Spring the Cheat

A previous post on this blog shared Sara Teasdale’s “Spring in War-Time,” a poem that ironically juxtaposes spring battle offensives with the regeneration and rebirth most often associated with the season.  In “Spring the Cheat,” British author Winifred Letts contrasts the promise of spring with the devastating losses felt by those on the home front.

Spring the Cheat

The wych-elm shakes its sequins to the ground,

With every wind the chestnut blossoms fall:

Down by the stream the willow-warblers sing,

And in the garden to a merry sound

The mown grass flies.  The fantail pigeons call

And sidle on the roof; a murmuring

Of bees about the woodbine-covered wall,

A child’s sweet chime of laughter – this is spring.

Luminous evenings when the blackbird sways

Upon the rose and tunes his flageolet*,

A sea of bluebells down the woodland ways,--

O exquisite spring, all this—and yet—and yet—

Kinder to me the bleak face of December

Who gives no cheating hopes, but says—“Remember.”

            —Winifred Letts

Blossoms fall from trees like sequins, birdsong echoes in woods and streams, bees drowsily buzz their bass note as children’s treble laughter fills the scented air – but all is out-of-tune with the bleak mood of those who mourn. The renewal of the natural world merely underscores what has been lost forever: beloved men who were killed in the Great War. 

Winifred Letts, a certified medical massage therapist, enlisted as a Volunteer Aid Detachment nurse and worked in military hospitals through much of the war. Other poems by Letts that have been previously posted on this blog include “If Love of Mine,” “Hallow-e’en, 1915,” “July, 1916,” and “Screens (In a Hospital).”

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*Flageolets are woodwind instruments; small versions known as “bird flageolets” were used to teach captive songbirds to sing.

Ghosts of the Great War

Ghosts of Vimy Ridge by William Longstaff 

“People see ghosts, they see images of their mothers, they see dead comrades,” Canadian historian Tim Cook reports from his archival research of First World War letters and diaries.* For example, Sergeant Frank S. Iriam’s description of the Western Front, taken from his memoir, In the Trenches 1914-1918, provides one such account of the supernatural:

This part of the line had a weird and gruesome look that seemed to whisper of death and devastation. The very ground here seemed to speak and the night wind seemed to pluck at your sleeves and counsel you beware. You could feel the pulse of the thousands of the dead with their pale hands protruding through the mud here and there and seeming to beckon you .... You could feel the presence of something not of this earth. Akin to goblins.**

Winifred Letts, an Anglo-Irish writer who served as a VAD and a masseuse for wounded soldiers, published a collection of war poetry in 1916 titled Hallow-e’en and Poems of the War. “Halloween, 1915,” describes those on the home front who welcome the “ghosts of our well-beloved dead.” A previous post on this blog also discusses the popularity of spiritualism during the First World War.  Letts’ poetry includes numerous references to the spirit world; one example is her twilight-lit, melancholic poem “If Love of Mine.” 

If Love of Mine

If love of mine could witch you back to earth

It would be when the bat is on the wing

The lawn dew-drenched, the first stars glimmering,

The moon a golden slip of seven nights’ birth.

If prayer of mine could bring you it would be

To this wraith-flowered jasmine-scented place

Where shadow trees their branches interlace;

Phantoms we’d tread a land of fantasy.

If love could hold you I would bid you wait

Till the pearl sky is indigo and till

The plough show silver lamps beyond the hill

And Aldebaran† burns above the gate.

If love of mine could lure you back to me

From the rose gardens of eternity.

            —Winifred Letts

In her poem “Loss,” Letts writes, “In losing you I lost my sun and moon / And all the stars that blessed my lonely night.” The poem concludes, “I lost the master word, dear love, the clue /That threads the maze of life when I lost you.”

It wasn’t only the dead who were lost; survivors also often found themselves buried by grief and adrift in cultural changes resulting from the war. In 1957, Letts described herself as “a period piece, a has-been, totally unknown to this generation.”†† 

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* Tristan Hopper, “Soldier diaries tell of ghosts intervening in First World War,” National Post, 28 May 2014, https://nationalpost.com/news/soldier-diaries-tell-of-ghosts-intervening-in-first-world-war-canadian-historian, Accessed 27 Oct. 2018.

** Glenn R. Iriam, “Ypres Salient,” In the Trenches 1914-1918, eBookIt, 2011. 

† Aldebaran (or Alpha Tauri) is the brightest star in the constellation of Taurus (it is the red star that marks the bull’s eye).  The “plough” named in the previous line alludes to one of the most famous constellations in the night sky, known in the United States as “the Big Dipper.”

†† Bairbre O’Hogan, “Winifred M. Letts,” Herstory, http://www.herstory.ie/news/2017/8/8/winifred-letts-playwright-poet-novelist, Accessed 27 Oct. 2018.

Hallowe'en

Detail "Menin Gate at Midnight by Longstaff (photo Maria Jintes)

In the fall of 1916, a soldier from the Western Front returned to England on leave and recounted an unsettling experience:

Towards the end of September, I stayed in Kent with a recently wounded First Battalion friend. An elder brother had been killed in the Dardanelles, and their mother kept the bedroom exactly as he had left it, with the sheets aired, the linen always freshly laundered, flowers and cigarettes by the bedside. She went around with a vague, bright religious look on her face. The first night I spent there, my friend and I sat up talking about the war until past twelve o’clock. His mother had gone to bed early, after urging us not to get too tired. The talk had excited me, and though I managed to fall asleep an hour later, I was continually awakened by sudden rapping noises, which I tried to disregard but which grew louder and louder. They seemed to come from everywhere. Soon sleep left me and I lay in a cold sweat. At nearly three o’clock, I heard a diabolic yell and a succession of laughing, sobbing shrieks that sent me flying to the door. In the passage I collided with the mother who, to my surprise, was fully dressed. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘One of the maids had hysterics. I’m so sorry you have been disturbed.’ So I went back to bed, but could not sleep again, though the noises had stopped. In the morning I told my friend: ‘I’m leaving this place. It’s worse than France.’ There were thousands of  mothers like her, getting in touch with their dead sons by various spiritualistic means.^[i]

The First World War saw a dramatic surge in spiritualism, and in their desperate wish to communicate with the dead, many of the grieving turned to Ouija boards, mediums, and séances.[ii]  It’s no surprise then that many poems of the First World War are also peopled with ghosts. 

HALLOW-E'EN, 1915

Septembre, Francois Cachoud

Will you come back to us, men of our hearts, tonight

In the misty close of the brief October day?

Will you leave the alien graves where you sleep and steal away

To see the gables and eaves of home grow dark in the evening light?

"O men of the manor and moated hall and farm,

Come back to-night, treading softly over the grass;

The dew of the autumn dusk will not betray where you pass;

The watchful dog may stir in his sleep but he'll raise no hoarse alarm.

Then you will stand, not strangers, but wishful to look

Frank Jenkins, died July 1, 1916

At the kindly lamplight shed from the open door,

And the fire-lit casement where one, having wept you sore,

Sits dreaming alone with her sorrow, not heeding her open book.

Forgotten awhile the weary trenches, the dome

Of pitiless Eastern sky, in this quiet hour

When no sound breaks the hush but the chimes from the old church tower,

And the river's song at the weir, -- ah! then we will welcome you home.

You will come back to us just as the robin sings

Nunc Dimittis from the larch to a sun late set

In purple woodlands; when caught like silver fish in a net

The stars gleam out through the orchard boughs and the church owl flaps his wings.

We have no fear of you, silent shadows, who tread

The leaf-bestrewn paths, the dew-wet lawns. Draw near

To the glowing fire, the empty chair, we shall not fear,

Being but ghosts for the lack of you, ghosts of our well-beloved dead.

            --Winifred M Letts

In Letts’ poem, the silent shadows of the men who have died appear not as frightening ghosts, nor as strangers, but as “men of our hearts” who have returned to the places they have loved. The quiet spirits who come “treading softly” are tenderly welcomed.  They are urged to come out of the darkness and into the “kindly lamplight” of home where they may find shelter and solace under familiar gables and eaves.  The beloved ghosts are invited once again to occupy “the empty chair,” and draw near “the glowing fire.”  

In the magical twilight of Halloween, both the dead and the living wish nothing more than to forget for a while  the pain and sorrow of “the weary trenches.”  In this spellbound time, supernatural grace suffuses the natural world too, as stars gleam “like silver fish caught in a net” and the robin sings “Nunc dimittis” like a choir boy at Evensong: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” And most precious of all, in this world of magical thinking is the assurance, “we will welcome you home.”

The poem discloses the deep bond of kinship between the souls of the war dead and those who, “dreaming alone with…sorrow,” grieve for them at home.  All have been transformed into ghosts, and all are united in the empty, lost futures that stretch before them.  With sad confidence, the voice of the poem can say, “We have no fear of you” – for the horror is to be found in the war, not in its dead. 

#WeAreHere, photo by Rachel Dacre

On July 1, 2016, groups of men dressed as First World War soldiers walked the streets and sidewalks of Great Britain in silence.  Appearing in shopping malls, train stations, and parks, the “ghost soldiers” were largely silent except for occasionally joining together to sing the trench song “We’re Here Because We’re Here.”  The commemorative tribute was inspired “in part from tales told during and after the First World War by people who believed they had seen the ghosts of loved ones they had lost.”[iii]

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[i] Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1929.  The soldier he visited was Siegfried Sassoon. 

[ii] To learn more about Spiritualism during the war, see “’A solace to a tortured world…’—The Growing Interest in Spiritualism during and after WW1” by Suzie Grogan, published online at World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings. 

[iii] “Secrets behind #WeAreHere revealed” by Ann Gripper, Rod McPhee, and Nicola Oakley.  The Mirror, 1 July 2016.