Song in That November

Charing Cross Station Detraining Wounded
Lobley J Hodgson,  ©IWM ART2758

In early May of 1916, Helen Mackay recorded in her wartime journal,

In other years also the spring was sad. There was always that exquisite lovely poignant sadness of spring. 

  These days are too beautiful. It seems as if one could not bear them. 

   I think it is because so much beauty makes one want happiness.

  One cannot understand, in such loveliness, why one is not happy.* 

Helen G. Edwards Mackay
from Find A Grave

Mackay, an American living in France and volunteering at Hôpital St. Louis in Paris, published a collection of vignettes that described her First World War experiences, Journal of Small Things (1917). She also published a small volume of war poetry, London, One November (1916). Read together, they describe a world reeling from the contradictions of war: glory contrasted with loss and mutilation; beauty juxtaposed with horror, destruction, and death.  As Margaret Higonnet writes of Mackay, “Her patterns of contrast and inversion capture social and psychological conflicts in wartime.”** One example of these contrasts and inversions is a poem Mackay wrote after visiting London in 1915.

Song in That November

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

and the daffodils shine in your ways,

and your thrushes sing,

and your walled winds swing,

down the gold of your glancing days,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London?

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

with the gift of all life in her hands,

with her laughs and her lights,

and her throbbing gold nights,

and the hour-glass singing the sands,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London? 

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

Out of the depths of your war and your mourning,

how can you pardon her promise of years?

—Helen Mackay 

The poem imagines Spring as a woman who visits the darkened wartime city of London, bringing light, laughter, and “the gift of all life in her hands.” But all of Spring’s gifts — from the delicate scent of daffodils to the song of thrushes and the glancing golden light — are fleeting and ephemeral. Every beauty and grace that is offered is set against the “hour-glass singing the sands.” 

In a world wracked and wrecked by war, Mackay understands the bitter ironies of springtime. Hope for a bright future seems cruel when set against the bleak lists of dead that fill the newspapers and the loss that permeates the city – the mutilated wounded who have returned and the absence of those who never will.

As Mackay explains in Journal of Small Things, in order to survive the daily traumas of war, “one has simply got to pretend.” Her entry “London, September” describes a scene on a train platform as soldiers are leaving for the war: 

 

Victoria Station 1918
Clare Atwood ©IWM ART2513

We all pretended as hard as we could that it was splendid.
There was a woman on the platform who must have been crazy, I think.
She did not belong to any one going out. She  was one of those dreadful things you see in London, with a big hat heaped with feathers, and draggled tails of hair. I think she had a red dress.
She came up to us under the windows of the train, and stood nodding her dreadful feathers and waving her dreadful hands and calling things out.
She called out, “Oh it’s all very fine now, you laugh now—but you won’t laugh long. You won’t laugh out there. And who of you’ll come back and laugh, my pretty boys, my gay boys?”

Nobody dared take notice of her. If any one of us had taken notice of her, nobody could have borne it. There seemed to be no guard about to stop her, and not one of us dared admit that she was there.*** 

Mackay’s account continues, “The crazy woman called out those terrible things, that were so true.” 

“Song in That November” also speaks truth as it describes the psychological strain that oppressed civilians; Mackay’s poem “Quinze Vingt” (posted earlier on this blog) bluntly reports the trauma inflicted on soldiers. In both poems, Mackay challenges pretense and lays bare sufferings that outlasted the war. 

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* Journal of Small Things, “May 3rd [1916],” p.168.

** Margaret R. Higgonnet, “Helen Mackay, American modernist: Finding a form for the Great War,” First World War Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2021, p. 203.

*** Journal of Small Things, “London, September,” pp. 31–32.