Poems in their pockets

There’s a holiday for everything: November 27th is Bavarian Cream Pie Day and May 4th marks both Beer Pong Day and International Respect for Chickens Day. And every April, the US celebrates National Poetry Month, with one day set aside as “Poem in your Pocket Day.” According to the National Academy of Poets, it’s a day that encourages everyone to select a poem, carry it, and share it with others.

But what of poems found in the pockets of the dead? They echo like last words, held close by those who wrote them or loved them.

 

Frank Hurley, Dawn of Passchendaele
State Library New South Wales

Heaven

(Found in his pocket after death.)

Suddenly one day

The last ill shall fall away;

The last little beastliness that is in our blood

Shall drop from us as the sheath drops from the bud,

And the great spirit of man shall struggle through,

And spread huge branches underneath the blue.

In any mirror, be it bright or dim,

Man will see God staring back at him.

            —T.P. Cameron Wilson

T.P. Cameron Wilson was killed in the First World War on March 23, 1918. The introduction to his posthumously published book of poems, Magpies in Picardy, relates that he was “extremely shy about his verse, and, unlike most youthful poets, was always disinclined to let it be seen, or discussed, by his friends.” Before joining the British Army, Wilson had been a schoolteacher in rural Derbyshire. In a letter dated May of 1916, he wrote,

Do teach your dear kids the horror of responsibility which rests on the war-maker … We’ve been wrong in the past. We have taught schoolboys “war” as a romantic subject … And everyone has grown up soaked in the poetry of war—which exists, because there is poetry in everything, but which is only a tiny part of the great dirty tragedy … All those picturesque phrases of war writers … are dangerous because they show nothing of the individual horror, nothing of the fine personalities smashed suddenly into red beastliness, nothing of the sick fear that is tearing at the hearts of brave boys who ought to be laughing at home.*

T.P.C. Wilson

And in his war-time notebook of “waste paper philosophy,” Wilson wrote a reflection on prayer:

When you pray I dare advise you break away from arranged titles, such as the Church has hung round the neck of its God … I have prayed to Him as the Great Calm Spirit, as Father, as King, as Friend, and all the titles mean nothing, and fluttered like dead leaves on the moving stream of love … Once as I walked along a road I spoke to Him as the Splendid Friend, and saw the huge sea, green and silent against the clouds, and near me the laughing pines, and very far away a sail like a speck of foam but which was a great ship, full of men. And I knew I was a fool, and could not call Him anything, but said, “Make me big, and less a fool,” and then I ran, and met my friends and linked an arm through the warm arm of one and sang a silly song.**

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*T.P. Cameron Wilson from War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, E.P. Dutton, 1930, pp. 299-300.

** T.P. Cameron Wilson, Waste paper philosophy, to which has been added Magpies in Picardy, George H. Doran, 1920, p. 31.

Return

St. Ives, Cambridgeshire

Edward Hilton Young’s poem “Air Service (For M.J.G.D. 1896-1918)” remembers a young pilot who, killed at the age of twenty-one, was “swifter than all things save the wings of death.” E.H. Young was an officer with the Royal Navy when late in 1916 he met Royal Naval pilot Jeffery Miles Game Day at Harwich. The officers shared an enthusiasm for tea and the belief that life should be lived “all out”—holding nothing back from devoted action.  They became close friends, meeting numerous times during the war, the last time in February of 1918. In his memoir of Miles Day, Young recalls listening to his friend talk about his home in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire: “It is not about his own marvellous service that he likes best to talk: he is happiest when he is talking about country places and especially about his own country-side of river, fen, and mere. He loves them truly.”*

E. Hilton Young

On February 27^th, 1918, Day’s plane “was shot down by six German aircraft which he attacked single-handed, out to sea…. because he wished to break the [enemy’s] formation, in order to make it easier for the less-experienced people behind him to attack.” His plane in flames, Day “nose-dived, flattened out, and landed perfectly on the water. He climbed out of his machine and waved his fellow-pilots back to their base; being in aeroplanes [not sea-planes] they could not assist him.”** Despite an immediate and lengthy search, Day’s body was never found.  He is remembered on the naval memorial to the missing at Chatham.

Less than two months later, Young was seriously wounded while manning a rear gun on the H.M.S. Vindictive in the raid on Zeebrugge. Although his right arm was amputated, Young returned to active duty and survived the war.  In 1919, he published his only book of poetry, The Muse at Sea. The book closes with a trilogy of poems remembering Jeffery Miles Day; the final poem recounts a visit to the birthplace and home that Day loved.    

Miles Jeffery Game Day

Return

This was the way that, when the war was over,

we were to pass together. You, it’s lover,

would make me love your land, you said, no less,

its shining levels and their loneliness,

the reedy windings of the silent stream,

your boyhood’s playmate, and your childhood’s dream.

The war is over now: and we can pass

this way together.  Every blade of grass

is you: you are the ripples on the river:

you are the breeze in which they leap and quiver.

I find you in the evening shadows falling

athwart the fen, you in the wildfowl calling:

and all the immanent vision cannot save

my thoughts from wandering to your unknown grave.

                        St. Ives, 1919

            —Edward H. Young

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* Edward Hilton Young, “Memoir,” Poems and Rhymes by Jeffrey Day, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1919, pp. 12-13.

** Edward Hilton Young, “Memoir,” p. 8.

Sassoon's "Thrushes"

Thrushes in flight, photo by Karen Woolley

After earning a Military Cross for bravery, making public his letter “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration,” undergoing treatment for shell shock at Craiglockhart Hospital, and deciding to return to his men and the battlefront, Siegfried Sassoon found himself at Litherland military camp in December of 1917. His diary records his mood:

Came to Litherland on December 11. Since then have eaten, slept, played a few rounds of golf at Formby, walked on the shore by the Mersey mouth, and am feeling healthy beyond measure. I intend to lead a life of light-hearted stupidity. I have done all I can to protest against the war and the way it is prolonged. At least I will try and be peaceful-minded for a few months–after the strain and unhappiness of the last seven months. It is the only way by which I can hope to face horrors of the front without breaking down completely. I must try to think as little as possible. And write happy poems. (Can I?)*

Sassoon’s poem “Thrushes” had been written shortly before his release from Craiglockhart as Sassoon prepared himself to return to battle; it was published in the Hydra in November of 1917. 

Thrushes

Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim,   

Whose voices make the emptiness of light   

A windy palace. Quavering from the brim   

Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night,   

They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing   

Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof

Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering;   

Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing;   

Who hears the cry of God in everything,   

And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.

            —Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon

In April of 1916, Sassoon recorded in his diary, “Since March 26^th I have done 18 days in the trenches,—and those days & nights are a mechanical & strained effort,—Coming away from it all—to find the world outside really acknowledging the arrival of spring—oh it was a blessed thing…. Sunset was fading with a long purple-gray cloud above the west, & oh the wood was still, with slender stems of trees, all in their vesture of young green—& bluebells were on the ground, & young fresh grass, & blackbirds & thrushes scolding & singing in the quiet, & the smell of wet mould, wet earth, wet leaves—& voices of children coming up from a cottage below the hill. It was a virgin sanctuary of peace for my soul & heaven for my eyes & music for my ears; it was Paradise, & God, & the promise of life.”**

In his study of nature and the British soldier in the Great War, John Lewis-Stempl writes, “Birds had a special place in the hearts and minds of men on the Western Front…. Although birds lived in their own world, they were also the ‘link’ to God. More than any other fauna, birds possessed the ability to carry the watcher ‘heavenwards.’”†

After the war, Sassoon told Professor Lewis Chase that his poem “Invocation,” “together with “Thrushes,” was the only ‘pure poetry’ in Counter-Attack.”††

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* Siegfried Sassoon, 11 Dec. 1917, Diaries, pp. 2v, 3r, http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-09852-00001-00012/6.

** Sassoon, Diaries, April 1917, pp. 7v, 9r, http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-09852-00001-00005/16.

† John Lewis-Stempel, Where Poppies Blow, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016, pp. 33, 62.

†† Sassoon, qtd in Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet, Duckworth, 1998, p. 438.