Sunday, September 10, 2023

The Dream, Part I

For a long time, people have hand-copied poems that they love. The scribing of a poem slows our reading of it; writing out a poem makes us pay closer attention to the nuances of words, sounds, line breaks, and punctuation. 

Roland Leighton, the Great War poet who is perhaps best known for his engagement to the memoirist and writer Vera Brittain, copied poems. Shortly after his enlistment in the British Army in 1914, his mother found in his room an exercise book in which Roland had written out a poem that had recently been published in the Westminster Gazette by the young Cambridge writer Kathleen Montgomery Coates.*

© The Vera Brittain Fonds,
McMaster University Library
The Roland Leighton Literary Estate

The first person who seems to have read Roland’s copy of Coates’ poem was his mother, Marie Connor Leighton.  In the anonymously published memoir that his mother wrote and dedicated to Roland after his death, she writes, “I read the lines through carelessly at first; but when I came to the third or fourth line I knew that if he was to get out to the Front and get killed this poem would haunt me always.”**

A Year and a Day

I shall remember miraculous things you said
        My whole life through –
Things to go unforgotten till I am dead;
  But the hundredfold, adorable ways of you,
The tilt of your chin for laughter, the turn of your head
   That I loved, that I knew –
Oh, while I fed on the dreams of them, these have fled!

Vera Brittain

Words which no time can touch are my life’s refrain,
   But each picture flies.
All that was left to hold till I meet you again,
        Your mouth’s deep curve, your brows where the shadow lies,
These are the things I strive to capture in vain—
   And I have forgotten your eyes,
And the way that your hair spun curls in the beating of rain! †
            —Kathleen Coates

Before leaving for the front, Roland talked with his mother about his own efforts at writing poetry and about his admiration for Vera, the sister of his good friend, Edward Brittain. Describing Vera to his mother, he said, “I like her tremendously. You would, too, if you knew her. She’s not like other girls. She’s brilliant and can think for herself. She wants to be a writer some day. But first she’s going to Oxford.”

His mother, “a prolific author of serial fiction and melodramatic novels” replied, “Going to Oxford isn’t the way for a woman to be a writer—except of treatises. But that’s beside the point.”***

Several months later, Roland copied “A Year and a Day” yet again, this time sending his copy to Vera Brittain in a letter dated 17 December 1914. Vera relates the story of the poem in her memoir Testament of Youth, but in her account, Roland sends her the poem in the autumn of 1915. As she tells the story, in mid-August of 1915, Roland was back from the Western Front on leave. They became engaged, and she met his family for the first time. One day, they walked by the sea, and discussed “the callousness engendered by war both at the front and in hospital.” That evening, she told him, “If I heard you were dead ... my first feeling would be one of absolute disbelief. I can’t imagine life without you.”

Roland replied abruptly, “You’d soon forget.” Vera retorted that she was not “one of the forgetting sort,” but that “if you died I should deliberately set out to marry the first reasonable person that asked me,” because “if one seems to have forgotten, the world lets one alone and things one is just like everyone else, but that doesn’t matter. One lives one’s outer life and they see that, but below it lies the memory, unspoiled and intact. By marry the first reasonable person that asked me, I should thereby be able to keep you. My remembrance would live with me always and be my very own.” 

Roland conceded the argument, and Vera writes, “indeed nothing else did seem to matter; for the time being each of us remembered neither the past nor the future, but only the individual and the hour .... Some weeks later he wrote to me from the trenches of that evening, and sent me, copied from the Westminster Gazette, a poem by Kathleen Coates called “A Year and a Day.”

Roland Leighton's grave
Vera Brittain includes the poem in her memoir, then comments, “Reminiscent as the lines were, they embodied my own failure of memory as well as his. Try as I would I could never, once we were apart, recollect his face, nor even in the silence of night hear his voice, with its deep notes and its gay, high laugh. I used to think that if, by closing my eyes or sitting in the dark, I could picture his eyes as they looked when I last saw them, or in imagination listen to him speaking, it would not be so hard to be separated. It is years now since I have been able to recall his face, and I know that, even in dreams, I shall never hear the sound of his voice.”****

In the same season that Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton were becoming engaged and discussing what their future might hold, Kathleen Montgomery Coates’s only brother was killed in France while on patrol. Basil Montgomery Coates died on September 7, 1915.  His sister’s poem “The Dream” expresses the deep sorrow of that loss and will be shared and discussed in the next blog post.

 
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* I have been unable to find the poem in the Westminster Gazette, and it appears that others have also failed in the search, as various sources state that it was written/published “between 1910 and 1913.”
**Marie Connor Leighton, Boy of My Heart, Hodder and Stoughton, 1916, pp. 176–177.
† The punctuation used in this version of the poem is that from Roland Leighton’s copy that he sent to Vera Brittain in a letter dated 17 December 1914 (from the First World War Digital Poetry Archive). In Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth, she changes the dash to a comma after vain and ends the poem with a full stop after rain.
***The information on Marie Leighton’s career as a writer is from Wikipedia. Her comments on Oxford as preparation for a woman’s career in writing is from Boy of My Heart, p. 179. 
**** Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, “Learning versus Life,” pp. 162 – 164, Virago, 2014 (first published in 1933). 



The Dream, Part II

Just four days before her twenty-fourth birthday*, Kathleen Montgomery Coates lost her only brother. Twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Basil Montgomery Coates was killed on the Western Front on September 7, 1915. He would have turned twenty-two on September 16th.

from Oundle Memorials
of the Great War

Kathleen Coates went to Cambridge in 1909 as a student at Girton College, earning her degree in Modern Languages in 1914. In 1912, she was joined at Cambridge by her younger brother, who was pursuing a degree in medicine at Queens College. When war broke out, Basil volunteered with the Rifle Brigade, arriving at the front in France in the early summer of 1915. He was dead within months.

Basil was shot while on patrol duty; his commanding officer wrote to the boy’s mother, 

Your son was killed yesterday (7 Sept.) while on patrol duty, and unfortunately we were unable to recover his body, which the Germans have taken into their lines, and which they will no doubt give an honourable burial. He was out patrolling with a Corpl. Fenton, crawling about in the crops, was seen by the enemy, fired on and killed, and the corporal crawled home about 300 yards with three bullet wounds .… A young officer called Everard went out with a man, and at very great personal risk got up to your son, but was fired at so persistently that he was unable to do anything towards moving him. As soon as it was dark another party, under Lieut. Sanstone, went out to the place to try to bring the poor boy in, but only found tracks through the corn, showing the way the enemy had taken him into their lines.**

The British were never able to recover his body.

In 1918, Kathleen Montgomery Wallace (she had married in 1917) published a collection of poetry titled Lost City.*** Its dedication note reads Cantabrigiae Mortuisque Carissimus (Cambridge and the beloved dead). The book is divided into two sections: Before and After. This poem appears in the second section of the volume: 

The Dream

Through the still streets whose windows were shut down

I wandered in a dumb and unknown town,

Where streets wound on and on, and had no name,

Where unseen fingers brushed my sleeve, and came

To a walled place of trees, and a voice said,

“Seek here, seek here, and you shall find your dead!”

And stopping down beneath the boughs asway

I found your name, and knew that there you lay.

And the blue twilight fell, and the cold dew,

While I lay in the grass and spoke to you ....

So, when I rose, “Now God be thanked,” said I,

“Who set my feet to find you, where you lie.

My own, my own, I shall not dream again

You lie uncoffined in the pitiless rain ....”

And woke; and knew I dreamed; and turned, to see

There, on my pillow, the old agony ....
        —Kathleen Montgomery Wallace

The poem expresses the empty despair of loss and the desperate ache for ritual and burial. Without that closure, like Antigone, the sister is haunted by the image of her beloved brother’s body left to decay in the “pitiless rain.” 

In October of 1918, the Bookman reviewed Lost City:

Youth Mourning, George Clausen
© IWM Art.IWM ART 4655
The war sets more and more poets to singing as over the battlefields the birds sing the louder because of the guns. Some of these poets sing to ease their own pain and bring a bruised sweetness to those who listen .... Here in a bundle of new books of poetry and verse one finds a slender paper-covered volume on which the understanding reviewer will fasten with the thrill of the discoverer.  It is Lost City by Kathleen Montgomery Wallace and to the mind of the present reviewer it makes a trilogy with Rupert Brooke and Rose Macaulay. It is a book of Cambridge and the Fen Country and of those who went from Cambridge, that city of youth, never to return ....  This woman’s poetry, haunted by the shades and beauties of the university town, speaks for itself.****

Kathleen Coates Wallace was one of many sisters who lost brothers in the First World War. In the poem “To L.H.B. (1894 – 1915),” Elizabeth Mansfield ’s also recounts a dream of her dead brother. In the dream, her brother appears to her beside a “remembered stream,” offering her berries with the words, “These are my body.  Sister, take and eat.” 

With no known burial place, Basil Montgomery Coates is commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial in Belgium, one of over 11,000 names. 
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*Kathleen Coates Wallace's obituary in the London Times (31 March 1958) states she was born in 1891; other sources give the year as 1890.
** From de Ruvigny’s Roll of Honour 1914–1918, http://mrcweb.org.uk/mrc2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Basil-Montgomery-Coates-report-of-death.pdf

*** Kathleen Montgomery Coates Wallace's poem "May Term, 1916" has been shared and discussed in this blog post. The post "The Dream, Part I" examines one of her pre-war poems. 
**** “New Books: The Singing Season,” Bookman, October 1918, No. 325, Vol. LV, pp. 16 – 17.