A Forest Offering

Attack Developing in the Champagne, Blanc Mont Sector 
Claggett Wilson, ca. 1919 Smithsonian American Art Museum

Soldiers’ accounts of the First World War are rich in descriptions of trees and woods, such as those at Ploegsteert, Delville, Mametz, Belleau, and High Wood. Lieutenant Richard Talbot Kelly fought at Loos, the Somme, and Arras, and he recalled, “To me, half the war is a memory of trees: fallen and tortured trees, trees untouched in summer moonlight, torn and shattered winter trees, trees green and brown, grey and white, living and dead.”*

Private Norman Edwards, serving with the 1/6th Gloucestershires, was also haunted by the woods of the Great War:

Thou Shalt Not Steal
John Singer Sargent, 1918

How can I describe the spell at Ploegsteert Wood, not the horrors of which I have just written, but the living impalpable beauty of that place? To the men of the 4th Division who captured it and held it in the winter it was doubtless a place of evil memory, but to us who were fortunate enough to occupy it in May when the earth was warm with spring and the enemy comparatively quiet, it was a peaceful spot. To turn one’s back to the parapet and watch the edge of the wood take on the pale golden glow of dawn, later to lie down amid the forget-me-nots in the warm sun or stand naked and bathe in a shell-hole filled with water, were experiences that aroused one’s aesthetic facilities to a high pitch. One realised how close one was living to nature ... and the thought that possibly each dawn might be the last accentuated the delight.** 

Before the war, F.W. Harvey roamed the hills and woods of Gloucestershire with his school friend Ivor Gurney. Both enlisted and served on the Western Front, and both were witnesses to trauma and death. Each man struggled in the war’s aftermath. Gurney was declared insane in 1922, living the next fifteen years of his life in mental hospitals until his death in 1937. Harvey married, had children, and continued to write poetry, but as his physician noted, “His years in the prisoner of war camp had inflicted psychic trauma from which he never really recovered. He had been permanently scarred. He was a war casualty although he would have been the last to admit it.”*** 

Ten years after the war’s end, Harvey composed a poem for those whom he had loved and lost to the war. According to researcher J.G. Repshire, Harvey recited the poem at the local Yorkley Armistice Day ceremony each year,† but the poem wasn’t included in any of Harvey’s subsequent poetry collections. Harvey died in 1954; the poem, along with letters, scrapbooks, and numerous other unpublished works, was found in 2010 in his home overlooking the Forest of Dean.****

To Old Comrades, A Forest Offering

Knowing that war was foul, yet all a-hunger

For that most dear companionship it gave,

Dirleton Memorial, East Lothian Courier

I wished myself once more on lousy straw;
And in a trice was there; and ten years younger, 
With singing soldiers scornful of the grave:
The tough mates, the rough mates that lay on lousy straw,
And since have laid them down in earth ...
                    I saw
Again their faces flicker in the light
Of candles fixed most dangerously in rings
Of bayonets stabbed in wooden beams, or stuck
Down into the floor’s muck ...     
                    The woods are bright  
With smouldering beech. Only a robin sings.
Alone to-day amid the misty woods,
Alone I walk gathering fallen leaves,
For it is Autumn and the day of the dead.
I come to where in solemn silence broods
A monument to them whose fame still rings
(Clear as a bugle blown) to him that grieves,

And lay my leaves for crown upon each head
Here, my old Forest friends, are your flowers!
Beautiful in their death as you in yours;
Symbol of all you loved, and were, and are.
Beautiful now as when you lived among us!
And in their heart I place this spotted fungus,
Symbol of war that slayeth all things fair.
    —F.W. Harvey

In the spring of 1930, Harvey published a newspaper article titled “Robbing the Soldier of His Treasured Memories,” in which he wrote, “The most lonely man in the world today is the old soldier. Most of his friends were killed. The newer generation growing up knows not him or his.”††  

In Gloucestershire, the county he loved, Harvey is still remembered as “The Laureate of Gloucestershire” or more simply, “The Forest Poet.” 

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* Richard Talbot Kelly, A Subaltern’s Odyssey: A Memoir of the Great War, 1915–1917, Kimber, 1980. 

** Norman Edwards, quoted in Richard van Emden’s Tommy’s Ark, Bloomsbury, 2010, p. 84. 

*** Bill Tandy, A Doctor in the Forest, quoted in Anthony Boden’s FW Harvey: Soldier, Poet, History Press, 2016, p. 413. 

**** With thanks to the family of FW Harvey and the Harvey Society for permission to share this poem. 

† James Grant Repshire, F.W. Harvey and the First World War: A biographical study of F.W. Harvey and his place in the First World War literary canon, dissertation 2016, Univ. of Exeter., p. 262. 

†† Cited in Repshire, p. 265. 

Hieroglyphic of silence

The Harvest Moon, Harvey Dunn (Smithsonian AF.25720)

 
Words are soldiers of fortune
Hired by different ideas
To provide an importance for life.
           —Maxwell Bodenheim, from "Sappho Answers Aristotle”* 

In 1914, twenty-two-year old Maxwell Bodenheim published his first work in Poetry magazine. That same year, his poem “The Camp Follower” was one of fourteen chosen for the magazine’s war issue. The magazine’s editor, Harriet Monroe, later recalled Bodenheim as a “blond youth [who] used to appear at the office now and then, bearing innocent young rhymes written out in an incredibly large round babyish hand.”**

Four years later, Bodenheim published his first poetry collection, Minna and Myself. His work was well reviewed, and his poems appeared alongside those of other rising young writers such as Carl Sandburg and TS Eliot. His poem “Soldiers,” first published in the Pagan Magazine Anthology (1918), was included in Minna and Myself.   

Soldiers

Early June morning, Claggett Wilson, Smithsonian

The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid
Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond.
The lips of one are twisted
To a hieroglyphic of silence.
The face of another is like a shining frog.
Another face is met by a question
That digs into it like sudden claws.
Beside it is a face like a mirror
In which a stiffened child dangles ... 

Dead soldiers, in a sprawling crescent,
Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentence. 
—Maxwell Bodenheim

The poem offers a vivid contrast to lines from TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets: Little Gidding” (1942),  in which Eliot writes, 

What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

In Bodenheim’s “Soldiers,” the dead communicate in messages of opaque distortion that are impossible to decipher. A fantastic creature who has perished in a small pond smiles fiercely, and the twisted lips of a dead man offer a “hieroglyphic of silence” — but the dead speak only in questions and “gravely” mocking sentences. 

In the Foreword to Minna and Myself, Louis Untermeyer wrote, 

Words, under his hands, have unexpected growths; placid nouns and sober adjectives bear fantastic fruit.... Among the younger men he has no superior in his use of the verbal nuance. But it is not merely as a word-juggler that Bodenheim shines. He has an imagination that he uses both as a tool and as a toy.... In the realm of the whimsical-grotesque, Bodenheim walks with a light but sure footstep.***

In 1925, Harriet Monroe reviewed Bodenheim and his work in Poetry magazine. While she praised Minna and Myself, she found less to admire in Bodenheim’s subsequent publications. She wrote, “One watches the development of his art with much the same feeling which a gaping crowd lavishes on a tight-rope athlete dancing over perilous abysses.” By this time, Bodenheim was better known for his boorish arrogance and lechery than his writing; Monroe concludes the review with questions about Bodenheim’s future: 

What drop of poison in this poet’s blood, embittering his thought, threatens to nullify the higher reaches of his art? .... What Freudian tragedy of suppression and deprivation through this poet’s childhood may have turned his blood to gall, and the wine of his satire to vinegar? Will he never work himself free of the inferiority complex which twists his art?† 

Today, Bodenheim may be best known for the circumstances surrounding his death.†† In February of 1954, after Bodenheim and his wife were found murdered in a flophouse, the New York Daily News reported, 

They found him with his mouth open and his eyes staring and a bullet hole in his chest, while near him lay his wife, with four knife wounds in her back. They lay, in the stiff and contorted attitudes of violent death, in a dirty furnished room, tenanted by an idiot and lout with the occasional thunder of a passing El train which, when it passes, drowns all sound, including poetry. ††† 

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* Maxwell Bodenheim, “Sappo Answers Aristotle,” Poetry, vol. 18, no. 2, 1921, p. 63.
** Harriet Monroe, “Maxwell Bodenheim,” Poetry, vol. 25, no. 6 (Mar. 1925), p. 320.
*** Louis Untermeyer, “Foreword,” in Minna and Myself, by Maxwell Bodenheim, Pagan, 1918.
† Monroe, “Bodenheim,” pp. 324, 326, 327.
†† See previous post on Bodenheim on this blog (“The Camp Follower”), particularly biographer John Strausbaugh’s comments.
††† Kermit Jaediker,“The Last Bohemian,” New York Daily News, 28 Feb. 1954. The full story can be read here.