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). 

So tired

Edward Brittain, Roland Leighton, and Victor Richardson
 via First World War Poetry Digital Archive,
http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/1333

By late June of 1917, the Great War had dragged on for nearly 1,070 days, and there had been more death and suffering than anyone could have imagined when it began in August of 1914.  Great Britain was approaching the first anniversary of the worst day in its military history: one year earlier, on July 1, 1916, the Battle of the Somme began; 19,240 British soldiers were killed on the first day alone. 

In late spring of 1917, Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse Vera Brittain resigned from her duties and returned from Malta to nurse Victor Richardson, a close friend of her brother and of her dead fiancé, Roland Leighton. Together, the men were known as "the three Musketeers." Richardson had been blinded and disfigured from wounds received in an attack on Arras on April 9 of 1917; Vera was planning to marry him and serve as his caretaker for life. Before they were wed, his injuries worsened, and Victor Richardson died on June 9, 1917. Brittain’s short poem “Sic Transit” was written shortly after.*

Sic Transit

—V.R., died of wounds, 2nd London General Hospital, Chelsea, June 9th, 1917

I am so tired.
The dying sun incarnadines the West,
And every window with its gold is fired,
And all I loved the best
Is gone, and every good that I desired
Passes away, an idle hopeless quest;
Even the Highest whereto I aspired
Has vanished with the rest.
I am so tired.

            —London, June 1917

The poem’s title alludes to the Latin phrase “Sic transit gloria mundi” (Thus passes the glory of the world), a reference to the fleeting brevity of life. Brittain’s abbreviated poem restricts itself to the use of only two repeated rhymes. While in films and video games, war is often portrayed as an adrenaline rush of action, “Sic Transit” aches with numb exhaustion.

Vera Brittain

The Great War fed on youth and dreams; it devoured hope and sapped energy. Victor Richardson was twenty-two when he died; Vera Brittain was twenty-three when she found herself mourning the  death of yet another friend killed in battle.  Shortly after learning of Victor’s injuries, she had recorded in her diary, “I no longer expect things to go well for me; I don’t know that I even ask that they shall. All I ask is that I may fulfil my own small weary part in this War in such a way as to be worthy of Them, who die & suffer pain.”**

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*I am indebted to A Century Back for its insightful commentary on the circumstances surrounding the writing of the poem.

**Chronicle of Youth, excerpt from entry for April 18, 1917.

Perhaps

Christmas is supposed to be a season of comfort and joy, but many people struggle through the holidays, especially those who have lost someone they love.  The empty place at the table – the voice that will never be heard again:  despair and loneliness are too often the unwelcome guests at festive gatherings of families and friends.

Over one hundred years ago, in December of 1915, Vera Brittain, a young VAD nurse just shy of her 22^nd birthday (29 December), was excitedly awaiting a visit from her fiancé, Roland Aubrey Leighton. In the last week of November, Roland had written to Vera, “Just a short letter before I go to bed. The Battalion is back in the trenches now and I am writing in the dugout that I share with the doctor….Through the door I can see little mounds of snow that are the parapets of trenches, a short stretch of railway line, and a very brilliant full moon.  I wonder what you are doing. Asleep, I hope—or sitting in front of a fire in blue and white striped pyjamas? I should so like to see you in blue and white pyjamas.” 

Roland Leighton

On December 17^th, Vera received a message from Roland suggesting he might get his wish to see her -- pyjamas aren’t mentioned: “Leave from December 24 – 31^st.  Land on Christmas Day.” 

That Christmas Eve, Vera worked with other nurses filling soldiers' stockings with candy and nuts, and on the following morning, she attended Christmas communion at the hospital chapel, where she knelt to “thank whatever God there be for Roland and for all my love and joy.”

She then caught a train to Brighton, where she waited for her fiancé’s arrival.  With time on her hands, she wrote on December 26^th, “I walked along the promenade, and looked at the grey sea tossing rough with white surf-crested waves, and felt a little anxiety at the kind of crossing he had had.  But at any rate he should be safely in England by this time, though he probably has not been able to send me any message to-day owing to the difficulties of telephones and telegrams on Sunday & Christmas Day combined….So I only have to wait for the morrow with such patience as I can manage.” 

On Monday December 27^th she received news of Roland:    

“I had just finished dressing when a message came to say that there was a telephone message for me.  I sprang up joyfully, thinking to hear in a moment the dear dreamed-of tones of the beloved voice. But the telephone message was not from Roland...it was not to say that Roland had arrived, but that instead had come this telegram...'Regret to inform you that Lieut. R.A. Leighton 7th Worcesters died of wounds December 23rd...'"

Perhaps by Vera Brittain

(To R.A.L. died of wounds in France , December 23rd 1915)

Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,
And I shall see that still the skies are blue,
And feel once more I do not live in vain,
Although bereft of You.

Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet
Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,
And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.

Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.

Perhaps some day I shall not shrink in pain
To see the passing of the dying year,
And listen to the Christmas songs again,
Although You cannot hear.'

But though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.

On his last day of duty, Leighton had volunteered to proceed before his men into No Man’s Land, where they were repairing wire in front of their trench.  Almost immediately the target of German machine gunfire, he was severely wounded in the stomach and spine.  Carried by stretcher to a hospital clearing station, Roland died the next evening. 

Vera Brittain

On New Year’s Eve, Vera wrote her last diary entry for 1915: “This time last year He was seeing me off on Charing Cross Station after David Copperfield – and I had just begun to realize I loved Hjm.  To-day He is lying in the military cemetery at Louvencourt—because a week ago He was wounded in action, and had just 24 hours of consciousness more and then went ‘to sleep in France.”  And I who in impatience felt a fortnight ago that I could not wait another minute to see Him, must wait till all Eternity.  All has been given me, and all taken away again – in one year.  So I wonder where we shall be – what we shall all be doing – if we all still shall be – this time next year.” 

She writes that her friends, in an effort to help, “counselled patience and endurance; time, they told me with maddening unanimity, would heal.  I resented the suggestion bitterly; I could not believe it, and did not even want it to be true.  If time did heal I should not have kept faith with Roland, I thought, clinging assiduously to my pain, for I did not then know that if the living are to be of any use in this world, they must always break faith with the dead.” 

It would be interesting to know what John McCrae, the author of “In Flanders Fields” would have responded.   

Violets from oversea

"Summer & trenches don't go together somehow," Roland Leighton wrote to his sweetheart, Vera Brittain in April 1915. 

Later that month, Roland wrote to Vera and described a discovery he'd made while walking in Ploegsteert Wood (known to the Tommies as "Plug Street Wood").  Roland had found "the body of a dead British soldier hidden in the undergrowth a few yards from the path.  He must have been shot there during the wood-fighting in the early part of the War.   The body had sunk down into the marshy ground so that only the tops of the boots stuck up above the soil. His cap & equipment beside him were half-buried and rotting away."  Leighton ordered that the body be covered with dirt, "to make one grave more among the many in the wood" (Chronicle of Youth, 25 April 1915). 

The next day, Roland started a poem, and while on leave that August (during which time he and Vera became engaged), he showed Vera the finished villanelle that he had titled and dated: "Violets," April 25, 1915.  Her journal records, "I remembered how on that day he had written me a letter – he was then in Ploegsteert Wood—enclosing some violets from the top of his dug-out which he said he had just picked for me." 

Villanelle

by Roland Leighton

From the film Testament of Youth

Violets from Plug Street Wood,
Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue, when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head:
It is strange they should be blue.)

Violets from Plug Street Wood

Think what they have meant to me--
Life and Hope and Love & You
(And you did not see them grow
Where his mangled body lay
Hiding horror from the day;
Sweetest it was better so.)

Violets from oversea,
To your dear, far, forgetting land
These I send in memory,
Knowing You will understand.

The poignancy of the poem lies in the tension between two voices: a man writing to his sweetheart in a "dear, far, forgetting land," and a soldier talking to himself, trying to puzzle out how the horrors of war can coexist with simple flowers that recall "Life and Hope and Love and You" (this is the voice that speaks in the parenthetical comments). 

The soaked blood and mangled body of the dead man are literally entwined with the violets that are gathered for the "Sweetest" and sent to her in memory.  But in memory of what?  Do the violets recall the golden age of innocence and romance before the war?  Or are they sent in memory of the dead man whose body has lain forgotten for months?  There is a bittersweet irony in the poem's last line as it vows she "will understand." He knows she cannot fully grasp what he faces, because his darling "did not see" where the violets grew, hiding the horror of the neglected corpse. And yet the soldier is grateful for her ignorance:  "Sweetest, it was better so."   

By August of 1915, Roland was having difficulties in finding beauty anywhere on the Western Front.  He wrote to Vera, "I used to talk of the Beauty of War; but it is only War in the abstract that is beautiful.  Modern warfare is merely a trade." In September, he was even more direct about his altered opinion of the war:  "Let him who thinks that War is a glorious golden thing…let him look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been Its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half-crouching as it fell, supported on one arm, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped around it; and let him realise how grand & glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence. Who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?" 

Roland and Vera were to have been married during his Christmas leave that began December 24th, but while waiting expectantly for his arrival, she  received a telephone call informing her that Roland had died of wounds on December 23^rd.   He was buried in France in the Louvencourt cemetery.  The inscription on his headstone reads, "Goodnight though life and all take flight – Never goodbye."  The lines are a reference to a W.E. Henley poem that Roland had shared with Vera in a letter in May of 1915, describing how as he crossed a field in the starlight, a little poem of W.E. Henley's came into his head:  

            Goodnight, sweet friend, goodnight!

             Till life & all take flight

             Never goodbye.

He again alluded to the poem as he was returning to the Western Front after his August leave, sending Vera a telegram that read "Till we may live our roseate poem through," and a brief letter that read, "Nearly at Folkestone now.  I am trying not to think of it, but the thought will come.  Oh damn, I know it—

            Goodnight, sweet friend, goodnight!

            Till life & all take flight

            Never goodbye."

Vera Brittain visited Roland Leighton's grave twice, once in 1921, and again in 1933.  I'd like to think that she left violets.  

Roland Leighton, Louvencourt cemetery