dante’s Inferno: ‘In the mid way of this our mortal life, / I found me in a gloomy wood astray…’