Laurence Binyon: 'For the Fallen'

As Remembrance Day approaches, we are likely to encounter a familiar stanza from a poet whose works are otherwise almost entirely forgotten: Laurence Binyon. Binyon was a brilliant man: Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum; scholar of William Blake and of Oriental Art; a Red Cross volunteer at the Western Front; Norton Professor at Harvard in the early 30s; friend of Ezra Pound, Walter Sickert, Edmund Dulac and countless others.

Binyon was not always careful of his acquaintances' reputations. During the British Library’s move to St Pancras in 1995, a box of papers was discovered which had once belonged to him. It contained six letters from Rosenberg to Binyon and twenty-eight more from Rosenberg to another poet, Gordon Bottomley, as well as alternative versions of some of Rosenberg’s best-known poems and several memoirs of Rosenberg collected by Binyon after the war. Having made the initial effort to preserve these markers of Rosenberg's achievement, he had then lost or forgotten about them. Nevertheless, in the early 1920s Binyon did write a fifty-page tribute to Rosenberg, praising in particular the younger poet's 'ardent toil' and 'continual self-criticism'.

Geoffrey Hill has called Binyon's 'For the Fallen' 'perhaps the most widely known and widely quoted poem of the Great War'. Its challengers would presumably be Brooke's 'The Soldier' and Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'. Taken as a whole, 'For the Fallen' is less known than any of those, but its fourth stanza is proclaimed at Remembrance Day events worldwide.

For the Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in the labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

It is easy to see why that fourth stanza, alone, should have been rescued from oblivion. It constitutes the turning-point, the moment when the poem's argument for consolation emerges: the dead enjoy an eternal youth, immortalised in the memory of the living and in other more permanent ways. They are 'As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust'. Their everlastingness exists outside memory, in a form of stellification which harks back to a common motif in Greek myth.

For formal reasons as well, that fourth stanza is especially effective. Its foreshortened final line, 'We will remember them', states without embellishment. It expresses a profound recognition which would only be cheapened by rhetorical flourish. But most of all, the stanza seems sonorous because of its echo of Enobarbus's compliment to Cleopatra: 'Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety'. It may seem a long stretch from Cleopatra's beauty to the fallen youth of the First World War, but a similar principle applies: each achieves a perfection immune to the ravages of time.

Siegfried Sassoon's Papers

George Simmers today reports on the happy fact that Siegfried Sassoon's papers have been saved for the nation. In the process, he reserves some well-aimed barbs for Andrew Motion (whose grasp of Great War history is not entirely secure) and Michael Morpurgo (who is credited by George with a love of 'grand simplicities'). Morpurgo's latest meanderings on the 'futility' of the War can be found here.

I have blogged previously that the University of Exeter holds twenty letters from Sassoon to Charles Causley. I am keen to trace the other side of the correspondence: letters from Causley to Sassoon. They do not seem to be among the papers bought by Cambridge, or any of the other significant Sassoon archives. If you know of their whereabouts, please get in touch.

Virtual Trenches

Those ingenious people at the First World War Poetry Digital Archive have created a virtual 'tour' of the First World War battlefields, which you can sample by clicking the video above. You can also experience the site by visiting Second Life here.

This is their press release:

With Armistice Day fast approaching a JISC project team has taken an unusual approach to ensuring that people continue to learn about the First World War.

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University have collaborated on an exciting new project in the 3D virtual world Second Life to simulate areas of the Western Front 1914-18. The team believes this is the first time anything of its type has been done on Second Life.

This project, which is funded by JISC, has arranged a range of digitised archival materials like poetry manuscripts, letters and diaries from the major poets of the First World War including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Vera Brittain, along with contextual primary source materials. These materials have been supplemented with new interpretative content and a spectrum of interactive tools and tutorials, streaming video and audio effects.

The artefacts have been drawn from the highly successful First World War Poetry Digital Archive1, launched in 2009 to mark the 90th anniversary of the end of the war. By placing them in an online virtual model the project aims to make the collection more useful and engaging to a range of different user groups across UK education sectors, research communities and the heritage industry.

Ben Showers, digitisation programme officer at JISC, said: “The First World War Digital Poetry Archive is constantly pushing the boundaries of what it means to be an academic archive, and now users are able to interact with the collections and materials. JISC funding for this additional virtual environment means students, researchers and everyone interested in this material can collaborate and become immersed in the world of the Western Front to experience the immediate context of these manuscripts and poems like never before.”

Visitors to the virtual trenches are given a unique immersive experience where they can explore a training camp, dressing station, a trench network and No Man’s Land. The terrain is waterlogged and difficult to navigate, rife with rats and littered with poppies. Moving nearer to the front line the clamour of shell blasts and artillery fire becomes louder and louder.

Dr Stuart Lee, lecturer in English at Oxford University, said: “Attempting to form the context of a particular piece of literature is a key critical approach in the discipline, which normally involves studying secondary material, or in rare case, site visits. By piloting the use of Second Life, the First World War Poetry Archive is approaching this in an innovative way. More importantly it is showing how new technologies (virtual worlds) can be utilised to provide more interesting access to key research and teaching resources.”

As guests explore the simulation, they can listen to the voices of veterans recounting their experiences of the war, watch original film footage from the time, and learn about life on the Western Front. Within this context they can encounter some of the most powerful poetry in English literature by handling the original manuscripts, turning the pages of the poet’s war diaries and letters, and listening to readings.

At the end the visitor is teleported out of the trenches to a teaching area. Here they are asked to consider the memory of the war, and to confront their own prejudices and stereotypes - was the war really all about trenches, mud, and rats, or are their other aspects to it that we now need to consider? Should it only be remembered as mass slaughter, a gross act of futility, or more a collective act of unparalleled heroism that ended ultimately in a victory for Britain and its allies?

Kate Lindsay, project manager, said: “Virtual worlds create opportunities to do things that are impossible in real museums. By simulating parts of the Western Front, we can embed an entire exhibition's worth of content within in the space. This can be further enhanced by placing digital versions of real archival materials and narratives along the paths that visitors take. The result is an immersive and personal experience. It's not 'real' but it does offer possibilities for understanding a part of history that is now beyond human memory."

Battle of Gheluvelt: 95 Years Ago Today

The Battle of Gheluvelt took place on 31 October 1914. The Worcesters' heroics in closing the line, when all had seemed lost, inspired Housman's 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries', MacDiarmid's ignorant riposte, and this updating of Simonides' epitaph by the poet laureate, Robert Bridges:

Gheluvelt
Epitaph on the Worcesters. October 31, 1914

Askest thou of these graves? They'll tell thee, O stranger, in England
How we Worcesters lie where we redeem'd the battle.

Simonides, 'Epitaph'; H. W. Garrod: 'Epitaph: Neuve Chapelle'

Ō ksein', angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti tēide
keimetha tois keinōn rhēmasi peithomenoi.

Simonides' famous epitaph for the dead at Thermopylae has been translated countless times. (Scroll down here for 13 versions.) William Golding, self-taught in Greek, claimed that it could only be paraphrased, and offered this prosaic attempt: 'Stranger, tell the Spartans that we behaved as they would wish us to, and are buried here.' Golding describes his pilgrimage to the battlesite in the title essay of The Hot Gates (Thermopylae means 'hot gates' in Greek), remarking at the debt that we owe to the tiny company which sacrificed itself against the Persian hordes: 'A little of Leonidas [the Spartan leader] lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like. He contributed to set us free.'

The Winter of the World, edited by Hibberd and Onions, contains three adaptations of Simonides' epitaph. (The editors also point out its influence on Housman's 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries'.) The best of these is H. W. Garrod's 'Epitaph: Neuve Chapelle':

Tell them at home, there's nothing here to hide:

We took our orders, asked no questions, died.

This is angrier than Simonides, but masks some of its anger in ambiguity. Tell them at home because we don't want to hide anything? Tell them at home that there's nothing here for them to hide (although they're always hiding things elsewhere)? According to the first reading, the soldiers are proclaiming their honesty and bravery; according to the second, they are casting aspersions on the candour of those at home. The alternative possibilities are, indeed, a way of hiding something: hiding and revealing it simultaneously.

Taking orders, at Neuve Chapelle, is significantly different from merely behaving 'as they would wish us to' at Thermopylae: sacrifice has become compulsory. The cause and effect in Simonides' epitaph is simple: we behaved as they would wish us to, and (therefore) we are buried here. Garrod's epitaph gives three steps: 'We took our orders, asked no questions, died.' If they had not taken their orders (but they had to), or if they had asked questions (knowing, it would seem, that there were questions to ask), their ineluctable fate might have been avoided after all. The soldiers asked no questions: that recalls the previous line, and hints that things were being hidden from them. Now that they are dead, 'there's nothing here to hide'. Deceit is no longer necessary; only living soldiers need to be lied to.

Wilfred Owen War Poet Exhibition

Gallery 118 is holding an exhibition of paintings, sculpture and music inspired by the poetry of Wilfred Owen. The artists Michelle and Daniel Cioccoloni promise a multimedia experience incorporating visual and aural elements. The exhibition, titled 'War and the Pity of War', opens at 6pm on 1 November and runs until Remembrance Sunday on 8 November. Admission is £3.

You can listen to Daniel Cioccoloni's soundtrack for the exhibition in five parts here.

Herman Melville: 'Shiloh'

The Battle of Shiloh, in Tennessee, took place on 6-7 April 1862. Casualty levels were unprecedented: the 3500 men who died there amounted to more than the United States had lost in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Mexican War combined.

As befits its subtitle, Herman Melville's 'requiem' is remarkably non-partisan. Both sides seem to have been deceived; how modern that parenthetical line sounds, both in tone and sentiment. Melville gives the fatally wounded the opportunity to overcome their enmity. Americans all, they live as foe and die as friends: the schisms of civil war are healed in deaths which transform churchyard into graveyard. That the battlefield should have been a site of Christian worship emphasises the appalling costs of this fratricide as well as the possibilities for its redress.

Shiloh
A Requiem

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
   The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
   The forest-field of Shiloh---
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
   Around the church of Shiloh---
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
      And natural prayer
   Of dying foemen mingled there---
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve---
   Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
   But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
   And all is hushed at Shiloh.

Anthologising the Poetry of the Great War

Tomorrow (21 October) I will be speaking at the University of Salford on the topic 'Anthologising the Poetry of the Great War'. The talk takes place at noon in Room 409 of the Institute of Social, Cultural, and Policy Research.

Arthur Hugh Clough: from Amours de Voyage

When Wilfred Owen condemned Horace's motto, 'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori', as 'The old Lie', he was not demonstrating an unusual knowledge of classical verse. Galloway Kyle's Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men (1916) and its successor, More Songs of the Fighting Men (1917), had each contained a poem with that Horatian title --- the poets being Sydney Oswald and Harold John Jarvis. Owen ascribed the phrase to Jessie Pope ('My friend'), making plain that it encapsulated the sentiments which ignorant war-mongers would repetitively endorse. But in doing so, he quoted it himself with a crowning rhyme: 'glory' / 'mori'. Horace has the last and most sonorous word.

Owen was not the first to interrogate Horace's line and seek with some limited success to resist its siren music. Arthur Hugh Clough's masterpiece Amours de Voyage, set during and around the Siege of Rome in 1849, is a long epistolary poem in which war provides the backdrop for a doomed love affair. Claude, the male protagonist, writes back home to his friend, Eustace, in such a way that a shared knowledge of Horace's line is obviously presumed. His letter in verse, the second of canto 2, fragments the phrase, making it seem hackneyed and hoping to shatter its authority:

Dulce it is, and decorum, no doubt, for the country to fall, --- to
Offer one's blood an oblation to Freedom, and die for the Cause; yet
Still, individual culture is also something, and no man
Finds quite distinct the assurance that he of all others is called on,
Or would be justified even, in taking away from the world that
Precious creature, himself. Nature sent him here to abide here;
Else why send him at all? Nature wants him still, it is likely;
On the whole, we are meant to look after ourselves; it is certain
Each has to eat for himself, digest for himself, and in general
Care for his own dear life, and see to his own preservation;
Nature's intentions, in most things uncertain, in this are decisive;
Which, on the whole, I conjecture the Romans will follow, and I shall.
So we cling to our rocks like limpets; Ocean may bluster,
Over and under and round us; we open our shells to imbibe our
Nourishment, close them again, and are safe, fulfilling the purpose
Nature intended, --- a wise one, of course, and a noble, we doubt not.
Sweet it may be and decorous, perhaps, for the country to die; but,
On the whole, we conclude the Romans won't do it, and I sha'n't.

This rebounds on Claude: the etiolated intellectual, a man of inaction, attempts to justify his cowardice as natural. The passage is hedged with verbal manipulations: that brilliantly paradoxical 'no doubt' in the first line signals Claude's profound scepticism, and he bolsters his counter-argument with 'it is likely', 'it is certain', 'we doubt not', and (twice) 'On the whole'. The flimsy rhetoric undoes itself. Claude wants to be seen to acknowledge the truth of Horace's argument and replace it with a greater and contradictory truth of his own. Instead, his special pleading has the unlooked-for consequence of making that 'oblation to Freedom' appear all the more honourable.

The Romans, of course, will 'do it'; they will defy the invading French army, and many will 'die for the Cause'. Claude's response to that turn of events, later in the poem, finds a metaphor capable of seeming to do justice to Horace's idealism while prefiguring Owen's bitter disillusionment: 'The smoke of the sacrifice rises to heaven, / Of a sweet savour, no doubt, to Somebody; but on the altar, / Lo, there is nothing remaining but ashes and doubt and ill odour.'

The Georgians

Newly published this month by Shoestring Press is The Georgians: 1901-1930, edited by Merryn Williams. In recent years, this benighted movement has begun once more to receive appropriate attention, so Williams's anthology (the first of its kind for nearly four decades) is timely, and highly recommended.

Williams makes a very good case for including poets who were overlooked by Edward Marsh in the original Georgian anthologies. Charlotte Mew, for example, is represented here by eight poems, even though Marsh had considered and rejected her work. Thomas has thirteen poems, Gurney twelve, Owen nine. Dragging in the major poets and calling them 'Georgian' is an effective way to make the selection stronger. Whether they have very much in common beyond the overlapping of their careers is another matter. Good poems are their own justification.

My only disappointment is that Williams did not try to make a stronger case for the 'original' Georgians --- especially those whose reputations have fallen away since appearing in Marsh's anthologies. Marsh wasn't always mistaken: he published Graves, Sassoon, Lawrence, Rosenberg, and others whose work has survived. He also published Abercrombie (pictured above), Bottomley, Gibson, Davies, Flecker. This last group of poets was widely admired by people whose opinions we ought to take seriously. Among Abercrombie's enthusiastic readers, for example, were Rosenberg, Gurney, Frost and Thomas. Were they wrong, and posterity right? Or is it time to revisit Abercrombie's work? Williams's anthology won't help: Abercrombie is represented by just one poem ('Ryton Firs'), and his prose review of the first Georgian anthology.

Also included by Williams is D. H. Lawrence's review of that same anthology. 'The collection', Lawrence maintained, 'is like a big breath taken when we are waking up after a night of oppressive dreams... We are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning.' The Georgians have been so often ridiculed through the intervening decades that Lawrence's ecstatic praise can seem nonsensical to those who know them by reputation only. We now have the chance to read Williams's selection alongside Marsh's five original anthologies and assess the justice of Lawrence's claims for ourselves.