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.

Richard Lovelace: 'To Lucasta, Going to the Wars'

Richard Lovelace (1618-c.1658), described by a contemporary as 'the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld', fell from privilege into desperate poverty during his short life.

The reason was the English Civil War. Lovelace remained loyal to the King, having served him as 'gentleman wayter extraordinary' from the age of 13. He was imprisoned briefly in 1642 after presenting a Royalist manifesto to Parliament, and imprisoned again five years later for his part in Royalist disturbances. While in prison, he prepared the Lucasta poems for publication. But he was broken and ruined by his experiences, and spent his final years as 'the object of charity', lodging in 'obscure and dirty places'. His exact date of death is unknown, but he was reported by John Aubrey to have died in a cellar in Long Acre.

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

1
Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
  That from the Nunnery
Of thy chaste breast, and quiet mind,
  To War and Arms I flee.

2
True, a new Mistress now I chase,
  The first Foe in the Field;
And with a stronger Faith embrace
  A Sword, a Horse, a Shield.

3
Yet this inconstancy is such
  As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
  Loved I not Honour more.

'Lucasta' is derived from the Latin meaning 'pure light', and therefore she shares with women addressed by Lovelace elsewhere in his work --- Amarantha ('Immortal') and Althea ('Truth') --- an idealised abstraction. The reference to the 'Nunnery', and to a single 'breast' (not 'breasts') ensures that this relationship is taken out of the sexual domain. ('Get thee to a nunnery', Hamlet tells Ophelia.) It is the 'new Mistress' who excites the passions, with the prospect offered by that consummatory rhyme 'chase /embrace'. The poet is untrue in pursuit of a greater desire: the desire for those Virgilian 'Arms'.

The third stanza starts as an attempt at reconciliation, only to end by uneasily justifying the sense of competition and the greater appeal of Mars over Venus. 'Honour' is a concept which applies as much to the battlefield as to love. It is the poet's love of Honour which allows him to love Lucasta 'so much', with the implication that if he were to stay with her it would show a lesser love. By avowing his commitment to Honour before all else, he attempts to show that he is being true to Lucasta in the act of abandoning her.

Postscript: if this account has been helpful to you, please consider following the blog via the link in the right-hand margin. 

Disappointment as Wilfred Owen Fails to Last the Pace

T. S. Eliot has been declared the nation's favourite poet. Apparently, he is 'full of classical elusions', an insight so inadvertently brilliant that it deserves to stand uncorrected.

Wilfred Owen, the only soldier-poet on the (entirely random) shortlist, finished out of the medals in fourth place, having led for much of the race. Judith Palmer of the Poetry Society explains that voting for Owen had been 'fuelled by a rise in the number of soldiers being killed in Afghanistan over the summer, when the number of British fatalities topped 200 for the first time.' So we like Owen more when our soldiers are being killed. Between Eliot and Owen came the unlikely pairing of John Donne and Benjamin Zephaniah. Which is proof, if any were needed, that these polls are harmless additions to the jollity of life.

Ivor Gurney: 'Pain'

Ivor Gurney collected 'Pain' as the second of five sonnets, under the title 'Sonnets 1917 (To the Memory of Rupert Brooke)'. The sequence appeared in his first collection, Severn & Somme, published the same year. In a letter to his great friend, the music critic Marion Scott, Gurney called 'Pain' the 'blackest' of the five, and told her that the poems were 'intended to be a sort of counterblast against [Brooke's] 'Sonnetts 1914' [sic], which were written before the grind of the war and by an officer (or one who would have been an officer.)' Gurney described his sequence as 'a protest of the physical against the exalted spiritual; of the cumulative weight of small facts against the one large.' 'Old ladies won't like them', he ventured, 'but soldiers may.'

Pain

Pain, pain continual; pain unending;
Hard even to the roughest, but to those
Hungry for beauty...Not the wisest knows,
Nor most pitiful-hearted, what the wending
Of one hour's way meant. Grey monotony lending
Weight to the grey skies, grey mud where goes
An army of grey bedrenched scarecrows in rows
Careless at last of cruellest Fate-sending.
Seeing the pitiful eyes of men foredone,
Or horses shot, too tired merely to stir,
Dying in shell-holes both, slain by the mud.
Men broken, shrieking even to hear a gun.---
Till pain grinds down, or lethargy numbs her,
The amazed heart cries angrily out on God.

This comes early in Gurney's writing career, but it works because it takes risks similar to those found in his later and stronger poetry. There is a precariousness about Gurney at his best. So, 'scarecrows in rows' is the phrase of a poet too ambitious to worry about perfection. ('To praise a thing for its faultlessness is to damn it with faint praise', Gurney told Scott.) That Germanic construction, 'Fate-sending', is similarly reckless, but it prepares the way for that brilliant word 'foredone', which OED gives as 'put out of existence', 'ruined' or 'annulled'. '[T]oo tired merely to stir' is somehow better than the more conventional 'too tired even to stir', because it stresses that even a tiny hint of movement might save the men and horses from their fate.

The last line is astonishing. 'God' joins alliteratively to 'gun', but its horribly apposite rhyme is with 'mud'. ('I, too, saw God through mud', Owen writes the following year in 'Apologia pro Poemate Meo'; and in another strange coincidence, his 'Futility' has limbs 'too hard to stir'.) The amazed heart cries out on God, not to God. The phrase is caught between accusation, imprecation and supplication. Is God the cause of this suffering, or the hope for redemption from it? Either way, the angry outburst requires an energy which pain and lethargy will soon defeat. Pain brings about acceptance --- not just of suffering but of purposelessness and grey monotony. It leads to the defeat of the human and the bestial alike. Everything is returning inexorably to mud.