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.*
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| © 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!
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| 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.”
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| Roland Leighton's grave |
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).
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