Bondage

Arthur Lewis Jenkins
Photo by Auxiliary Portrait Studio, Westminster

Arthur Lewis Jenkins joined the British Army in September of 1914 and was killed a little more than three years later on 31 December 1917 while flying a night patrol mission over Scotland. He was twenty-five years old. An anonymous review published in 1919 in the Times Literary Supplement states that Jenkins had been killed in the war, but had “lived long enough to die a poet.”* The Balliol College War Memorial Book’s tribute to Jenkins writes, “The war gave him a unity which he had not been able to find in earlier days.”** 

Mourners frequently try to find meaning in the war deaths of young men: a reviewer wrote about JH Stables and his poetry, “There could be no better school for a young poet who wants to shed the faults of youth than the trenches.”***

Here is Jenkins’ poem “Bondage,” written the year he died and published posthumously in his book of poetry, Forlorn Adventures. 

Bondage

“O, I am sick of ways and wars,
    And the homeless ends of the earth—
I would get back to the northern stars,
    To the land where I had birth,
And take to me a dainty maid,
    And a tiny patch of ground,
Where I may watch small green things grow,
    As the kindly months come round.”

"Shell Shock!" 
from The Hydra, Dec. 1917

“And shall no memory of old fights
    Of comrades tried and dear,
That sleep so sound in outland soil,
    Come back to mar your cheer?
No thought of sudden marches,
    And swift assaults at morn,
Come back to shake your hard-won ease
    In the land where you were born?”

“The wine of war is bitter wine,
    And I have drunk my fill;
My heart would seek its anodyne
    In homely things and still.
Nor shall my comrades grudge to me
    My lass and my hearthstone,
But come to talk beside my fire,
    Whenas I sit alone.” 

“God help you, friend, if you should find,
    The head you fain would rest
Has pillowed too long on a saddle tree
    To lie on a woman’s breast;
For the sad ends of all the earth,
    Where lightly peril moves,
They shall have power in their own hour,
    To call you from your loves.”
            —Arthur Lewis Jenkins, 1917

In the first and third stanzas, a weary soldier longs for home and dreams of future happiness to be found with a wife and a small garden to tend. But the second and fourth stanzas are spoken by a wiser, more sardonic voice that questions the possibility of ever leaving the war behind. This speaker cautions the young soldier that it will be impossible to purge his memories of trauma and death, for “They shall have power” at any time of their own choosing to disrupt his peace and separate him from those he loves.

Rather than presenting a unified personality, “Bondage” speaks of the division and alienation that many men suffered during and after the First World War. In the memorial volume For Remembrance, Adcock writes that Lieutenant A.L. Jenkins, “was still a dreamer, an idealist, whose ideal of happiness was not of a kind that could ever be won by the sword, but in the strange, sweet, immaterial something that he sighs after in Forlorn Adventures.”**** Yet Jenkins’ poem suggests he knew that whether he lived or died, any pre-war “ideal of happiness” was likely to prove elusive.

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* “Four Young Poets,” Times Literary Supplement, 23 January 1919, cited in J. Goldman’s “Following Bradshaw and Bishop into Jacob’s Room,” Feminist Modernist Studies, vol. 3, n. 1, 2020.
** Balliol College War Memorial Book, 1914–1918, Robert Maclehose and Co, Glasgow, 1924,  p. 295.
*** Katherine Tynan, “War Poets and Others,” The Bookman, Oct. 1916, p. 22.
**** A. St. John Adcock, For Remembrance: Soldier Poets Who Have Fallen in the War, Hodder and Stoughton, 1920, pp.218–219.