Let us forget

The Deluge (1920) by Winifred Knights
The Tate Museum, T05532

Over a century after the end of the First World War, “Lest We Forget” is an often-repeated phrase, urging that the tragedies of war be remembered in commemoration*. But during the war itself, both those on the fields of battle and on the home front often wrote of their deliberate efforts to forget. 

British soldier Ivor Gurney writes in “To His Love” “Cover him, cover him soon! / And with thick-set / Masses of memoried flowers— / Hide that red wet / Thing I must somehow forget,” while the last stanza of Rose Macaulay’s  “Picnic July 1917” describes civilians’ efforts to block thoughts of the conflict:   

Oh, we’ll lie quite still, not listen nor look,
While the earth’s bounds reel and shake,
Lest, battered too long, our walls and we
Should break … .should break….

Mental disassociation from the trauma of war was critical to emotional stability—dwelling on the realities of war could lead to madness.   

Less than one month before peace was declared, American writer Sara Teasdale composed a poem that she never published. “Autumn Night 1918,” dated September 13, 1918, is recorded in Teasdale’s notebooks, now part of the Sara Teasdale collection at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.**

Autumn Night 1918

Encounter in the Darkness (1919), Claggett Wilson
Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1981.163.5

Let us forget! The night smells fresh,
The park is quiet, the stars are white—
They are fighting, the youth of the world are dying—

Let us forget! Kiss me to-night,
It is autumn now the whole world over,
Run down this path with me, let us forget!
Over the sea they are dying—kiss me,
Never mind if my lashes are wet.

In the lamp-light see two scarlet branches!
What is that ghostly thing under the tree?
Only a wild white aster stirring
In a wind blown westward over the sea.

Listen, the wind is moaning in trouble,
It brings what dying soldiers say,
Crying out from the bloody stubble
To women three thousand miles away.
—Sara Teasdale

The speaker’s repetition of “let us forget” signals that this is impossible. Neither a lover’s kisses nor flight down a forested path can erase the news of the war and its millions of dead. Humans have destroyed their connection with the natural world, and the comforts of the pastoral are meaningless in the face of industrial war. Trees, flowers, and the wind itself offer only traitorous reminders of corpses, bloody fields, and dying men’s moans. 

“Autumn Night 1918” offers a fascinating contrast with Teasdale’s better-known poem “There Will Come Soft Rains.” In the latter, the natural world is indifferent to humans, not caring nor deigning to remember whether “mankind perished utterly.” Yet in “Autumn Night 1918,” while the natural world appears to conspire in reminding men and women of the costs of war, an underlying message of the poem suggests that although nature may forget the war, people are incapable of doing so, especially when this is what is most vehemently desired. 

Distance from the battlefield does not protect civilians from the consequences and horrors of the war, and survivors are never discharged from the duty of bearing the burden of loss. 

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* "Lest We Forget" was first used in Rudyard Kipling's 1897 poem "Recessional."
** This post is deeply indebted to Melissa Girard’s research on Teasdale’s First World War poetry. Girard’s compelling scholarship deserves a much wider audience; her essay “‘How Autocratic Our Country Is Becoming’: The Sentimental Poetess at War” can be read online. It is drawn from her dissertation Lines of Feeling: Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality (U of Illinois, 2009). 

Spring in War-Time

Throughout the First World War, the coming of spring brought with it the renewal of military offensive action.*  In 1915, American poet Sara Teasdale exposed the incongruity of resuming the killing during earth’s season of growth and rebirth. 

Spring in War-Time

Thou Shalt Not Steal, John Singer Sargent
© IWM (Art. IWM ART 1609)

I feel the spring far off, far off,
      The faint, far scent of bud and leaf—
Oh how can spring take heart to come
      To a world in grief,
      Deep grief?

The sun turns north, the days grow long,
      Later the evening star grows bright—
How can the daylight linger on
      For men to fight,
      Still fight?

The grass is waking in the ground,
      Soon it will rise and blow in waves—
How can it have the heart to sway
      Over the graves,
      New graves?

Under the boughs where lovers walked
      The apple-blooms will shed their breath—
But what of all the lovers now
      Parted by death,
      Gray Death?

            —Sara Teasdale, 1915 Rivers to the Sea

The poem contrasts lovers and graves, apple-blossoms and the grayness of death, underscoring  the terrible irony of war-time spring offensives with the abbreviated, truncated lines that conclude each stanza. In the spring of 1917, as America prepared to enter the war, Teasdale wrote to her sister-in-law, “The feeling here is growing more and more acrid all the time.” Commenting on public displays that supported the war, she continued,

How much of this is bona fide patriotism, I don’t know. It makes me heart-sick for it represents such terrible loads of sorrow to be borne later when our men are maimed and killed by the thousands.  It is staggering when one thinks of the four thousand years of so-called civilization on this planet—that it culminates now in the most brutal and tremendous bloodshed that the world has ever seen.*

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* For an example of a poem that celebrates war in springtime, see Rawnsley’s “Going to the Front,” which begins,

      I had no heart to march for war
      When trees were bare and fell the snow;
      To go to-day is easier far
      When pink and white the orchards blow…
Teasdale's poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1920) can also be found on this blog. 

**Qtd. in William Drake, Sara Teasdale, Woman and Poet, U of Tennesee Press, 1989, p. 169.

Not one will care at last when it is done

In 1920, two years after the Great War had ended, American poet Sara Teasdale published a poem about spring rains. In 1950, science fiction author Ray Bradbury, inspired by her poem, published a short story with the same title.   

There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Like a fragile robin's egg, the 12-line poem breaks into two halves, the first six lines offering up the variety and vitality of spring, while the last six catalog emptiness and loss. 

The inverted syntax of the poem's title and first line places time in its future tense before the mention of rain, for this is a meditation on time, war, and memory.  The poem looks ahead to the future, and as it does so, it reinterprets many of the images that had been darkly associated with the First World War.  Unlike the "wild rain" of Edward Thomas's poem, the showers of Teasdale's poem are "soft." Unlike the "obscene, the filthy, the putrid" mud of Mary Borden's poem, in Teasdale's lyric, the "smell of the ground" carries the life-giving scent of the spring.  And unlike the "stiff and senseless" chum described in Rickword's "Trench Poets," whose unburied body recalls men who hung on the barbed wire of No Man's Land, in Teasdale's poem, robins perch on fence wire, "whistling their whims." 

In the shimmering sound of the swallows and the evening songs of the frogs, Teasdale asks us to listen as sweetness and harmony return to the world. 

But the second half of the poem echoes three times the words "not one":  not one will be left to know of the war, to care about the war, to mind "if mankind perished utterly."  While the first half of the poem suggests that spring and rebirth will bring healing to the wounds of war that have been inflicted on the landscape and the psyche, the tone of the second half of the poem is one of indifference rather than acceptance. 

Gassed, by Gilbert Rogers

Teasdale's poem now appears sadly prophetic.  Today in America, there are few who remember the First World War.  The Meuse-Argonne offensive is an unfamiliar name to many, despite the 26,277 American men who were killed and the 95,786 who were wounded in the battles.  The total American casualties of the war, estimated at 116,516 killed and 204,002 wounded, have largely been forgotten.  Teasdale's poem gives voice to the dead of the war in its final lines: "And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,/Would scarcely know that we were gone."