An Epitaph on Epitaphs on an Army of Mercenaries

A. E. Housman (1859-1936) is unfairly treated in Lorrie Goldensohn's engaging and (usually) reliable study, Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-Century Soldier Poetry. Goldensohn's later chapters are full of detailed and perceptive readings, but early on she risks making a travesty of pre-Somme war poetry in her hunt for what she calls the 'glory trader[s]'. So, having attacked Tennyson's 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' for 'hailing and encouraging the extension of empire by its professional builders' (wait a minute --- doesn't the poem starkly criticise those blundering builders?), Goldensohn goes on to associate Tennyson and Housman with a benevolent 'poetry on military glory... that the distantly involved could bestow in tones mixing an Olympian pity tinged with irony and admiring gratitude.'

Her first example from Housman is unfortunate; she quotes 'Lancer' apparently without noticing the homoerotic double meaning in 'Oh who would not sleep with the brave?' And she claims to find 'more of the same' in her next example, 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries'. (Please imagine that Blogger has permitted me to indent lines 2 and 4 of each stanza.)

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

By way of riposte, Goldensohn quotes MacDiarmid's 'Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries': 'It is a God-damned lie to say that these / Saved, or knew, anything worth a man's pride. / They were professional murderers', etc. (There is a 'Third Epitaph' by Edwin Morgan, but Goldensohn doesn't mention it and I can't say that I blame her.)

Housman's 'Epitaph' is more sophisticated than either MacDiarmid (who greatly admired Stalin) or Goldensohn allow. Written about the British Expeditionary Force of 1914, it repeats with bitter irony the German propagandist description of those soldiers as 'mercenaries'. Everything in the poem suggests a motivation greater than money, greater even than the (selfishly mercenary) hope of Christian salvation. Housman rewrites Romans 6:23 --- 'The wages of sin is death' --- knowing that the Biblical passage continues with the promise of eternal life: 'but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.' These so-called mercenaries 'Saved the sum of things for pay', but what pay can the dead expect when they have been abandoned even by God? Theirs is the ultimate sacrifice --- a sacrifice for which they have no hope of being rewarded in this life or the next.

Update: see here for an account of MacDiarmid's 'Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries'.

The 'Horror and Futility' of War?

Congratulations to George Simmers, whose superb Great War Fiction blog has just welcomed its 100,000th visitor.

Simmers reports that 'Naughty Julie' is the most popular search engine term for finding his site. He also comments that many visitors are students looking for quick answers to questions about 'the horror and futility of war' in relation to the same small number of texts. And he sides with those military historians who grumble over what they see as a relentless caricaturing of the Great War. The coercions of the curriculum, or so the argument goes, do not allow texts to differentiate themselves in all their nuanced richness: all Great War texts become one text, setting out to prove that the war was horrible and futile. Several of the revisionist historians have even been heard to despair that the obsession with the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon has seriously distorted the general public's understanding of the war. War is not futile, the historians argue, if it is necessary. And the Great War, they insist, was necessary to defeat Prussian militarism.

In 1917, Sassoon came to the conclusion that the British government was deliberately prolonging the war; what had started as a defensive campaign had become an opportunistic assault ignoring the possibilities for an early peace. Sassoon quickly persuaded Owen of his position when they met in Craiglockhart. But it was (and among historians, still is) a minority view, and their soldier-poet contemporaries did not share it.

Were Sassoon and Owen the creators of the futility narrative, or its beneficiaries? I have always felt about Owen that the wrong poems are valorised: 'Dulce et Decorum Est', for example, takes issue with Jessie Pope ('my friend'), whose crude patriotic verse makes an easy target. Owen meets one kind of propaganda with an equal and opposite kind ('like a devil's sick of sin', etc.). Subtler poems such as 'Miners' and 'Apologia pro Poemate Meo' cannot be shoehorned quite so comfortably; they have more to say than that War is a Bad Thing. And as for Owen's letters --- 'When I looked back and saw the ground all crawling and wormy with wounded bodies, I felt no horror at all but only immense exultation at having got through the Barrage'. As a teaching aid Owen is not always credited with full humanity: in fact, he was a welter of contradictory emotions.

Owen and Sassoon are as important as their reputations suggest. But until recently, other poets who did not dwell on 'the pity of war' were unfairly neglected. After Owen and Sassoon, it can come as a huge surprise to find Gurney writing poetry about drinking cafe au lait, or Grenfell writing about shooting partridges (when he isn't shooting Pomeranians), or Rosenberg exploring ancient Jewish history. Those voices need to be heard on the school curriculum, too. The poetry of the Great War is far more diverse than the focus on Owen and Sassoon has led generations to believe. For that matter, Owen and Sassoon are more diverse.

Simmers implies that, in terms of internet traffic, the naughty Julies of the Great War are Birdsong and Journey's End. If it's horror and futility you're looking for, I recommend them.

Charlotte Mew's War Poetry

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was a major poet. That may sound far-fetched to anyone who knows her by (minor) reputation, or who has only seen the over-anthologised poem 'The Farmer's Bride'. But if you haven't read her work, you are missing one of the great pleasures of early twentieth-century poetry. She can sometimes be found at the tail-end of Victorian literature surveys and anthologies, and her preoccupation with the figure of the fallen woman, in particular, does hark back to Victorian traditions. Even so, her versification --- which looks Whitmanian until you realise that she is still working within an accentual-syllabic metre and pursuing it to breaking point --- speaks instantly of her orginality. She is the missing link between Victorian and Modernist poetic practices; her fraught 200-line dramatic monologue 'Madeleine in Church' exploring the collision between religion and sexual desire (an extract here) makes her Robert Browning's radical heir.

The First World War lurks in the shadows of all Mew's poems of that period, but she only writes directly about it on three occasions. Although 'The Cenotaph' is deservedly the best-known, 'May 1915' and 'June 1915' merit wider currency as well. It is hard to blame anthologists of war poetry who overlook them, when those poems can't even be found in the new Selected Poems, edited by Eavan Boland. (Mew wrote so little poetry that it seems miserly to be given only a selection.) Boland never mentions the War in her perfunctory introduction, even though Mew's work constitutes one of the most agonised civilian poetic responses to issues of guilt, artistic entitlement and commemoration. Predictably enough, Boland heads straight for the well-worn narratives instead. She is more concerned with Mew's sexuality, with the terrible oppressions endured by women poets, and with attempts at aphorism which are as pointless as they are indefensible: 'The Mew family are the dark side of Empire', or 'The nineteenth century was a time of sinister enchantment for women poets.' All of them. All century.

Boland's edition is a wasted opportunity. Happily, Carcanet still publishes Mew's Collected Poems and Selected Prose. It is more complete (as its title promises) and much better edited.

Isaac Rosenberg

Strongly recommended --- despite its credit-crunching price --- is Vivien Noakes's edition of Isaac Rosenberg's work in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series. Noakes is an exemplary editor, as her variorum edition of Rosenberg's poetry demonstrates. Now she collects in one volume the entirety of Rosenberg's surviving writings (poetry, plays, prose essays, letters), as well as plates of Rosenberg's sketches and paintings. I will be reviewing the book in more detail for the Friends of the Dymock Poets.

Noakes is so thorough that she even restores the excisions of the censor. Here is an extract from a letter to Edward Marsh on 26 January 1918, where my square brackets mark the sentences which the censor saw fit to delete:

I am back in the trenches which are terrible now. We spend most of our time pulling each other out of the mud. I am not fit at all now and am more in the way than any use. You see I appear in excellent health and a doctor will make no distinction between health and strength. I am not strong. [What is happening to me now is more tragic than the 'passion play'. Christ never endured what I endure. It is breaking me completely.] What has happened to your Life of Rupert Brooke. Is it out yet. I suppose you are kept very busy.

Modern War Poetry Group

Here is an online discussion group for contemporary war poetry. The moderator is Stuart Lee, who also runs The First World War Poetry Archive.

Winn's The Poetry of War

I have been reading James Anderson Winn's The Poetry of War, which was published last year by Cambridge University Press. The book is nothing if not panoramic: with chapter titles like 'Honor and Memory' and 'Shame and Slaughter', it draws on examples from Homer to Bruce Springsteen. This creates opportunities and dangers. Winn brings into startling relation texts which are centuries and cultures apart; few scholars have written so elegantly about the connections between the classical and the modern traditions of war writing. But in displaying such extraordinary breadth of knowledge Winn necessarily sacrifices depth. The book shifts dizzyingly from example to example, rarely dwelling long enough on any given poem or author. This is not the book to read if you want to find out about, say, Wilfred Owen, or Walt Whitman, or even Homer; but if you are interested in the ways in which their works speak to each other, The Poetry of War is essential reading.

Winn's need for speed means that occasionally his statements seem like provocations, which he does not stay to justify. So, for example, he calls 'To His Love' Ivor Gurney's 'finest poem'. As this is the only poem by Gurney which he mentions, it is impossible to know whether he has a strong antipathy to the rest of Gurney's work or simply hasn't read it. Winn also claims that 'Strange Meeting' is Owen's 'most radical' poem, mainly on account of its humanizing of the enemy and its belief that war is anti-progressive. But by 1917-1918, such views were shared by many soldiers and most surviving soldier-poets. Isaac Rosenberg, who does not warrant so much as a name-check in Winn's book, was appalled by war from the start, claiming that it went against all his principles of justice; and his 'Break of Day in the Trenches' (described by Fussell as the finest poem of the war) wryly remarks on the rat's cosmopolitan sympathies as it scuttles between the trenches.

Winn's broad brush also risks obscuring highly nuanced poems such as 'Easter 1916', in which Yeats is credited with showing his 'love' for the Irish rebels. Well, yes... and no. Winn goes on: 'When Yeats writes of the "terrible beauty" of the Easter Rising, he may be thinking of the way the English put down the revolution by indiscriminately shelling the center of Dublin, starting fires that burned much of the city. In acknowledging the beauty inherent in fire and destruction, Yeats participates in a long tradition stretching back to Homer.' Winn's sympathies are a lot easier to determine than Yeats's. What began as wild surmise (Yeats 'may be thinking of') becomes established fact in the following sentence.

The Poetry of War concludes by pointing out that 'poets as a group have no special claim to the moral high ground'. The same is true of their readers. Acknowledging the 'contradictory emotions that war calls forth in all of us', Winn's book tests our assumptions about war and war poetry even while it sometimes fails to test its own assumptions as thoroughly as it ought.

Rabbie Burns

Lines on War

I murder hate, by field or flood,

Tho' glory's name may screen us;

In wars at hame I'll spend my blood,

Life-giving wars of Venus.

The deities that I adore,

Are social peace and plenty;

I'm better pleas'd to make one more,

Than be the death o' twenty.

Keith Douglas

Keith Douglas (1920-1944) would have been 89 today. He is often called the best English poet of the Second World War, but even that is to do him a disservice. He belongs among the greatest Anglophone poets of his century. His influence has not yet been properly acknowledged, but a hint of his importance to later poets can be taken from a letter Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother in June 1962: 'Ted did a beautiful [BBC radio] program on a marvelous young British poet, Keith Douglas, killed in the last war... Both of us mourn this poet immensely and feel he would have been like a lovely big brother to us.' For Hughes's considerable indebtedness to Douglas, see my essay here.

Douglas was more than a major poet. He also wrote Alamein to Zem Zem, the best prose memoir of combat that I have read. In poetry and prose, Douglas lingers over images of war's nastiness and squalor, by which I don't mean the terrible hardships of war such as Owen writes about. His truths go beyond even Owen's range: Douglas tells us what it is like to kill, or to stumble across the rotting corpse of a dead enemy soldier, or to watch a wild dog digging up a fresh corpse, or to loot through the 'bran-tub' of a battlefied. 'Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake', 'Cairo Jag' opens; as one anthology primly observes, cutting cake is a euphemism for 'procuring a woman'. And the poem ends unforgettably:

But by a day’s travelling you reach a new world
the vegetation is of iron
dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery
the metal brambles have no flowers or berries
and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine
the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions
clinging to the ground, a man with no head
has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli.

You'd struggle to find any Owenite pity in that. The pairing of nouns in the last line and a half --- man/head, packet/chocolate, souvenir/Tripoli ---makes the tone comedic, even frivolous, rather than sombre. Anyway, what good is chocolate to a man with no head?

Ivor Gurney news

A round-up of Gurney-related news. The Ivor Gurney Society has announced details of its spring weekend on 16 May in Churchdown, just outside Gloucester. After the success of their Gurney conference in 2007, Kate Kennedy and Trudi Tate are organising a conference in Cambridge on 11-12 July titled The First World War: Literature, Music, Memory. (Yours truly will be speaking on Gurney; if you want to give a talk, you need to contact the organisers by the end of next week.) And Pamela Blevins's biography, Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty, is now published by Boydell. It is the first biography since Michael Hurd's in 1978.

Birth of a Nation

While all eyes are on the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem memorialising the start of the American Revolutionary War seems a fitting subject. The 'rude bridge' mentioned in the opening line is the North Bridge in Concord, where in 1775 a group of local patriots resisted a much larger company of British army regulars. Emerson's brother reports that the poem was to be sung to the tune of the 'Old Hundred'.

Concord Hymn
Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their dead redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.


Robert Frost loved this poem (as he loved so much of Emerson's writing). His patriotic poem 'The Gift Outright', which he read at Kennedy's Inauguration, may well be remembering Emerson's 'Concord Hymn' as it records the transition of Americans from 'colonials' to liberation and independence: 'The deed of gift was many deeds of war'.

Penguin Book(s) of First World War Poetry

I've been using Jon Silkin's Penguin Book of First World War Poetry as a teaching text for years. First published in 1981, it was substantially revised in 1997 (the year of Silkin's death), but in both editions the introduction offered an opinionated, provocative and occasionally downright bizarre account of the terrain. It has been said that anthologies are only interesting to the extent that they leave people out. Silkin included all the obvious poems by the obvious poets, but he wasn't afraid to criticise them according to his own idiosyncratic standards. Rosenberg won the title; Owen was runner-up; Sassoon came out as best of the rest. Gurney was admired but not understood. Many others were present, Silkin informed us, for historical rather than literary reasons. The result was an infuriating and necessary book.

In 2004, with Silkin's anthology still in print, Penguin published George Walter's In Flanders Fields, their second anthology of First World War poetry. The introduction is much shorter and better behaved than Silkin's; there are no league tables, and Walter's emphasis is on being 'more protean than most recent editors of war poetry'. For protean read bland, a sceptic might argue. That would be unfair to such a thoughtful book; Walter is a fine scholar. But after the quirks and crazinesses of Silkin's anthology, Walter's seems very safe. What's more, the poems are arranged by 'theme', not by author. Does anyone ever reach for a war poetry anthology in order to look up a section called 'Somewhere in France' or 'Blighty'? Look to see which poems by Wilfred Owen have been selected and your only way of knowing will be to flick carefully through nearly 400 pages. What is the contents page of a poetry anthology for, if not to list the poems published in it?

In Flanders Fields is no longer in print. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, on the other hand, continues to sell. Silkin wins, or so it may seem. However, on closer inspection The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry turns out to be edited by... George Walter. It is In Flanders Fields repackaged. Silkin has been bumped off the list, his title usurped.

Other anthologies are available.

Frost and Thomas

I've been thinking about Robert Frost's strange elegy for his close friend Edward Thomas, who died at the Battle of Arras on Easter Monday, 1917. Frost later called Thomas the only brother he'd ever had. Here is the (unfortunately-titled) poem:

To E. T.

I slumbered with your poems on my breast
Spread open as I dropped them half-read through
Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb
To see, if in a dream they brought of you,

I might not have the chance I missed in life
Through some delay, and call you to your face
First soldier, and then poet, and then both,
Who died a soldier-poet of your race.

I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain
Unsaid between us, brother, and this remained—
And one thing more that was not then to say:
The Victory for what it lost and gained.

You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire
On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day
The war seemed over more for you than me,
But now for me than you—the other way.

How over, though, for even me who knew
The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine,
If I was not to speak of it to you
And see you pleased once more with words of mine?

It takes a long time for the tone to settle: 'I slumbered with your poems on my breast' is Poetry on its best behaviour, and 'slumbered' and 'breast' sound like unusually stuffy words for a poet who wanted to capture 'live speech'. There also seems to be some unintentional comedy in the image of Frost nodding off halfway through reading his friend's book. At the end, Frost reminds us that Thomas was an appreciative audience while alive: he wants to see Thomas 'pleased once more with words of mine'. There's just a tiny element of self-congratulation in that 'once more'.

Frost outlived his wife, two sons and a daughter, but this is his only overt elegy for an individual. It doesn't quite work. Compare it with his later poem 'Iris by Night', a far better memorial of their friendship.

Hello and...

welcome to my war poetry blog. Over the next few weeks I will add links to other scholars and to useful war poetry websites. I hope to make a few comments about new publications as they appear, and to keep you up-to-date with progress reports about my own research.