Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  Line 14: Magdalen College, Oxford (EB was now teaching at Oxford); the Menin Gate – at the start of the route out of Ypres towards the front line, along the Menin Road. EB refers to the Gate in Undertones as ‘that unlovely hiatus’.

  112 ‘The Cottage at Chigasaki’

  EB’s note in Choice or Chance: Perhaps the most familiar Japanese poem is that which says, approximately, ‘The morning-glory has taken hold of the well-bucket. I’ll borrow some water elsewhere.’

  The haiku to which he refers is by the Buddhist nun Chiyo-ni (1703–75). Chigasaki is on the coast, not far from Tokyo and Yokohama.

  113 ‘Lark Descending’

  Titled simply ‘The Skylark’ originally (see the draft reproduced in TDC), the poem was published in Choice or Chance under the title here. EB surely had in mind one of the most loved pieces of English music, The Lark Ascending, by Ralph Vaughan Williams; also the long poem of the same name by George Meredith, which inspired the composer and was much admired by Siegfried Sassoon. It is said that RVW composed the piece while watching troops embark in August 1914, but this has been disputed. It was first performed in public in 1920.

  115 ‘At Rugmer’

  Rugmer is in Yalding.

  Line 6: ‘kex’ is noted in the Dictionary of Sussex Dialect as used in the extreme east of the county: the ‘dry hollow stalk of hogweed, cow parsley and other umbelliferae’.

  116 ‘An Ominous Victorian’

  First published as ‘An Eminent Victorian’ in The Spectator, 17 November 1933. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, iconoclastic biographical studies of four of them, was published in 1918 and revolutionised the art of biography and the view of Victorians. In his revised title, EB suggests the fate in store for once revered literary figures.

  Line 1: Eliza Cook (1818–89): her poetry was hugely popular with the working-class public in both England and America; her best-known poem was ‘The Old Armchair’.

  Line 6: Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835), poet; the opening lines of two of her poems are famous: ‘The boy stood on the burning deck…’ (‘Casabianca’) and ‘The stately homes of England…’ (parodied by Noel Coward).

  Line 7: It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), a popular novel by Charles Reade

  Line 32: Samuel Rogers, (1763–1855), a poet now best known for his friendship with more famous poets, and as a generous host to literary London. He first came to prominence with The Pleasures of Memory (1792).

  119 ‘Writing a Sketch of a Forgotten Poet’

  EB in his preface to Poems 1930–1940: ‘The name of the forgotten poet […] was Mary Leapor, a most attractive young writer of the eighteenth century, and regarded as a prodigy because she was also the daughter of a gardener.’ He wrote an article about her, ‘A Northamptonshire poet: Mary Leapor’, published in the Journal of the Northamptonshire Natural History Society, June 1936.

  121 ‘Minority Report’

  Line 8: Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 BC–8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace; a great Augustan lyric and satirical poet, he also served for a time in the Roman army.

  123 ‘On a Picture by Dürer’

  Sonnenuntergang – Weiher im Walde / Landscape with a Woodland Pool (c.1495): this watercolour by Albrecht Dürer is part of the collection of the British Museum, where perhaps EB saw it. The poem was first published in August 1936.

  124 ‘Cricket, I Confess’

  EB remarked in a letter from Japan to Philip Tomlinson in August 1949, ‘If only these attentive and beauty-loving Japanese understood cricket!’ (Webb, p.278) The cricketers he remembers were all in the 1909 England Ashes team: Albert Relf (1874–1937), who played for Sussex; Gilbert Jessop (1874–1955), who played for Gloucestershire; Kenneth Hutchings (1882–1916), who played for Kent and was reckoned to be the most talented English batsman of his era, killed on the Somme.

  Line 5: ‘Poor Tom, thy horn is dry’ – Edgar in King Lear, Act III, Scene 6, has no more to say.

  125 ‘To W.O. and His Kind’

  EB was offered the chance of publication by Lord Carlow (1907–44), a keen book-collector and amateur typographer, whose private Corvinus Press published work by T.E. Lawrence, James Joyce and Walter de la Mare, among others. On Several Occasions was issued in an edition of 60 copies in April 1939, with 16 new poems including this one.

  Last line: ‘kindly’ was later changed to ‘genuine’.

  127 ‘Company Commander, 1917’

  VID: A.G. Vidler, an Old Blue (Christ’s Hospital pupil), severely wounded in 1915 near Festubert; later commissioned in the Royal Sussex. Described by EB as ‘an invincible soldier’, he never fully recovered from his head wounds or the loss of his only brother near Arras in 1917, and committed suicide in 1924. EB’s elegy ‘A.G.A.V.’ is included in Undertones.

  Line 1: ‘How lovely are the messengers…’ an anthem by Felix Mendelssohn, taken from Isaiah 52:7

  Line 11: ‘O for the peace…’ a Victorian hymn also known as ‘A Little While’, by Jane Crewdson

  129 ‘What is Winter?’

  First published as ‘A Day in December’, Poetry Review [Jan/Feb] 1943.

  132 ‘Thoughts of Thomas Hardy’

  Line 11: threne – threnody

  EB wrote an account of his literary life, Thomas Hardy (1942). He had met Hardy several times at the poet’s home, Max Gate, introduced by Siegfried Sassoon in 1922. Sassoon felt that the two poets were uncannily similar: ‘They share a sort of old-fashioned seriousness about everything connected with authorship. Both are fundamentally countrified and homely. Even in outward appearance they have a similarly bird-like quality. … Also both are essentially modest and unassuming’ (Webb, pp.133–4). After a visit in 1923 EB recorded that Hardy’s ‘talk is a mixture of trifles with which old age amuses itself, and details of real importance in reading his life – e.g. his first serious reading book (Dryden’s Virgil), and his zest for discussing smugglers and soldiers’ (Webb, p. 135). EB’s vivid ‘Notes on Visits to Thomas Hardy’ were reprinted in Edmund Blunden: A Selection of His Poetry and Prose, edited by Kenneth Hopkins (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950). Mrs Hardy presented EB with Hardy’s own copy of Edward Thomas’s Poems as a memento in 1926.

  133 ‘The Vanishing Land’

  Line 7: abeles – white poplars

  135 ‘After the Bombing’

  In 1947 EB was invited by the Foreign Office to go to Japan as part of a liaison mission, and he stayed there until 1950, with his wife and young family. He had written to his brother in August 1945 that the bombing ‘will have strengthened the feeling of all the Orient from Persia onward that the Western Civilisation is the barbarism. […] So any of us who can help at all in reviving the message of men like Shelley and Henry Vaughan should not miss any opening’ (Webb, p.272).

  138 ‘High Elms, Bracknell’

  The poem refers to the house in which Shelley and his wife Harriet lived for a few months in 1813, with their baby, Ianthe. The marriage of the 19-year-old poet and his 16-year-old bride did not last. EB visited the house near Windsor with Claire when he was writing his biography of Shelley, published in 1946. The two buds were ‘poppies which Claire pressed into her copy of Shelley’ and have remained there (TDC).

  142 ‘C.E.B.’

  This elegy for his father was written two years after the death of Charles Edmund Blunden, whom EB describes in ‘An Empty Chair’ as ‘A Sussex man but domiciled in Kent / And loving those earth-skills (thought so little of)/ By which the whole’s sustained’; schoolmaster, musician and cricketer.

  143 ‘At the Great Wall of China’

  EB travelled to China with a group from the University of Hong Kong in December 1955. As well as the comparison with sentries in WWI, the title recalls ‘“Trench Nomenclature”’, and a resonant incident in Undertones Chapter XVIII, where in the ‘Great Wall of China’ trench Blunden met a sentry who ‘spoke, grinned and shivered; we passed; and duly the sentry was hit by a shell.’

  144 ‘A Hong Kong House’<
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  The poem was first published in 1955 when EB was teaching at the University of Hong Kong. His daughter describes the house, which has since been pulled down: ‘The garden was overlooked by a long veranda which ran the length of the side of EB’s house. It was an informal garden, dominated by a soaring palm tree, which looked down to the university buildings and the sea beyond. […] playthings – refers to his daughters’ toys left on the lawn.’ (TDC)

  145 ‘Millstream Memories’

  Line 3: Macbeth to the ghost of Duncan, ‘Avaunt, and quit my sight’, Macbeth, Act III, scene 4

  Lines 4–5: an echo of Edgar disguised as a madman, ‘Frateretto calls me and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness’ (King Lear, Act III, Scene 6) – fishing in Hell must have been a peculiarly resonant image for EB.

  146 ‘Dog on Wheels’

  Explaining that her youngest sister had this toy to push around when she was learning to walk, Margi Blunden sees the poem as emblematic of her father’s isolation amidst a young family and the busy life of Hong Kong in the later 1950s: ‘His “battered” face carries its difficult history from the war. […] The sadness invested in the dog in the final two lines reflects something of his own feelings about his situation at this time.’ (Margi Blunden, My Father, Edmund Blunden, London: Cecil Woolf, 2011, p.8)

  148 ‘Darkness’

  Written when the Blitz was continuing in London, and severe in Plymouth, Swansea, Glasgow and Liverpool. Britain was very isolated, with the USSR not an ally until June and the USA disengaged until the end of 1941. Lines 6–7: EB draws on Prospero’s farewell speech, ‘Our revels now are ended’, The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1.

  149 ‘A Swan, A Man’

  Written in 1964. The setting is the old mill pool next to Hall Mill (in Long Melford, Suffolk), the house where EB retired (TDC).

  Line 16: The Ancient Mariner of Coleridge’s poem is cursed with unquenchable memory, and advises his listeners, ‘He prayeth best, who lovest best / All things both great and small’.

  150 ‘Ancre Sunshine’

  Published in Garland (Cambridge: the Golden Head Press, 1969).

  This was the last poem EB wrote, probably during a visit to the battlefields, and TDC notes that ‘it has the distinction of being the last poem about the war written by any surviving soldier poet.’

  He closed an essay on ‘Yalding Bridges’ from 1931: ‘I suppose I liked the River Ancre between Hamel and Thiepval in the autumn of a year of holocausts because it resembled this little nook of our village. In my dreams nowadays they merge into an identity, and shells just miss the alders of Cheveney-lez-Miraumont’ (The Mind’s Eye, p.175).

  Line 11: His wife Claire represents for him a later generation.

  Line 12: Miraumont was a village north of Grandcourt, taken from the Germans by the British in February 1917, and completely destroyed in the course of the war.

  NOTES TO ‘GOING OVER THE GROUND AGAIN’

  1. Selected Letters, 1, p.124 (24 August 1926).

  2. See http://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/poets-of-the-first-world-war (accessed 13 April 2018)

  3. Jay Winter, Remembering War: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006), p.1.

  4. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1975), p.254.

  5. ‘Edmund Blunden writes…’ Poetry Book Society Bulletin, no. 14 (May 1957).

  6. The literary ‘loyalties’ were exactly that, scholarly and long-lasting. Brownlee Kirkpatrick’s Bibliography of Edmund Blunden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) records over 50 entries for books, articles and reviews on Lamb, 45 for his beloved Clare, 40 for Coleridge; Shelley, something of an obsession, accounts for over 60; and Keats, another, for over 50. No doubt there are echoes and quotations that have not been identified in the notes to this selection; they will have come from EB’s extensive and repeated reading of these authors’ prose as well as poems.

  7. Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey (London: Faber & Faber, 1945), p.146.

  8. Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: combat and identity in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 122.

  9. Poems by Ivor Gurney: principally selected from unpublished manuscripts, with a memoir by Edmund Blunden (London: Hutchinson, 1954), p.11.

  10. The Great War and Modern Memory, p.269. Fussell ends the chapter with a nice example of the ‘calendar-art sentiments’ Blunden’s approach risked and avoided.

  11. Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: essays on pastoral poetry and the pastoral ideal (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975), p.7, makes this point. EB refers to Walton in his essay on his love of bookbindings, ‘Bringing them Home’:

  My taste probably began in childhood… Isaak Walton was festooned with golden creels and rods and lines and trout and bulrushes; the old man himself, on what I think they call the back strip (so one might speak of an angel’s vertebrae), stood forever there by the hawthorn bush, baiting his hook, about to throw in again. (The Mind’s Eye, pp.232–3)

  12. Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral (London: Methuen, 1971), p.2. EB compiled a collection of Wordsworth’s poems for young readers, The Solitary Song, published by the Bodley Head in 1970. See also Robert Hemmings, ‘Landscape as palimpsest: Wordsworthian topography in the war writings of Blunden and Sassoon’, Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 43, no. 3 (2007), which explores the significance of maps and map-reading for Blunden.

  13. In a review essay, ‘The Preservation of Rural England’, Blunden refers to the English as ‘tenants of this genuine Arcadia’, under threat from post-war developers. Published in the TLS March 1929; reprinted in Edmund Blunden, Votive Tablets (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1931), p.352.

  14. Selected Letters, 1, p.7 (18 September 1920).

  15. Robert H. Ross, The Georgian Revolt; the rise and fall of a poetic ideal 1910–1922 (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), p.187.

  16. Edna Longley, ‘War Pastorals’ in Tim Kendall ed., The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2007), p.466.

  17. Longley, ‘War Pastorals’, p.467.

  18. Edna Longley, ‘The Great War, history, and the English lyric’ in Vincent Sherry, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.79.

  19. Marinelli, Pastoral, p.9.

  20. Longley, ‘The Great War, history, and the English lyric’, pp.78–9.

  21. Webb, p.84.

  22. Blunden wrote to Sassoon on 22 July 1926, ‘I can still smell shelling and chloride of lime – but I can’t remember the base; nor the long journeys to and fro from leave. Sometimes a sausage balloon hanging over Tokyo gives me an awkward feeling’ (Selected Letters, 1, p.121).

  23. Quoted by Webb, pp.118–19.

  24. Blunden’s modesty was remarked on by everyone who knew him. The poet Vernon Scannell, in his memoir A Proper Gentleman, described him as ‘the most modest, courteous and generous man I have ever met or will be likely to meet and it was impossible not to love him’ (quoted by Webb, p.317).

  25. Blunden to Sassoon, 24 August 1926: ‘Yet, I think there are two things to be considered in this “game of ghosts”: not only how the man felt then towards his “present,” but how he feels now towards his “present.” He may choose the time when he was necessary, (roughly) effective, and felt friendship about him’ (Selected Letters, 1, p.123).

  26. Hardy noted that Egdon Heath, the setting of Return of the Native, ‘may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex – Lear’; Shakespeare’s Lear is a recurring presence in Blunden’s war writing. See the discussion of this in Desmond Graham, The Truth of War: Owen, Blunden and Rosenberg (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1984), pp.93–6. For EB’s relationship with Hardy, see p.169 n.9; p.191 note to p.132.

  27. He subsequently altered the verb in line 3 to ‘Foreheads still trenched with feverish wonderings’, perhaps thought it was too obvious a metaphor and
in Poems 1914–1930 – where it closes the section ‘War: impacts and delayed actions’ – changed the line to ‘Foreheads entrenched with all the argument’.

  28. A phrase used by Peter Scupham in his generally very appreciative essay, ‘Edmund Blunden’, PN Review, vol, 25 no.3 (January–February 1999), p.61.

  29. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, p.268.

  30. 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), p.11.

  31. Longley, ‘The Great War, history, and the English lyric’, p.65.

  32. Rothkopf notes that for Blunden and Sassoon, ‘T.S. Eliot became a focus of their distaste for Modernist poetry. A kind of sniper fire fills these letters, directed chiefly at Eliot and his acolytes.’ She suggests that ‘Blunden was perhaps more distressed than he said outright by Eliot’s dismissal of his preference for the countryside, Lamb and Vaughan as signs of immaturity’ in a Dial review of September 1927 (Selected Letters, 1, pp. xxiv, xxix n.27).

  33. Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: the poetry of the Great War (Oxford University Press, 1972), p.110.

  34. Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.14. In an interview with John Press, EB remarked mildly, ‘I daresay I could find free verses of mine before I was conscious of many modern free-verse writers. The First World War did something to shake us up on forms and metres, and generally on the music of verse.’ Peter Orr, ed., The Poet Speaks; interviews with contemporary poets (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, pp.33–7), p.34.

  35. Quoted by Webb, p.144.

  36. Greening, introduction to Undertones, p.lxvii. The poem in this selection perhaps least easily identifiable as Blunden’s is ‘Into the Salient’ (p.97), and it is one of the few he wrote in free verse.

  37. Michael Roberts, ed., The Faber Book of Modern Verse (London: Faber, 1936), p.1. Also omitted for this reason were Charles Sorley, Walter de la Mare, Edwin Muir, William Plomer and Roy Campbell, whom Roberts lists; he does not mention (or include) Robert Frost or Edward Thomas.