Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  38. F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (1932; Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1972), pp.53–4.

  39. Quoted by Webb, pp.43–4, from the introduction to Philip Longworth, The Unending Vigil: a history of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (London: Constable, 1967).

  40. War had been ‘overwhelmingly found out’ on the Somme for this ancien combatant, as he wrote in 1929: ‘What men did in the battle of the Somme, day after day, and month after month, will never be excelled in honour, unselfishness, and love; except by those who come after and resolve that their experience shall never again fall to the lot of human beings.’ (Fall In, Ghosts, p.66) EB wrote to Sassoon on 13 April 1935: ‘Do not be alarmed by Hitler! I feel sure he is a good hand once you get at him, and will be at the old X-roads at the exact time with the rations, as he undertook. I refuse to believe in Wars […]’. The facetious tone changed, but EB was still seeing the Second World War through the lens of the First: ‘The Strand Magazine has asked me to “send some war poems” – “if possible early next week.” B—r them all, say I. […] (“We have no quarrel with the German People” – was there ever a phrase which will mean so little in three months time? German soldiers are merely doing what they are told. But they’ll all be “Huns” by Xmas.) Obviously it wouldn’t do for them to win. I share the universal abhorrence of Hitler’s methods and intentions.’ (Selected Letters, 2, p.113; p.238, 18 September 1939)

  41. Letter to Douglas quoted in Desmond Graham, Keith Douglas 1920–1944 – a biography (Oxford University Press, 1974), p.218n. In ‘War Pastorals’, Edna Longley suggests that ‘Blunden’s intermittent power to stand back and strip away deceit may have influenced Keith Douglas’s desert pastoral’ (p.472). Curiously, stationed in Egypt in 1942, Douglas discovered that his commanding officer had been Blunden’s in ‘the last show’, and reported that Clarke had said: ‘Marvellous feller, always bringin’ me reports in astonishin’ly neat handwritin’, astonishin’ly neat. And then he’d dish in a bit of astonishin’ly good poetry, too. Well, you’d better write and tell him I’m still tickin’ over, what? Good.’ The Letters, edited by Desmond Graham (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000), p.217.

  42. Blunden, ‘Siegfried Sassoon’s Poetry’, The Mind’s Eye, pp. 272, 267. EB here adapts Lewis Carroll: ‘I said it very loud and clear: / I went and shouted in his ear’ (‘Humpty Dumpty’s Recitation’). I am indebted to the stimulating discussion of the truth of war poetry (and much else) in Edna Longley, ‘The compact essential real truth’, Under the Same Moon: Edward Thomas and the English lyric (London: Enitharmon, 2017), pp.121–76.

  43. Keith Douglas, ‘Poets in This War’ in The Letters, pp.352–3.

  44. Philip Larkin, ‘The War Poet’, reprinted from the Listener in Required Writing: miscellaneous pieces 1955–1982 (London: Faber & Faber, 1983, pp.159–63), p.159.

  45. Blunden in Selected Letters, 3, p.248 (25 October 1963).

  46. These terms are taken from James Campbell’s important essay ‘Combat Gnosticism: the Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’ (New Literary History, vol.30, Winter 1999, pp.203–15), which questions the privileging of combat experience in writing about war, especially as it affects literary criticism and anthologising.

  47. Jay Winter, Remembering War, pp.52–3, 57.

  48. This persistence of themes has been recognised in Martin Taylor’s ordering and range of Blunden’s poems in Overtones of War: poems of the First World War (London: Duckworth, 1996), and in John Greening’s additional poetic supplement to his edition of Undertones of War.

  49. Quoted by Paul Edwards, ‘British war memoirs’ in Vincent Sherry, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 15–33), p.28.

  50. Blunden writes to Sassoon on 2 January 1931 that he experiences ‘asthmatic accessions, which, when I sleep, are transformed into the most dreadful dreams of War – that is, I am in those dreams an utter coward and the battalion including me is about to raid’ (Selected Letters, 1, p.311). Blunden was awarded the Military Cross for ‘conspicuous gallantry in action’ on the Somme in 1916, having just turned 20.

  The role of dreams and the recognition of their peculiar character within PTSD is discussed by Cathy Caruth in various publications on trauma. She has pointed out that Freud had shell-shocked patients whose dreams returned and could not be ‘understood in terms of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexplicably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits’ (introduction to Trauma: explorations in memory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p.5). The idea that the traumatic event has ‘literally no place’ in the past or the present makes it into a kind of no-man’s-land in itself.

  51. Margi Blunden, My Father, Edmund Blunden: on Rereading Undertones of War (London: Cecil Woolf, 2011), p.8.

  52. Jay Winter, War and Remembrance, p.70.

  53. In 1929, Blunden wrote, ‘where the traditions and government which [the war] had called into being had ceased to be, we who had been brought up to it were lost men. Strangers surrounded me. No tried values existed now‘(‘Aftertones’, Fall In, Ghosts, p.59). These were young men when the war ended, and Blunden returned to that point in 1958: ‘… one trouble that followed was that peace was not all happiness; then millions of veterans (in their ’twenties) began looking back to such moments as that in the barn [in a poem by Sassoon] with desire and longing. At least there had been a generosity, a unity, a trust’ (War Poets 1914–1918, p.28).

  54. Tim Kendall, Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, p.2.

  Cathy Caruth asks: ‘in what way is the experience of trauma also the experience of an imperative to live? What is the nature of a life that continues beyond trauma?’ (Literature in the Ashes of History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, p.7).

  55. These concepts from Margalit’s The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002) are explained in Jay Winter, Remembering War, pp.240–42.

  56. Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: combat and identity in World War I, pp. 79; p.113 quoting from C.E. Carrington, Soldiers from the Wars Returning (London, 1965), p.252.

  57. It is interesting that although Blunden wrote in the ‘Preliminary’ to Undertones that the book was ‘almost useless’ because either most of its readers would have gone through the same experience and know it all, or a few readers would not have and ‘neither will they understand’, when the second edition came out in 1930, he was able to say ‘it has been read and understood by many’. See Greening’s edition for the later prefaces.

  58. Poems by Ivor Gurney, p.11.

  59. Quoted by David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: the Great War and the Twentieth Century (London: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p.344. Reynolds agrees that Blunden ‘left an indelible mark on our understanding of what constitutes “war poetry”’.

  Index of First Lines

  A cloudless day! with a keener line 6

  A singing firework; the sun’s darling 113

  A sycamore on either side 2

  A tangle of iron rods and spluttered beams 5

  A thick hot haze had choked the valley grounds 30

  ‘A thousand words on Courage.’ – This request 101

  Above the hedge the spearman thistle towers 28

  Against this lantern, shrill, alone 110

  Again that yellow dusk or light along 91

  Already fallen plum-bloom stars the green 32

  Among sequestered farms and where brown orchards 115

  Among the dead reeds, the single swan 149

  ‘And all her silken flanks with garlands drest’ 77

  ‘And now a dove and now a dragon-fly 144

  Are all your eighty years defined at last 142

  ‘Are you looking for someone, you who come pattering 132

  As in the silent darkening room I lay 49

  At Quincey’s moat the squandering village ends 9

  Beseech
ingly this little thing 140

  Beside the creek where seldom oar or sail 90

  Black clouds hide the moon, the amazement is gone 36

  Come to me where the swelling wind assails the wood… 118

  Dance not your spectral dance at me 88

  Dim stars like snowflakes are fluttering in heaven 93

  Earth is a quicksand; yon square tower 70

  Fierce in flaming millions, ready to strike they stood 106

  Flashing far, tolling sweet, telling of a city fine 133

  Forgive what I, adventuring highest themes 87

  From shadows of rich oaks outpeer 11

  From the dark mood’s control 109

  From the night storm sad wakes the winter day 24

  Genius named them, as I live! What but genius could compress 80

  Happy the herd that in the heat of summer 56

  He’d scarcely come from leave and London 62

  Here they went with smock and crook 23

  Here this great summer day 119

  Here’s the dream I love 141

  How bright a dove’s wing shows against the sky 21

  ‘How lovely are the messengers that preach us the gospel… 127

  How unpurposed, how inconsequential 78

  I am for the woods against the world 107

  I am only the phrase 55

  I am the Poems of the late Eliza Cook 116

  I have been young, and now am not too old 94

  I heard the challenge ‘Who goes there?’ 86

  I saw the sunlit vale, and the pastoral fairy-tale 102

  I see you walking 81

  I sent her in fancy 147

  If even you, so able and so keen 125

  In a frosty sunset 66

  In a round cavern of glass, in steely water 74

  In all his glory the sun was high and glowing 150

  In the avenues of yesterday 130

  Into the blue undisturbable main 136

  Is not this enough for moan 98

  Just see what’s happening Worley. – Worley rose 61

  Like mourners filing into church at a funeral 7

  Morning, if this late withered light can claim 75

  My hesitant design it was, in a time when no man feared 135

  My soul, dread not the pestilence that hags 58

  Nailed to these green laths long ago 19

  Now everything that shadowy thought 16

  Now to attune my dull soul, if I can 8

  O how comely it was and how reviving 60

  One hour from far returns: Each man we had 137

  On the far hill the cloud of thunder grew 17

  O road in dizzy moonlight bleak and blue 79

  O rosy red, O torrent splendour 59

  Painfully writhed the few last weeds … 73

  Perched in a tower of this ancestral Wall 143

  Pitch-dark night shuts in, and the rising gale 20

  Presume not that grey idol with the scythe 95

  Professing loud energy, out of the junction departed 113

  Round us the pines are darkness 99

  Sallows like heads in Polynesia 97

  Shattering remembrance, mercy! Not again 145

  Shot from the zenith of desire 112

  ‘Sir, I cannot profess to understand 124

  So rise, enchanting haunting faithful 128

  So sigh, that hearkening pasts arouse 134

  So there’s my year, the twelvemonth duly told 52

  Such surge of black wings I never saw homing 139

  Swift away the century flies 46

  That well you drew from is the coldest drink 112

  That you have given us others endless means 121

  The beech leaves caught in a moment gust 74

  The cuckoo with a strong flute 68

  The fire dies down, and the last friend goes 148

  The green brook played, talked unafraid 126

  The haze upon the meadow 129

  The hop-poles stand in cones 67

  The impulses of April, the rain-gems, the rose-cloud 103

  The silver eel slips through the waving weeds 48

  The stage was set, the house was packed 76

  The swallow flew like lightning over the green 72

  The thoroughfares that seem so dead to daylight passers-by 4

  The tired air groans as the heavies swing over … 3

  The trunks of trees which I knew glorious green 69

  The wild-rose bush lets loll 13

  The windmill in his smock of white 34

  There the puddled lonely lane 42

  There was winter in those woods 47

  There, where before no master action struck 85

  ‘There’s something in the air,’ he said 57

  This dog – not a real dog, you know 146

  Though I within these two last years of grace 12

  Through the smothered air the wicker finds 25

  Till darkness lays a hand on these grey eyes 96

  Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day 37

  ‘To dream again.’ That chance. There were no fences 114

  Touched with a certain silver light 120

  Treasure not so the forlorn days 33

  Triumph! How strange, how strong had triumph come 38

  Two buds we took from thousands more 138

  Under the thin green sky, the twilight day 64

  Unriddle this. Last night my dream 53

  Walking the river way to change our note 131

  We shuddered on the blotched and wrinkled down 1

  We talked of ghosts; and I was still alive 111

  Were all eyes changed, were even poetry cold 92

  What soldier guessed that where the stream descended 69

  What’s that over there? 98

  When groping farms are lanterned up 14

  When on the green the rag-tag game had stopt 26

  Where found you, Dürer, that strange group of trees 123

  Where so dark and still 44

  Where tongues were loud and hearts were light 63

  While on my cheek the sour and savage wind 89

  With coat like any mole’s, as soft and black 29

  Yes, I still remember 122

  About the Authors

  EDMUND BLUNDEN (1896–1974) grew up in Kent and went to school in Sussex at Christ’s Hospital; these were the formative landscapes of his boyhood. He joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, serving in France and Flanders. His collection The Shepherd (1922) made his reputation as a poet; his classic account of his military service, Undertones of War (1928) was written while he was teaching in Japan. He made his living by writing and editing, with two extended periods of teaching: as a Fellow of Merton College 1931–42, and as Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong 1953–64. He received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1956, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford 1966–68. His passions were poetry, book collecting, cricket, and the English countryside; he was haunted by his war experience all his life.

  ROBYN MARSACK began her long association with Carcanet Press by editing the first edition of Edmund Blunden’s Selected Poems in 1982, and worked as a publishers’ editor until she became Director of the Scottish Poetry Library 2000–2016. She was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Glasgow 2016–2018. She has co-edited several poetry anthologies, including OxfordPoets 2013 with Iain Galbraith, and edited Blunden’s Fall In, Ghosts: selected war prose, published by Carcanet in 2014.

  Also by EDMUND BLUNDEN

  from Carcanet Press

  Fall In, Ghosts: selected war prose

  edited by Robyn Marsack

  Copyright

  Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Stree
t, Manchester M2 7AQ.

  This new eBook edition first published in 2018.

  On the cover: Patrick William Adam, ‘War’, 1915. (© Dundee Museums Collection)

  Poems copyright © The Estate of Edmund Blunden 2018. Introduction, essay, selection and editorial matter copyright © Robyn Marsack 2018. The right of Robyn Marsack to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved.

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN 978 1 78410 688 1

  Mobi ISBN 978 1 78410 689 8

  PDF ISBN 978 1 78410 690 4

  The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.