A singing star in time's abyss

Edward Thomas

On the first day of the battle of Arras, April 9, 1917, Edward Thomas was killed by an artillery shell. He had arrived in France just months before and had been writing poetry for only three years (most of Thomas’s poems, such as “Rain,” were written between 1914 and his death).  Almost immediately following Thomas’s death, other writers wrestled their grief into words. Eleanor Farjeon wrote “Easter Monday (In Memoriam E.T.),” and Walter De La Mare composed a short poem of heart-aching beauty.  

To E.T.

You sleep too well—too far away,
   For sorrowing word to soothe or wound;
Your very quiet seems to say
   How longed-for a peace you have found.

Else, had not death so lured you on,
   You would have grieved — ’twixt joy and fear—
To know how my small loving son
   Had wept for you my dear.
        —Walter De La Mare (1918)

Four years later, in 1922, Ivor Gurney wrote “The Mangel-Bury,” which opens with a remembrance of Thomas:

        It was after war; Edward Thomas had fallen at Arras—
        I was walking by Gloucester musing on such things
        As fill his verse with goodness....*

Each of these poems can be read in the collection Elected Friends: Poems for and about Edward Thomas, compiled by Anne Harvey. One of my favorites is “The Golden Room,” by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, written in 1925. Gibson, Robert Frost, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Rupert Brooke were among the Dymock poets, a group of friends who lived in rural Gloucestershire, meeting for walks and dinners to share ideas, laughter, and poetry.  

The Golden Room

Do you remember that still summer evening
When, in the cosy cream-washed living-room
Of the Old Nailshop, we all talked and laughed—
Our neighbours from The Gallows, Catherine
And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;
Eleanor and Robert Frost, living in a while
At Little Iddens, who’d brought over with them
Helen and Edward Thomas? In the lamplight
We talked and laughed; but, for the most part, listened
While Robert Frost kept on and one and on,
In his slow New England fashion, for our delight,
Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,
And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes?

Wilfrid and Geraldine Gibson 
The Old Nailshop, Greenway

We sat there in the lamplight, while the day
Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers
Called over the low meadows, till the owls
Answered them from the elms, we sat and talked:
Now, a quick flash from Abercrombie; now,
A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas;
Now, a clear laughing word from Brooke; and then
Again Frost’s rich and ripe philosophy,
That had the body and tang of good draught-cider,
And poured as clear a stream.

’Twas in July
Of nineteen-fourteen that we sat and talked;
Then August brought the war, and scattered us.

Now, on the crest of an Ægean isle,
Brooke sleeps, and dreams of England: Thomas lies
’Neath Vimy Ridge, where he, among his fellows,
Died, just as life had touched his lips to song. 

And nigh as ruthlessly has life divided
Us who survive; for Abercrombie toils
In a black Northern town, beneath the glower
Of hanging smoke; and in America
Frost farms once more; and, far from the Old Nailshop,
We sojourn by the Western sea. 

And yes,
Was it for nothing that the little room,
All golden in the lamplight, thrilled with golden
Laughter from the hearts of friends that summer night?
Darkness has fallen on it; and the shadow
May never more be lifted from the hearts
That went through those black years of war, and live.

And still, whenever men and women gather
For talk and laughter on a summer night,
Shall not that lamp rekindle; and the room
Glow once again alive with light and laughter;
And, like a singing star in time’s abyss,
Burn golden-hearted through oblivion?
—Wilfrid Gibson, 1925**

Gibson and his wife, Geraldine, lived in The Old Nailshop, a thatched cottage in Greenway Cross, and Rupert Brooke came to stay with them in July of 1914. Within walking distance were the homes of Edward and Helen Thomas, and Robert and Elinor Frost. Eleanor Farjeon, a friend of the Thomases, relates the story of the night when she “drank all the poets in Gloucestershire under the table”: 

Everyone was wiping his eyes with laughter, and we finished the meal with the cheese. Mrs. Farmer rose. I rose, and Helen rose, and Elinor Frost. Mr. Farmer rose. The Poets attempted to rise, relapsed on to their seats, and regarded each other with comical consternation. They were perfectly sober, though exceedingly gay; but the gallons of strong cider, against which I had been inoculated, had gone to their legs, and not one of them could stand without support. I saw Edward and Robert stagger to their feet, clutch each other, and go down; they rose again with great caution, clinging together. On the other side of the table Gibson and Abercrombie were behaving similarly. Two brace of poets staggered out into the moonlight and went hilariously homeward like two sets of Siamese Twins.***

Gibson’s poem is a memorial to the summer of 1914, and its lines shimmer with repeated references to golden light. Cream-washed walls, clear West Country cider, warm laughter, and the magic of lamplight shine with promise and potentiality. 

Yet by August of 1914, the world had descended into war, darkness, and shadow. 

Gibson wrote “The Golden Room” over ten years after that idyllic summer, reflecting on the grief and loss of the intervening years. Abercrombie had accepted the position of Professor of English at the University of Leeds; Gibson and his family had moved to a coastal town in Wales; Brooke had been dead for a decade, and Thomas nearly that long. 

“And still....” 

So begins the last stanza of “The Golden Room.” In the poem's last lines, Gibson blesses future gatherings of friends and writers, comparing them to “a singing star in time’s abyss.” Bonds of love and comradeship will rekindle the lamp “whenever men and women gather / For talk and laughter on a summer night.”
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* The poem was The Guardian’s “Poem of the Week,” 27 April 2009, accompanied by a rich discussion by Carol Rumens. **
The poem was published in The Atlantic magazine’s February 1926 issue and in Gibson’s 1928 collection, The Golden Room and Other Poems.
*** Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, Oxford UP, 1958, p. 94.

Lament: the Trench Edition

There’s something extraordinary about holding an old book in your hands, wondering about its history and journey. This summer in an Oxford bookstore, I found a copy of Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men, published in September 1916. The small book was labeled “Trench Edition,” made particularly for soldiers: compact and light-weight, easy to pack in one’s kit. The front cover proclaimed the book to be “The most significant literary volume connected with the war: a revelation and an inspiration: of great individual and historic interest and value.” Few of the contributors were familiar to me, despite my research in obscure poetry of the First World War, so of course I purchased the book. But the real draw wasn't in the printed pages, but in the handwritten additions to the book. In careful script, someone—most likely a soldier—had copied five additional poems into the front and end pages.

The first hand-copied addition was Robert Nichols’ “At the Wars.” First published November 1917, it was reprinted in February 1918 in the popular anthology The Muse in Arms, edited by E.O. Osborn. The second poem added was William Watson’s “The Yellow Pansy,” published in 1917 in The Man Who Saw: and Other Poems Arising out of the War. The third was W.N. Hodgson’s “Before Action.” This poem must have been loved: although it is included in the text of the anthology, the first and third stanzas were also copied in the front of the trench edition, and a date was added beneath: June 29, 1916. This when the poem was first published in the weekly magazine The New Witness under the pen name Edward Melbourne. The poem's closing line is “Help me to die, O Lord.” Hodgson was killed two days later at the Somme.

In the end papers of the trench edition, two more poems were added in pen: Colwyn Philipps’ “Release” and a W.W. Gibson poem. Phillips' “Release,” like the Nichols’ poem, was likely copied from Osborne’s A Muse in Arms, because when Osborn published “Release,” he added the title that had not appeared in Philipps’ 1915 posthumous collection of poems. The Gibson poem, the last to be copied in the small anthology, first appeared in 1918 in Gibson’s collection Whin (a Northern dialect term for gorse). It was the last poem in Gibson’s collection, but it was copied without the title that Gibson gave it: “Lament.”  

Lament

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings—
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?
—Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

While he didn’t experience front-line combat, Gibson suffered greatly at the loss of friends who were killed in battle. A member of the Dymock poets along with Edward Thomas, Gibson tried to enlist in the British Army, but was rejected four times due to his poor health and bad eyesight.* In October 1917, he was finally accepted as a recruit in the Motor Transport Corps, serving the entirety of the war in England. 

We can only guess at the war experience of the owner of the Trench Edition of Soldier Songs. The hand-written poems added to the volume suggest that the book was owned by someone who was an avid reader of war poetry and who lived at least until early 1918 when Gibson’s poem was published.** Perhaps, too, the owner was a soldier who sought to find meaning and purpose in the overwhelming death and suffering; the Preface to the volume asserts, “The note of pessimism and decadence is altogether absent, together with the flamboyant and hectic, the morose and the mawkish. The soldier poets leave the maudlin and the mock-heroic, the gruesome and fearful handing of Death and his allies to the neurotic civilian who stayed behind to gloat on imagined horrors and inconveniences and anticipate the uncomfortable demise of friends.”***

But I am convinced that the owner of the book was someone who loved the countryside, who found solace in “An upland field when’s spring’s begun, / Mellow beneath the evening sun” (Nichols, “At the Wars”), in flowers blooming in frozen winter gardens (“Watson, The Yellow Pansy”), in “that last sunset touch that lay / Upon the hills when day was done” (Hodgson, “Before Action”), in “The vasty distance where the stars shine blue” (Philipps, “Release”) and in the “birds and winds and streams” made holy by the dreams of those who would never return home to the countryside they loved.
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* Gibson’s account, published in “The Development of Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s Poetic Art” by Geraldine P. Dilla, The Swanee Review, Jan. 1922, p. 39.
** According to Hogg’s thesis, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: People’s Poet, Gibson compiled the poems in August 1917 and published them late that year; the Times Literary Supplement reviewed Whin on 14 Jan. 1918. 
*** A characterization of civilian poets that I believe to be ungenerous and quite simply inaccurate (see my comments on Sassoon's "Glory of Women").

Retreat

Retreat from Mons

“The Great Retreat” is the name given to the forced march from Mons to the outskirts of Paris in late August and early September of 1914, the British Army’s longest retreat. The summer of 1914 was one of the hottest of the century, and the retreat was grueling and dangerous, as exhausted British troops attempted to escape the pursuing German Army. Men slept as they marched, some regiments covering nearly 250 miles in 13 days.  Describing the scene, historian John-Lewis Stempel wrote, “Some units lost all cohesion, some men lost all reason. One officer was so spooked he started firing his revolver at imaginary Germans in the street.”

The challenge of the war was not only to stay alive, but to remain sane.  While others would write of the tactics and topography of the retreat from Mons, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s short poem captures the interior landscapes of the mind.

Retreat

All-heal

Broken, bewildered by the long retreat
Across the stifling leagues of southern plain,
Across the scorching leagues of trampled grain,
Half-stunned, half-blinded, by the trudge of feet
And dusty smother of the August heat,
He dreamt of flowers in an English lane,
Of hedgerow flowers glistening after rain—
All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet.

All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet—
The innocent names kept up a cool refrain—
All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet,
Chiming and tinkling in his aching brain,
Until he babbled like a child again—
"All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet."

            --Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

Willow-herb (photo by Paul Lane)

The war has stripped these men of power and of sense.  Bewildered and dazed, the trained soldiers appear almost child-like as they march “half-stunned, half-blinded” in the stifling August heat. This is the retreat of the body. 

But there is also the retreat of the mind. Exhaustion and fear compel one man to escape into his imagination.  As he stumbles down the dusty roads of Belgium and France, he dreams of an English lane, “Of hedgerow flowers glistening after rain.” The sing-song chanted names of herbs and flowers distracts from the misery of the present moment as it comforts with memories of home and the peace of the countryside. 

Meadow-sweet

“All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet” -- like the refrain of a nursery rhyme or lullaby, the very sounds of the healing herbs and fragrant flowers calm and soothe. But no flight of the imagination could escape the actual toll of the retreat; over 15,000 men were casualties of the march, either captured, wounded, or killed.   

Today, the British Commonwealth Grave Commission invites visitors to travel the “Retreat from Mons Remembrance Trail” and learn of the cemeteries and memorials that commemorate the thousands of men who died on the Great Retreat.

Gibson created a different kind of memorial in “Retreat”; the poem also honors the memory of the men who “went ungrudgingly, and spent their all for us,” that we might “feel the heartbreak in the heart of things.”*

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*These lines are from Gibson’s poem “Lament.”

An intimate death

Written at the time of the American Civil War, Emily Dickinson’s poem “Success is counted sweetest” describes the frustrated longing of a soldier who dies on the field of battle minutes before the victory is secured.   Just over fifty years later, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson wrote of a similar moment in the First World War.  However, his poem “Victory” is far more intimate: the grand campaign of the war appears trivial and meaningless when compared to the death of a single ordinary man.  As Joseph Stalin was reputed to have said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

Victory

Last Message, F. Matania © IWM

I watched it oozing quietly

Out of the gaping gash.

The lads thrust on to victory

With lunge and curse and crash.

Half-dazed, that uproar seemed to me

Like some old battle-sound

Heard long ago, as quietly

His blood soaked in the ground.

The lads thrust on to victory

With lunge and crash and shout.

I lay and watched, as quietly

His life was running out. 

                        -- WW Gibson

In twelve short lines, the poem deftly sketches a moment in which the world is forever changed for two men, while the war rushes on without taking notice.  As in his poem “The Question” (previously shared on this blog), Gibson eschews the epic and heroic, and instead explores the experiences of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances. 

As “the lads thrust on to victory,” they leave behind two injured comrades-in-arms, one of whom is dying.  Apart from the din of battle, with its crashes, curses, and shouts, a man helplessly watches as the blood quietly oozes from the wounded body of his friend. 

The form and the language of the poem are unassuming, using only four rhymes, common diction, and repetition (lines 3 – 4 are echoed in lines 9 – 10).  Lacking heroic language and vivid imagery, the poem simply represents the inherent contradictions of the war: deafening battles are punctuated by moments of quiet focus, and underpinning every thrusting charge is the resigned acceptance of stasis and loss. 

There is a reverence in this one death among thousands, for it is witnessed, shared, and thus sanctified by the presence of a friend.   Perhaps the greatest irony of the poem is its title, “Victory,” for what the poem wants us to see and remember is the death of one common and nameless soldier. 

WW Gibson

Gibson repeatedly tried to volunteer for the army, but was rejected four times, until he eventually succeeded in being accepted as a Private in the Motor Transport Corps.  Later in the war, he served as a medical officer’s clerk, but was never sent abroad. Gibson wrote not from first-hand experience of the war, but instead shaped his poems from news accounts and the stories of soldiers he encountered.   His writing often displays a strong sympathy with the poor and the underprivileged, and he wrote his poems, he said, to “get at people” by highlighting the war’s personal tragedies.*

*Cited in Kendall’s Poetry of the First World War (64).

It's not all about war

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which “war poetry” and “WWI poetry” are labels that suggest that these poems are only about war and only for those interested in war.  The poems deserve a wider frame of interpretation, a less literal way of listening to their voices, a bigger space in which to breathe. 

Take for example, Wilfrid Gibson’s poem, “The Question.”  It appears almost in the middle of the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (2006), sandwiched in between “Ballad of the Three Spectres” and “The Soldier Addresses His Body.”  What is the question that Gibson’s title suggests?  Is he questioning the reasons behind the war?  The meaning of the death and suffering in the trenches?  Whether he will live or die?  Here’s the poem: 

The Question

I wonder if the old cow died or not.

 Gey* bad she was the night I left, and sick.

 Dick reckoned she would mend. He knows a lot--

 At least he fancies so himself, does Dick.

 Dick knows a lot. But maybe I did wrong

 To leave the cow to him, and come away.

 Over and over like a silly song

 These words keep humming in my head all day.

 And all I think of, as I face the foe

 And take my lucky chance of being shot,

 Is this -- that if I'm hit, I'll never know

 Till Doomsday if the old cow died or not.

Is this a war poem?  The question that haunts this man is the fate of an old cow.  Despite the very real possibility of his own looming death and his “lucky chance of being shot,” he’s thinking of the responsibilities and things he left behind.  "The Question" is a war poem, but it’s so much more than that.

The language of the poem explores the difficulty of giving up control:  “Dick knows a lot” and “He knows a lot” are repeated twice in the short poem, suggesting that the speaker doesn’t really believe that Dick is capable and needs the incantatory power of language to make it so.  It’s a poem as much about trust and surrender as about war. 

And it’s also a poem about getting stuck – as the poem begins and ends in the exact same place, with the refrain or “silly song” that won’t come unstuck:  “if the old cow died or not.”  Think back to the last time you had a silly song stuck in your head, or the time you couldn’t stop thinking about whether or not you’d turned off the stove, or the occasion on which you couldn’t stop turning over in your head a casual, hurtful comment that was made.  We’ve all become obsessed with questions and problems that we know are ultimately trivial.  Sometimes, it’s simply because we are shallow and overly concerned with surface details; sometimes, our obsession with the trivial becomes a way of coping with other realities we don’t want to face, or perhaps sometimes we just don’t have the experience or vision to see the full situation.  All we can think about is the fate of the old cow. 

Whatever this man’s reason for his nagging obsession, we recognize its humanness.  And we understand a bit better that even when he faces “the foe,” he cannot stop himself from looking back towards home, a time when he was the expert who could make a difference, the time before his war began.   

*“Gey” is a Northern dialect word from the Scots that describes a considerable quantity of something and can be translated by the word “very.”