John Major and Rudyard Kipling

The guest on Radio 4's Great Lives this week was John Major, who, supported by Andrew Lycett, chose Rudyard Kipling as his exemplary figure. You can listen to the programme here.

Kipling might have been my choice, too, so it was fascinating to hear John Major justify his reasons. Major referred to Kipling as a 'poet' primarily. Much as I love Kipling's poetry, I love Kim and the short stories more. There are stories in The Jungle Books and Debits and Credits which seem flawless. Is there a better short story writer in English than Kipling? If you're sceptical, read this, this, or this.

Of course, half an hour is insufficient time to give Kipling anything like his due. He was the cousin of Stanley Baldwin, the nephew of Edward Burne-Jones, and the friend of (inter alia) Cecil Rhodes, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Baden-Powell and Theodore Roosevelt. Kipling was the last British writer whose opinions mattered. Not only did he whisper into the ears of emperors, he thrust his own arguments noisily into the public forum, and was listened to, enthused about, admired and loathed by a world-wide audience of which modern writers can only dream.

P.S. Still on the subject of Kipling: yesterday this site received a record number of hits, mostly thanks to South Africans searching for the phrase 'flannelled fools'. Can anyone tell me why?

Isaac Rosenberg: 'Through these pale cold days'

As a new feature for the blog, I am going to publish a war poem each week. Copyright rules out much of the twentieth century, so my focus will tend to be the Great War and earlier. This week, Isaac Rosenberg's 'Through these pale cold days', followed by some brief notes. Do please post below any comments about the poem or my interpretation.




Through these pale cold days

Through these pale cold days
What dark faces burn
Out of three thousand years,
And their wild eyes yearn,

While underneath their brows
Like waifs their spirits grope
For the pools of Hebron again---
For Lebanon's summer slope.

They leave these blond still days
In dust behind their tread
They see with living eyes
How long they have been dead.

This was the last poem Rosenberg wrote. He sent it to Edward Marsh in a letter dated 28 March 1918, calling it 'a slight thing' and commenting that 'My vocabulary small enough before is impoverished and bare'. By the time the letter arrived in England, Rosenberg was dead. He had been killed while on night patrol on 1 April.

'Through these pale cold days' has always seemed to me to be among the greatest and most mysterious of Rosenberg's poems, notwithstanding his own reservations. It is rarely anthologised, perhaps because editors remain unpersuaded that it should even be classified as war poetry. Yet its long view of Jewish history pressing into the present, and the departure of these strange revenants in the final stanza, are powerful if idiosyncratic responses to current circumstances. 'Revenants' only in one sense, because these long-dead ancestors find their descendants among inhospitable terrain --- not the familiar pools of Hebron nor Lebanon's summer slope, but the 'blond still days' which are so hostile to Jewishness: in 'The Jew', written the previous summer, Rosenberg had complained that 'the blonde', 'the bronze' and 'the ruddy' all 'sneer at me'.

Geoffrey Hill in Speech! Speech! has written of Rosenberg that 'His last efforts / to survive---like THROUGH THESE PALE COLD DAYS--- / appear belated and timely acts / of atonement'. There is a typically Hillian paradox in 'belated and timely', and Hill's preoccupation with ideas of atonement risks turning Rosenberg into Hill avant la lettre. All the same, the similarities between Rosenberg and Hill provide reminders of a debt which Hill is always prepared to acknowledge. Rosenberg, in those pale cold days, is briefly at one with his ghosts; he sees with living eyes for them; they are dead and, through him, alive. However, their visit is necessarily short; with new understanding of the future, they turn away to resume their search for the lost Edenic home. The poet is left behind, abandoned even by his own people.

Poetry of the Second World War at the IWM

At the Imperial War Museum on 2 November, 7pm, Jon Stallworthy, Fran Brearton and Owen Sheers will be 'exploring the poetry of the Second World War'. Go along to 'find out why you can quote Wilfred Owen, but not Alun Lewis'.

Yes, I know! I can, too!

Ivor Gurney in Gloucester

Photograph © Anne Boden

Ivor Gurney has a new plaque in Gloucester, courtesy of Seb Field, who tells the story here of how he brought it about.

Walt Whitman and the American Civil War

Walt Whitman c. 1860

Here is an extract from John Keegan's latest book, The American Civil War. Its subject is the medical response to the battlefields' carnage, and Walt Whitman's role in nursing the casualties. And here is a strong essay on the same subject by Angel Price.

Whitman was not a soldier, and did not witness any fighting, but his experiences in the field hospitals inspired him to write some of the most important and influential poetry of the nineteenth century. Kipling called him his favourite poet; Gurney was overwhelmed by the 'flood' of his work, and spent years studying, rewriting, and setting to music Whitman's poetry; Rosenberg argued that Shakespeare had 'paved the way for Whitman', with the Bard's 'freedom', 'daring' and 'inspiration' becoming 'in Whitman's hands... a roadway right through humanity'. Those poets' emphasis on experience and witness was already found in Whitman: 'I now doubt whether one can get a fair idea of what this war practically is... without some such experience as this I am having.' Whitman's influence was also felt in prose writings of the Great War. The nurses' memoirs of Vera Brittain and Mary Borden are noble variations on Specimen Days.

Drum Taps (1865), Whitman's poems of the war, became incorporated into the 1867 edition of that greatest and most protean of 19th-century poetry volumes, Leaves of Grass. The war poems are, among other things, an attempt to do justice to the dying: 'every case', Whitman noted, 'is a tragic poem, an epic, a romance, a pensive and absorbing book, if it were only written.' Here is the final poem of the section, 'Not Youth Pertains to Me':

NOT youth pertains to me,
Nor delicatesse—I cannot beguile the time with talk;
Awkward in the parlor, neither a dancer nor elegant;
In the learn'd coterie sitting constrain'd and still—for learning inures not to me;
Beauty, knowledge, fortune, inure not to me—yet there are two things inure to me;
I have nourish'd the wounded, and sooth'd many a dying soldier;
And at intervals I have strung together a few songs,
Fit for war, and the life of the camp.

Why Images of Warfare always need Words

Ben MacIntyre in today's Times argues for the 'immediacy' and 'revelatory' force of war photographs. His article is titled 'Pictures of war carry more moral meaning than thousands of words'. He is completely wrong. Images of warfare depend on words. Without words, they invite such an excess of meaning that they become, in effect, meaningless.

Take the photograph above, which is the cue for MacIntyre's claim. What are we looking at? There seem to be three soldiers, one of whom lies on the side of an earthen bank. Their faces are blurred or turned away. There is a tree in the background, which even the most expert arbiculturalist would be unable to identify. This may be a training exercise in the US, or it may be an image from Afghanistan or Iraq. The horizontal soldier may have slipped, or may have been shot. He may be rolling down the bank, or he may be still. Is he dead or alive? Is he fooling around?

Similar games can be played with Capa's Falling Soldier, which is why it matters whether we are seeing a soldier being killed or an actor acting. Without the verbal context to help us read the image, the image loses all force. Francisco de Goya, perhaps the greatest Western artist to depict the disasters of war, understood this well enough to turn it to his advantage. His images are accompanied by his own mysterious commentaries, which unsettle the viewer/reader in their oblique relationships.

I will happily admit that the photograph, reproduced on the Times website, may be clearer in the original, though no amount of visual clarity will provide enough context. That's another thing about photographs: unlike words, they lose detail as they are reproduced. And words can't be photoshopped.

So Ben MacIntyre claims that this picture is worth more than thousands of words. He might have said, more accurately, that it is worth nothing without words. He is immediately obliged to provide a commentary which gives the image its meaning:

Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard lies on his side in the Afghan earth, his gun still clutched in his hand. The air is speckled with the dust thrown up by the rocket-propelled grenade that has just been fired from a grove of pomegranate trees, blowing off one of Bernard’s legs.

As the camera shutter clicks, two other US Marines, blurred in their frantic efforts to save his life, are shouting: “Bernard, you’re doing fine. You’re gonna make it.”

The 21-year-old soldier did not make it.

Powerful stuff, which the photograph is hopelessly ill-equipped to do for itself.

George Galloway on John Cornford

Having recently blogged about the Spanish Civil War, I've just found via BBC iPlayer this radio programme on John Cornford. George Galloway sings the poet's praises, with contributions from the leading expert on anglophone Spanish Civil War poetry, Stan Smith. Not surprisingly given his own politics (and character), Galloway is more interested in Cornford as activist than as poet; but ably supported by Smith and Matthew Parris, he shows an impressive depth of knowledge about Cornford's life and works. The programme is worth half an hour of anyone's time.

And here, via today's Guardian, is George Orwell's magnificent account of being shot through the neck during the Spanish Civil War. 'The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting...'

Thomas Hardy's 'Private Tragedy'

Click here to watch 'Griff Rhys Jones on the private tragedy that caused [Thomas] Hardy to stop writing novels and devote the latter half of his life to poetry.' It is a video clip supporting Hardy's nomination as 'The Nation's Favourite Poet'. He is one of 30 on the shortlist. The only soldier-poet is Wilfred Owen.

I came across the clip because I was asked by BBC Radio Wales to give an interview about the poll, and they kindly provided me with this link. Some of the films work very well. The Hardy film, however, is an anomaly, based on chronological muddle. The death of his wife is presented as the 'private tragedy' in question, and it is this event which is credited with transforming Hardy into a poet. In fact, Hardy had been writing poetry all his adult life, and by the time his all-but-estranged wife died in 1912, he had already published three collections of poetry and all three volumes of his 'diorama' of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts.

Contrary to what the film suggests, Hardy was not in his fifties when his wife died; he was 72. And he did not become a poet as the consequence of any 'private tragedy', but because (depending on which biographer you believe): he had taken the novel as far as he could; he was sick of negative reviews; he couldn't face more arguments with his wife, who, as a Christian, strongly objected to the novels' worldview; he had always wanted to return to his 'first love' of poetry and had finally earned enough money to be able to do so; he fancied a new challenge.

Who would get your vote: the broken-hearted novelist who abandoned the form in order to write deeply personal love poems to his dead wife; or the famous poet who agonised over his feelings of guilt, anger and long-past love, who soon married the woman with whom he had been carrying on an affair for some years before his wife died, and whose elegies constantly contrasted the beautiful young woman of his youthful courtship and the embittered old wife she became?