Before
television and radio, there was poetry. In
The Great War and Modern Memory,
describing the world of 1914, Fussell asserts, “Except for sex and drinking,
amusement was largely found in language formally arranged, either in books and
periodicals or at the theater and music hall, or in one’s friends’ anecdotes,
rumors, or clever structuring of words” (158).
In other words, language was entertainment. Books were the immortal companions
of the soldiers in the trenches.
For
one of the first times in history, most of the soldiers were literate, and reading
offered men an escape to other worlds removed from the mud and blood, an avenue
for self-improvement when the surrounding situation was descending into madness,
and a way to battle the boredom of static, entrenched armies. Fussell
claims that “the Oxford Book of English
Verse presides over the Great War in a way that has never been sufficiently
appreciated” (159).
When
soldiers tried to make sense out of the senselessness of the war with language,
and when ordinary language failed to communicate the realities of the Great War,
trench poets often turned to the language of literature, recycling words and
images from traditional sources.
Edgell
Rickword, “youngest of the soldier poets” (Kendall’s Poetry of the First World War), took with him to the Front a two-volume
edition of the poems of John Donne, a seventeenth-century Metaphysical poet, and with
dark humor, Rickword uses Donne to give voice to the horror of watching a
friend’s body decay.
Trench
Poets by Edgell Rickword
I
knew a man, he was my chum,
But
he grew darker day by day,
And
would not brush the flies away,
Nor
blanch however fierce the hum
Of
passing shells; I used to read,
to
rouse him, random things from Donne—
like
‘Get with child a mandrake root.’
But
you can tell he was far gone,
for
he lay gaping, mackerel-eyed,
and
stiff and senseless as a post
even
when that old poet cried
‘I
long to talk with some old lover’s ghost.’
I
tried the Elegies one day,
but
he, because he heard me say:
‘What
needst thou have more covering than a man?’
grinned
nastily, so then I knew
the
worms had got his brains at last.
There
was one thing I still might do
To
starve those worms; I racked my head
for
wholesome lines and quoted Maud.
His
grin got worse and I could see
he
sneered at passion’s purity.
He
stank so badly, though we were great chums
I
had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.
It’s
a shocking poem the first time you read it -- the speaker irreverently bounces
the timeless and elegant poetry of Donne off of the increasingly grotesque body
of his “chum,” in a vain attempt to “rouse the dead.” But what better words can be used? Poetry and high language are commonly used to cope
with grief.
What
is jarring are the colloquial and disturbingly realistic descriptions of a dead
body that are interwoven with Donne’s poetry:
“mackerel-eyed,” “stiff and senseless,” and “grinned nastily.” The excerpts that Rickword chooses from Donne
seem to tell their own story: it begins
with an invitation to accomplish the impossible (“Get with child” from Donne’s
“Song,”), then moves to longing and the frustration of unrequited love and
connection (“I long to talk” from “Love’s Deity”), and ends with a reference to
nakedness and seduction (from “To His Mistress Going to Bed”). The continued unresponsiveness of his friend
causes the writer to abandon the sensual immorality of the last Donne
reference, and so he reaches for “wholesome lines” and settles upon Maud, Tennyson’s romantic
poem of doomed love. But the putrefying
body “sneers” at these Victorian ideals of love and purity; his physical reality seems
more in tune with the Metaphysical theme of carpe diem expressed in Marvell’s
lines, “The grave’s a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there
embrace,” – except that this body has been deprived of even the final dignity
and comfort of a private grave.
In its full length the fragment which I quote from Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War, is as follows:
ReplyDelete"During this period - the young soldier and intellectual Blunden is musing about his days and months in Ypres, 1917 - my indebtedness to an eighteenth-century poet became enormous. At every spare moment I read in Young's Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, and I felt the benefit of this grave and intellectual voice, speaking out of a profound eighteenth-century calm, often in metaphor which came home to one even in a pillbox. The mere amusement of discovering lines applicable to our crisis kept me from despair."
Chris
I'm so glad you replied with this lovely excerpt, Chris. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have an entire article or book that listed soldiers writing about the poetry and writers that they turned to for comfort and solace? I've read scattered accounts here and there -- but do you know of anyone who has collected this kind of content?
DeleteFew poems could ever conjure the horrors of war so eloquently as this Blunden poem. From the first time I encountered it it has been indelibly engraved on my mind.
ReplyDeleteA brave poem indeed. Rickword seemingly admits with those last two lines that this subject is outside the envelope that poetry can tilt at. When was it written?
ReplyDeletePublished in 1921; it would be fascinating if anyone knew when it was written?
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