Last of the leaves

Autumn Leaves, Millais

Melancholy and beautiful, “The Leaf Burners” is one of my favorites of the lost poems of the First World War.  The poem’s meditative tone, alliterative sounds, and kennings – compound words used to rename nouns, such as “tree-shaker” for the wind – recall the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, a distant warrior culture that found meaning and solace in the natural world.

The Leaf Burners

Under two oak trees

      on top of the fell,

With an old hawthorn hedge

      to hold off the wind,

I saw the leaf burners

      brushing the leaves

With their long brooms

      into the blaze.

Above them, the sky

      scurried along

Pale as a plate,

      and peered thro' the oaks,

While the hurrying wind

      harried the hedge.

But fast as they swept

      feeding the leaves

Into the flame

      that flickered, and fumed,

The wind, the tree-shaker,

      shaking the boughs,

Whirled others down

      withered and wan —

Summer's small folk,

      faded, and fain

To give up their life;

      earth unto earth,

Ashes to ashes,

      life unto death.

Far on the fell,

      where the road ran,

I heard the men march,

      in the mouth of the wind:

And the leaf burners heard

      and leaned down their heads,

Brow upon broom,

      and let the leaves lie,

And counted their kin

      that crossed over sea,

And left wife and wean,

      to fight in the war.

Forth over fell,

      I fared on my way ;

Yet often looked back,

      when the wind blew,

To see the flames coil

      like a curl of bright hair

Round the face of a child —

      a flower of fire,

Beneath the long boughs

      where, lush and alive,

The leaves flourished long,

      loving the sun.

Much I thought then

      of men that went forth,

Or dropt like the leaves,

      to die and to live;

While the leaf burners

      with their long brooms

Drew them together

Connaught Road Cemetery, photo by Julie Thomson

      on the day of their death.

I wondered at that,

      walking the fell —

Feeling the wind

      that wafted the leaves

And set their souls

      free of the smoke,

Free of the dead,

      speeding the flame

To spire on the air —

      a spark that should spring

In me, man of men;

      last of the leaves.

            -- Ernest Rhys

The poem describes a simple country scene as winter approaches: leaf burners use long brooms to push fallen leaves onto a bonfire.  As the leaf-burners work, they are watched by a sky that scurries along, “pale as a plate,” by the hurrying wind, and by a solitary wanderer or fell-walker (fell is a dialect word used in northwest England to refer to a hill or area of high land). 

As fast as they sweep, the leaf-burners cannot keep up with the leaves that are continually dropping, whirled by the wind, “withered and wan.”  Fallen leaves, and fallen men on the battlefield -- the poem joins the two.  The brown leaves that were once young and green, “Summer’s small folk,” are now faded, and yet they are willing – even pleased – to “give up their life.” The phrase “ashes to ashes,” although describing the burned leaves, also recalls the Anglican burial rite and reminds us that in the midst of death, there is the promise of resurrection: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12: 7). 

From the hillside, the leaf-burners hear on the nearby road, "in the mouth of the wind," the marching steps of men walking to war.  The sound causes the leaf-burners to pause, resting “brow upon broom,” as they remember their loved ones who have “left wife and wean” to fight in the Great War (wean is a Northern English/Scottish term for an infant).  The lonely hill walker also pauses to remember the millions of missing soldiers who, like the leaves, were once “lush and alive…loving the sun.”  The wanderer likens the men to the leaves, hoping that the countless soldiers’ sacrifice was not meaningless, but that they dropt “to die and to live,” their souls set free from their bodies to soar like sparks above the bonfire.  

Ernest Rhys, a Welsh-English writer, published “The Leaf Burners” in 1918.  Better known as the founder of the Everyman Library, Rhys is largely forgotten as a poet, with the exception of “Lost in France,” (or “Remembering Jo”) a short poem that was included in the 2014 Poems on the Underground.  The only record I can find of “The Leaf Burners” having been reprinted was in the Golden Book of Modern English Poetry (1936) -- and this information was shared with me by a blog reader. The poem has since been included in International Poetry of the First World War (2020). 

Ernest Rhys

Remembering Jo

If not for the context in which Ernest Rhys' poem originally appeared (more on that later), "Jo's Requiem" would not be easily identifiable as a war poem at all.  The poem offers no description of the First World War:  not of the trenches, nor of the suffering and death that occurred there. 

Instead, this is a poem that is firmly grounded in the English countryside.  There, a man simply named Jo earns his strength behind a plow, watches with sharp-eyed vision for birds that might threaten his newly sown seed, and is so attuned to his land that "He could hear the green oats growing,/and the south-west wind making rain."  I'd like to meet that man. 

XX

Jo's Requiem

by Ernest Rhys

He had the ploughman's strength
in the grasp of his hand;
he could see a crow
three miles away,
and the trout beneath the stone.
He could hear the green oats growing,
and the south-west wind making rain.
He could hear the wheel upon the hill
when it left the level road.
He could make a gate, and dig a pit,
and plough as straight as stone can fall.
And he is dead.

Unknown British soldier*

We learn that Jo has spent a lifetime in learning to read the subtle signs of life that surround him, spotting even "the trout beneath the stone."  His actions are neither noble nor heroic, yet he masters the world around him with skill and honest work, in making and digging. 

And he is dead.  The last line of the poem breaks with all that has gone before and ends as abruptly a sniper's bullet or an artillery shell.  We are not told if Jo fell "straight as stone can fall."  It doesn't matter how it happened:  the details of his death are irrelevant as they will not change the reality of it. 

The poem's bare closing statement heartbreakingly expresses the utter finality of death.  As Robert Frost writes in "Out, Out—", a poem of unexpected death on a farm, "No more to build on there." 

"Jo's Requieum" does not argue with death, nor does it attempt to glorify or justify the cause for which this man died.  The poem deliberately refuses any explicit attempt at making meaning of Jo's death.  What we are asked to see in the poem is one country man and his life, not the scope of the war or the nameless and faceless mass of the millions who died. 

Implicitly, however, there is a sense of injustice underlying the stark contrast of the poem's first eleven lines and its final sentence.  Strength and keen-sightedness were not enough to save Jo, nor were his practical talents, resourcefulness, and listening ear.  The poem doesn't try to explain Jo's death, for no sense can be made of a senseless war in which over nine million died.  The poem only asks us to remember and to mourn, as signaled by its brief title, "Jo's Requiem." 

Unknown British soldiers*

Curiously, the poem at some point was retitled "Lost in France."  First published as "Jo's Requiem" in Rhys' volume of poetry The Leaf Burners (1918), it appeared as the last poem in a series of twenty related verses entitled "The Tommiad." The title of the verse sequence is a play on the Iliad, suggesting an epic about British Tommies, the name given to British infantry soldiers.  But Ernest Rhys was a Welsh writer, and the title of the verse sequence may also be a play on the Welsh word tomi, "to spread dung" or "to bespatter with dirt," suggesting a much less glorious view of the First World War.  

"Jo's Requiem" was retitled "Lost in France" as early as 1945 in a British anthology titled Soldiers' Verse.  For a while, the two titles appeared together, with "Lost in France" as the main title and "Jo's Requiem" as the subtitle.  Most recently, the subtitle has disappeared altogether.  Several years ago, the poem appeared on the London Underground as "Lost in France," marking Remembrance Day. 

But the title change is significant:  it alters the poem from being a tribute to a single, knowable man to a more abstract comment on an enormous and indecipherable war. 

It is said that history repeats itself, and as actually happened in the First World War, the name of this man is being erased from memory. 

Rest in peace, Jo. 

*These photos and others were found several years ago in the loft of a barn in France, discarded as trash.  To read more, visit the Independent's web article "Unseen Photographs."