Blood-red roses and things that are not men

Muriel Stuart

Few today have heard of the British poet Muriel Stuart, but she was regarded as one of the best—and perhaps most unconventional—of the women writers of the early twentieth century. Thomas Hardy wrote a letter that praised her poetry as “superlatively good,” and Hugh MacDiarmid asserted, “Her power derives from her complete individuality of perception and her forthrightness of utterance. She stoops at no trimming or concealing.”*

But direct forthrightness is not universally praised in women. In Post-Victorian Poetry (1938), Herbert Palmer acknowledges that Muriel Stuart was one of the most prominent poets in the years during the Great War and immediately following, but he adds, “She seemed something of an overflow from the Yellow Nineties** a sort of female Dowson** with a dash of Keats …. She was, in particular, a poet of physical passion, expressing, too, all the disillusionment that comes from it …. She is in some of her earlier verse, like [D.H.] Lawrence, a poet of the generative forces of earth, of that dark creative passion which defies human law and convention.”***

Stuart’s war poem “It’s Rose-time Here” opens with highly traditional, almost clichéd references to roses, posy-rings, and the “pomp of May.” These are images that could easily be mistaken for lines written in the High Victorian period. But in the middle of the poem, an appalling shift occurrs that merges roses with wet blood and “things are not men— / Things shapeless, sodden, mute.”

It’s Rose-time Here…
1918

Soul of the Rose (1908)
John William Waterhouse

It’s rose-time here . . .
How could the Spring
Be the same merry thing?
How could she sparkle April's posy-ring
Upon the finger of this widowed year?
How could she bring
Her gauds so pitilessly near?
How could she bear
To lead the pomp of May,
The primings and the promises of June
So near, so soon,
In the old happy way?
How could she dare
To prick the eyes of Grief
With mockeries of returning bud and leaf?
How could she wear
Such coloured broideries
Beside the tattered garments of despair?
Tenting the hills with April's canopies,
Setting the tulips’ spears . . .
How could she keep her tourneys through such tears?

She did not care . . .
The roses are as beautiful this year.
The lily never doffed
One golden plume, nor did the May renounce
One thrilling splendour, nor wear one pearl less.
She has not grieved—even a little space—
For those who loved her once—
For those whom surely she must once have loved.

It’s rose-time here . . .
While over there
Where all the roses of the world have blown
The blood is not yet dried upon their hair,
Their eyes have scarcely filmed against the moon,
The sun has not yet utterly gone out;
Almost the stained grass still
Is conscious of their breath—
Those heavenly roses, torn and tossed about
On the vast plains of Death.

Paths of Glory, CRW Nevinson
 © IWM ART 518

It’s rose-time here . . .
(How I shall always hate the Spring
For being such a calm, untroubled thing.)
While over there
Where there're no children left to pull
The few scared, ragged flowers,
All that was ours, and, God, how beautiful!
All, all, that once was ours
Lies faceless, mouthless, mire in mire,
So lost to all sweet semblance of desire
That we in those fields seeking desperately
One face long-lost to Love,—one face that lies
Only upon the breast of Memory—
Would never know it—even though we stood
Upon its breast, or crushed its dreadful eyes,
Would never find it—even the very blood
Is stamped into the horror of the mud:
Something that mad men trample under foot
In the narrow trench—for these things are not men—
Things shapeless, sodden, mute
Beneath the monstrous limber of the guns;
Those things that loved us once . . .
Those that were ours, but never ours again.

It’s rose-time here . . .
—Muriel Stuart 

Nosheen Khan admires Stuart’s skill in contrasting “seemingly sentimental context [with] the brutal realities of trench warfare,” and argues that Stuart's poem demonstrates “that women could vividly apprehend the putrefacient transmogrification that became many a lover's lot in the trenches.” Khan notes that while Wilfred Own denounces other war poets for their use of “euphemistic devices…. Stuart’s poem illustrates how such euphemisms could be adroitly used to decry war.”† 

"It's Rose-time Here" deliberately presents the romance of the idyllic pre-war pastoral so that it can be dismantled and discredited when contrasted with the gruesome realities of 1918: rotting bodies no longer recognizable as men lie scattered across the fields of Belgium and France. 

In 1923, Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, visited London and met with the most famous authors of the day, among them Muriel Stuart. Monroe recalls, 

Muriel Stuart was a new acquaintance, one whose personality fulfilled the promise of her two books of verse. After all it is illuminating to meet a poet-correspondent eye to eye—something in this lady confirmed the feeling our readers may have shared with me, that she is the most interesting of the younger English poets. Her first adventure in motherhood—in private life she is Mrs. Minnitt—had just been successfully passed when I reached London; she was not sure whether a book or a baby was the more important achievement.††

Perhaps Stuart had already begun to realize that the demands of domestic life threatened her work as a writer. After her second child, Stuart “gave up writing poetry and took to gardening.”††† She wrote two gardening books (Fool’s Garden, 1936 and Gardener’s Nightcap, 1938) as well as contributing to gardening magazines. As Virginia Woolf notes, without money and a room of one’s own, even the most talented women writers are likely to disappear from literary history.
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* The Hardy letter is frequently referenced, but the original seems to be lost. MacDiarmid’s comment appears in his essay “Muriel Stuart” (Scottish Educational Journal, 23 Oct. 1925).
** Yellow Nineties: from the literary journal The Yellow Book, the term is used to refer to the period’s permissiveness and avant-garde aesthetics. Ernest Dowson: a British poet associated with the Decadent movement.
*** Herbert Palmer, Post-Victorian Poetry, JM Dent, 1938, pp. 274–275.
† Nosheen Khan, “Women’s Poetry of the First World War,” thesis, University of Warwick, August 1986, pp. 96–97.
†† Harriet Monroe, “The Editor in England,” Poetry, Oct. 1923, v 23, n. 1, p. 38.
††† “Muriel Stuart,” biography from Persephone Books.