Lament: the Trench Edition

There’s something extraordinary about holding an old book in your hands, wondering about its history and journey. This summer in an Oxford bookstore, I found a copy of Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men, published in September 1916. The small book was labeled “Trench Edition,” made particularly for soldiers: compact and light-weight, easy to pack in one’s kit. The front cover proclaimed the book to be “The most significant literary volume connected with the war: a revelation and an inspiration: of great individual and historic interest and value.” Few of the contributors were familiar to me, despite my research in obscure poetry of the First World War, so of course I purchased the book. But the real draw wasn't in the printed pages, but in the handwritten additions to the book. In careful script, someone—most likely a soldier—had copied five additional poems into the front and end pages.

The first hand-copied addition was Robert Nichols’ “At the Wars.” First published November 1917, it was reprinted in February 1918 in the popular anthology The Muse in Arms, edited by E.O. Osborn. The second poem added was William Watson’s “The Yellow Pansy,” published in 1917 in The Man Who Saw: and Other Poems Arising out of the War. The third was W.N. Hodgson’s “Before Action.” This poem must have been loved: although it is included in the text of the anthology, the first and third stanzas were also copied in the front of the trench edition, and a date was added beneath: June 29, 1916. This when the poem was first published in the weekly magazine The New Witness under the pen name Edward Melbourne. The poem's closing line is “Help me to die, O Lord.” Hodgson was killed two days later at the Somme.

In the end papers of the trench edition, two more poems were added in pen: Colwyn Philipps’ “Release” and a W.W. Gibson poem. Phillips' “Release,” like the Nichols’ poem, was likely copied from Osborne’s A Muse in Arms, because when Osborn published “Release,” he added the title that had not appeared in Philipps’ 1915 posthumous collection of poems. The Gibson poem, the last to be copied in the small anthology, first appeared in 1918 in Gibson’s collection Whin (a Northern dialect term for gorse). It was the last poem in Gibson’s collection, but it was copied without the title that Gibson gave it: “Lament.”  

Lament

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings—
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?
—Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

While he didn’t experience front-line combat, Gibson suffered greatly at the loss of friends who were killed in battle. A member of the Dymock poets along with Edward Thomas, Gibson tried to enlist in the British Army, but was rejected four times due to his poor health and bad eyesight.* In October 1917, he was finally accepted as a recruit in the Motor Transport Corps, serving the entirety of the war in England. 

We can only guess at the war experience of the owner of the Trench Edition of Soldier Songs. The hand-written poems added to the volume suggest that the book was owned by someone who was an avid reader of war poetry and who lived at least until early 1918 when Gibson’s poem was published.** Perhaps, too, the owner was a soldier who sought to find meaning and purpose in the overwhelming death and suffering; the Preface to the volume asserts, “The note of pessimism and decadence is altogether absent, together with the flamboyant and hectic, the morose and the mawkish. The soldier poets leave the maudlin and the mock-heroic, the gruesome and fearful handing of Death and his allies to the neurotic civilian who stayed behind to gloat on imagined horrors and inconveniences and anticipate the uncomfortable demise of friends.”***

But I am convinced that the owner of the book was someone who loved the countryside, who found solace in “An upland field when’s spring’s begun, / Mellow beneath the evening sun” (Nichols, “At the Wars”), in flowers blooming in frozen winter gardens (“Watson, The Yellow Pansy”), in “that last sunset touch that lay / Upon the hills when day was done” (Hodgson, “Before Action”), in “The vasty distance where the stars shine blue” (Philipps, “Release”) and in the “birds and winds and streams” made holy by the dreams of those who would never return home to the countryside they loved.
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* Gibson’s account, published in “The Development of Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s Poetic Art” by Geraldine P. Dilla, The Swanee Review, Jan. 1922, p. 39.
** According to Hogg’s thesis, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: People’s Poet, Gibson compiled the poems in August 1917 and published them late that year; the Times Literary Supplement reviewed Whin on 14 Jan. 1918. 
*** A characterization of civilian poets that I believe to be ungenerous and quite simply inaccurate (see my comments on Sassoon's "Glory of Women").