"The Homecoming": Cambridge war memorial |
At 11:00 am on the 11th
day of the 11th month of 1918, the weary, mud-stained
soldiers of the Great War put down their weapons. After 1,568 days, the
conflict that some had thought might never end finally drew to a close. Armistice Day (now
more commonly known as Remembrance Day) somberly honors the dead of the war, but that
first Armistice Day was an occasion for celebration.
Siegfried Sassoon in “Everyone Sang” writes of the delight and beauty that “came
like the setting sun” as “horror/Drifted away.” In Carola Oman’s
quietly joyful poem “To the Survivors,” we feel the collective sense of wonder:
the war is over, and the journey home has perhaps never been so tenderly imagined.
To the Survivors
They are all
given back to you—
Midsummer
Warwick woods, at night;
Vision of
Sherborne from the hill
Under a sudden
rainbow; flight
Of virgin winds
above the faithful downs;
The towns
Of Yorkshire;
docks that breathe
Old witcheries
with smoke and copper dusk;
And morning
mists that wreathe
The pale
Towers of
Canterbury; and the husk
Of ruined
Porchester; the vale
Of Gloucester;
Cotswold walls
Loose-stoned and
low; waterfalls
Of northern Devon;
all the patched
Wonder of field
and casual pool, and thatched
Unventilated
cottages. By us
Four years
avoided, ransomed now, again
(And four times
richer thus)
They come; and
all this pain
Is past. Can you believe it true?
They are all given back again to you.
They are all given back again to you.
--Carola Oman*
(Oxford
Magazine, December 1918)
The English landscape that featured so
largely in the imagination of the trench poets** is lovingly listed in all its
variety in Oman's poem: mysterious nights in Warwickshire’s woods and rainbows shining over
the market town of Sherborne; smoky city docks and the waterfalls of
the West Country; Canterbury’s holy towers and the loose-stoned walls of the
Cotswold fields; the medieval ruins of Porchester Castle and humble thatched cottages: “They are all
given back to you.”
Oman’s “To the Survivors” promises that everything has been preserved just as it was in the halcyon summer of 1914, and the
poem imagines the returning soldiers stepping right back into that golden past
(Carol Anne Duffy shares a similar vision in her
poem “Last Post”). Like captives who have been ransomed, the memory and
ideal of home have been returned to those who missed them so dearly, “and all
this pain/Is past.”
The poem’s mood is fantastically
optimistic (as is Sassoon’s poem with its closing line “the singing will never be
done”). It avoids mention of the wounded who
will return with scars both visible and unseen, and the magical thinking of Oman’s poem is altogether silent about the dead who will never return home.
But this is a poem for the survivors, and
it seems only right to allow them this one moment of pure, unadulterated joy.
Sometimes incredible and improbable visions are needed, for they may show the way
forward to peace and give perspective to the sufferings of the
past.
*See also Carola Oman’s poem “In
the Ypres Sector.”
**Other examples of war poems that
reference the landscape of home include Gibson’s “Retreat,” Oxland’s
“Outward
Bound,” Lett’s “July,
1916,” and Ledwidge’s “Home.”
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