British women at war graves in France |
In the
midst of the Great War, a short piece titled “They Help One to Forget the War’s
Burden” appeared in the Bristol Times and
Mirror on the feature page “Women and The Home”:
The little things, after
all, are the great things. Let us, in this time of the nation’s agony, these
days of horror, anxiety, and breaking hearts, come back to some remembrance of
the eternally beautiful little things.
Surrounded by the Great War – great battleships, great armoured cars,
great armies, let us spare a moment now and then for getting alone with the
stars—just a moment’s silent watching.
You cannot think of rising prices, or overcrowded tramways, or wearying
office-work, and see the pale Pleiades and a rising moon at the same time –
thank God, the little things help us to forget!
You can feel lonely and sad, perhaps, but it will not be a hopeless
loneliness—you will be looking at something Eternal.
Looking
for the Eternal in wartime was often an attempt to combat hopeless loneliness.
Evelyn
Underhill was an established writer when war was declared, the author of Mysticism: A Study of the
Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911) and The Path of Eternal Wisdom (1912). She
published her second volume of poetry, Theophanies
in 1916; a quotation from John Scotus Erigena appeared on the title
page: “Every visible and invisible creature is a theophany or appearance of God.”
Evelyn Underhill |
The
majority of Underhill’s poems take as their central themes the natural world
and spiritual questions, but eight of the last nine poems in Theophanies are war poems. In these, Underhill struggles to find glimpses
of God in the midst of war. The book was not well-received, and a critic for The Literary Digest wrote,
Miss Evelyn Underhill is
a student of mysticism who writes best when she avoids her favorite subject. In
her “Theophanies: a Book of Verse” … the
poems on spiritual themes are not convincing, but “Any Englishwoman,” altho it
is a slight thing for so great a tragedy to inspire, seems to be as sincere as
it is imaginative and well phrased.*
Any Englishwoman
May 1915
England’s in flower.
On every
tree speared canopies unfold,
And sacred
beauty crowns the lowliest weeds
Lifting
their eager faces from the mould:
Even in this hour
The
unrelented pressure of the spring
Toward what deeds?
What dreadful blossoming?
Ah, the
red spines upon the curving briar,
They tear the heart
Great with desire
And sick with sleepless pain
For
one that comes not again.
There’s
horror in the fragrance of the air,
Torment in
this intolerable art.
White petals on the pear!
Yet, peering there,
I see
beyond the rapture of young green
And passion of pale fire
The
glutton Death, who smiles upon the scene.
Grave in No Man's Land, Margaret Hall, c. 1918-19, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Last night
there was a sudden wind that blew
My joyful branches through.
Yesterday
a rich blossom on the spray,
To-day
All the
sweet promise of life is vanished away:
Yea, of
its ardent petals just a few
White on the ground
I found.
Bury them
quick—I must not see them decay.
Others may
know the triumph of the year
And coming of the clear
Still days
of autumn to redeem our grief.
For them
the colored bough, the noble sheaf:
But I shall see
The petals
that fell too soon from the blossoming tree,
And the stain
There on
the path, where they rest in the sorrowful rain.
—Evelyn Underhill
This is
not T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” and yet the “unrelented pressure of the
spring” with its “dreadful blossoming” foreshadows the first lines of that
poem: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land.”
Grieving Woman with medals c. 1918 City of Toronto Archives |
For many
English women, the fallen petals of spring recalled countless men who had died too
soon. For them and for their beloved soldiers, “All the sweet promise of life
is vanished away.” Both men and blossoms lie “White on the ground,” an
intolerable sight that provokes the anguished plea, “Bury them quick—I must not
see them decay.” Where is the Eternal to be found in these stains on the rain-spattered path?
The war changed
Underhill, for as one scholar writes, “Her rather optimistic theology was
unable to explain the cruel realities of World War I.” In the years following the Armistice, she sought
spiritual direction from Baron Friedrich von Hügel, one of the most respected
theologians in Europe at that time and moved toward “more Christocentric
thought and a growing balance between God’s immanence and transcendence.”**
In the
interwar period, Underhill became increasingly committed to pacifism. Shortly
before her death in 1941, she wrote to a friend,
Christianity and war are
incompatible, and . . . nothing worth having can be
achieved by “casting out Satan by Satan.” Never theatrical herself, she urged
that people of her persuasion not be “controversial, or go in for propaganda.”***
In the
same letter she “characterized Hitler as a ‘scourge of God,’who could be
countered by two means: war or the cross – ‘And only a very small number are
ready for the Cross, in the full sense of loving and unresisting abandonment to
the worst that may come.’”
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* “Current
Poetry, The Literary Digest, 7 March
1917, vol. 54, p. 714.
** Todd E.
Johnson, “Life as Prayer: The Development of Evelyn Underhill’s Spirituality,” Fuller Studio, https://fullerstudio.fuller.edu/life-as-prayer-the-development-of-evelyn-underhills-spirituality/,
Accessed 13 June 2018.
*** Robert
Gail Woods, “The Future We Shan’t See: Evelyn Underhill’s Pacifism,” Religion Online, https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-future-we-shant-see-evelyn-underhills-pacificism/, Accessed 13 June 2018.
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