How alone

“Undaunted April crept and sewed
    Her violets in dead men's faces...”*

A previous post on this blog has shared Muriel Stuart’s “It’s Rose-Time Here, 1918,” a poem that mingles images of fragrant flowers with the wet blood of fallen soldiers and “things are not men— / Things shapeless, sodden, mute.” 

In her same collection (The Cockpit of Idols, 1918), Stuart included another poem that explores the burden of loss that those on the home front continued to bear, long after the war had ended. 

From World's Work
June 1922

When I grow old and my quick blood is chilled,
And all my thoughts are grey as my grey hair,
When I am slow and dull, and do not care,
And all the strife and storm of Life are stilled;
Then if one carelessly should speak your name
It will go through my body like swift spears
To set my fireless bosom in a flame,
My faded eyelids will be bright with tears;
And I shall find how far my heart has gone
From wanting you, how lost and long ago
That love of ours was: I shall suddenly know
How old and grey I am . . . and how alone.
—Muriel Stuart

Upon first reading, the poem seems to mourn the death of a soldier. But the war birthed another kind of loss: In his poem “They,” Siegfried Sassoon asserts that every man who has served “will not be the same.” And Vera Brittain, in her essay “War Service in Perspective,” also describes the “barrier of indescribable experience” that the First World War erected between the men who had fought and the women who loved them.  

Muriel Stuart Irwin married Guy Neville Minnitt in 1912. Little is known of Guy Minnitt’s war experience except that he served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force and survived the war. In 1923, Harriet Monroe wrote of meeting Muriel Stuart in London, noting that the writer 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.”** 

In 1926, Guy Minnitt and Muriel Stuart divorced. She remarried Arthur William Board in September of 1927 and never published another book of poetry. 

A biography of Stuart published on the Persephone Books website states,

Muriel Stuart was a successful and well-known poet during and just after the First World War (she is in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography because of her poems). She then had two children, gave up writing poetry and took to gardening with enormous enthusiasm and dedication. She wrote only two books, Fool’s Garden (1936), about creating a garden in Surrey, and the one we have chosen to reprint, Gardener’s Nightcap. After the war, for thirty years, she was a well-known columnist for gardening magazines. Although a great beauty, Muriel Stuart was shy and self-contained – and happiest in her garden.

What caused Muriel Stuart to exchange poetry for gardening? We will probably never know why one of the most promising young women writers, a poet whom Thomas Hardy described as “superlatively good” turned from poetry that reflected on “the weight of social expectations on women” (see for example her poems “Words” and “The Bastard” ) to prose and perennials.
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*from “Thèlus Wood” by Muriel Stuart, in Miscellany of Poetry, 1919, edited by W. Kean Seymour.
** “The Editor in England” by Harriet Monroe, Poetry, Oct. 1923, v 23, n. 1 p. 38.