Irish War Poetry

Gerald Dawe's new anthology of Irish War Poetry (Blackstaff) brings together poems from and about the two World Wars, the Easter Rising, and the Irish and Spanish Civil Wars. Katharine Tynan, the first poet in the book, was born in 1861; the last, Van Morrison, in 1945. Dawe doesn't explain why he stops there, but it is a shame: Carson's 'Dresden' and Muldoon's 'Truce' are two of the more notable omissions. Permissions fees may have played a part. When John Hewitt is given more space than Yeats or MacNeice, it is safe to assume that an editor as gifted as Dawe has been obliged to make decisions for reasons other than literary merit.

To his great credit, Dawe manages to turn these restrictions into opportunities. There are generous selections of poets like Ledwidge (an Irish nationalist who died fighting for Britain), Stuart, and Greacen (to whose memory the book is dedicated). Yeats and MacNeice, after all, can take care of themselves; and if their under-representation ensures that the book is unlikely to be adopted as a teaching text, Dawe does an equally important job of challenging received notions of the canon. As he states in his short introduction, 'While Ireland and Northern Ireland's recent Troubles have occupied considerable political, cultural and poetic space, public and private reaction to the wars of the first half of the twentieth century have not been as widely considered, even though the cost in human and political terms was much greater.' Against the argument that the Troubles provided a greater poetic legacy, Dawe's anthology is the best response.

At £16.99 (pbk £9.99), this bulky and handsomely-produced hardback deserves success on both sides of the Irish Sea. Buy it for the poets you haven't heard of, as well as the poets you have. Buy it, too, for the postscript: Samuel Beckett's 'The Capital of the Ruins'. Surveying the wreckage of Saint-Lô, a town 'bombed out of existence in one night', Beckett has 'a vision and a sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again.' There, in miniature, is the ambition of his post-war writing, an ambition shaped by Beckett's experiences during the Second World War.

Pimps, Prostitutes and Lady Typists: A New Source for The Waste Land?

'The Fire Sermon', the third part of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), famously describes an assignation between a 'typist' and a 'young man carbuncular' who comes to her home as the 'expected guest':

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.

After her 'lover' has departed, the typist expresses her relief: '"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."'

Lawrence Rainey, in his invaluable annotated edition, points out how rarely typists featured in 'serious' poems prior to The Waste Land, although he goes on to identify seven realist novels between 1910 and 1922 which explored this new subject. In four of them, he notes, 'the heroine engages in what would now be termed consensual premarital sex'.

Even so, the fact that sex in 'The Fire Sermon' is premarital and consensual remains subsidiary to a more important consideration which complements the poem's larger patterning of motifs: sex (at least for the typist) seems utterly devoid of joy. What is her motivation, what the quid pro quo for making herself available to 'Exploring hands'? Regarding that mystery, Rainey's typist-novels (which he offers as parallels, not sources) are silent.

The poem's description of the 'departed lover' is, of course, ironic: the transaction between typist and young man carbuncular has nothing to do with love. The manuscripts of The Waste Land reveal that originally the poem had opened with a brothel scene in which Myrtle, the procuress, tells the male narrator that he is too drunk to have one of her girls. Prostitution, then, lurks in the peripheries, alongside various kinds of sexual violence, barrenness and dysfunction. The poem does not state that the typist receives money for her services, but her absence of sexual pleasure causes the reader to wonder in what ways she is compensated. We are not told that she is a prostitute; nor are we told that she is not.

A previously unnoticed source for this most musical and allusive (and musically allusive) of poems brings typist and prostitute into comic relation: the Great War song, 'I Don't Want To Be a Soldier'.


I Don't Want To Be a Soldier

I don't want to be a soldier,
I don't want to go to war,
I'd rather stay at home,
Around the streets to roam,
And live on the earnings of a lady typist.
I don't want a bayonet in my belly,
I don't want my bollocks shot away,
I'd rather stay in England,
In merry, merry England,
And fornicate my bleeding life away.

The phrase which stands out is 'lady typist'. Rhythms, rhyme patterns, and the logic of the sense require something else: something which rhymes with 'war'... What could be purer than a 'typist'? A 'lady typist'. And yet the phrase is a comic substitution for 'whore'. (Another version of the song refers, just as knowingly, to living off the earnings of a 'high-class lady'.) Even living off immoral earnings is better than going to war. See Gurney's 1917 poem 'Servitude': 'To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor / Of filthiest hovels, were noble to compare / With this brass-cleaning life [soldiering]'.

The lady typist, like her successor in The Waste Land, both is and is not a prostitute. She is the substitute, and simultaneously the equivalent. Eliot chose his protagonist's career wisely: we know her as (wink, wink!) a 'typist'.

An Epitaph on MacDiarmid's 'Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries'

A surprising number of visitors to this site have been seeking information about Hugh MacDiarmid's 'Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries', written in 1935. This morally corrosive poem may have wormed its way onto some benighted syllabus as an example of anti-war poetry.

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 and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

I argued in an earlier post that MacDiarmid was (at best) historically ignorant in his attempts to rebut Housman's 'Epitaph'. 'These' were the Old Contemptibles, the British Expeditionary Force sent in 1914 (by a democratic government and with the overwhelming support of the population) to repel invading Prussian forces and protect the sovereignty of occupied nations. To call our soldiers 'professional murderers' is merely to make the same crude allegation against professional armed forces throughout history. Are we encouraged to understand that amateur murderers are more acceptable?

MacDiarmid minded some murderers less than others. His apotheosis of Stalin, which endured even beyond the Hungarian Revolution (1956), contaminates much of his poetry and prose from the 1930s onwards. As far as MacDiarmid was concerned, Stalin helped 'elements of worth' to 'persist on earth'. Better to murder cold-bloodedly for ideology, than to 'murder' in battle for pay; and so, MacDiarmid's 'Epitaph' would have us believe, a soldier fighting in defence of his own or another nation is worse than a genocidal dictator.

Robert Nichols's War Poetry Anthology

Sebastian Field has kindly lent me his copy of Robert Nichols's Anthology of War Poetry 1914-18, first published in 1943. Nichols was a veteran of the Great War who had been invalided out of the army with shellshock.

Dedicated to 'Those who go by force into the land of Bire', the anthology spends 100 pages of introduction in a Platonic dialogue with a young soldier (Julian Tennyson) about to fight in the Second World War. The purpose is to hand down wisdom from one generation to the next. Wheedled into submission, or perhaps desperate to escape, Tennyson finally succumbs: 'I see now you were right. My generation does in some sort undertake this adventure in the enjoyment of a certain advantage over yours. We are clearer as to our aims and Germany's. And we have so much more definite notions as to what we have to expect.' Thank heavens for poetry anthologists!

Nichols is nothing if not self-indulgent. He expects that the reader in 1943, pondering the words of the Great War poets, will conclude 'that it is out of a feeling of the fullness of living that they consecrate themselves to death; the act is a sort of flowering, as if the flower should find a voice and say, "This is my blossom. It is red."' If it fails to do anything else, the metaphor at least makes clear why Nichols is such a minor poet.

His selection of poems takes up less than half the space of the introduction, and seems rather like a reluctant afterthought. Nichols's canon, such as it is, looks bizarre to modern readers: no Gurney, no Rosenberg, no David Jones, just one civilian (not Hardy or Kipling but James Elroy Flecker, obviously!). Owen, credited with having written 'by far the most beautiful' poems during the war, is represented by just four pieces, the same number as Brett Young. Sassoon wins with 13, followed by Blunden (9), Graves (8) and Brooke (5). Rickword has 2, and the only other poet represented by more than a single poem is Nichols himself (1 plus the 'Epilogue'). It is hard to think of a madder poetry anthology since E. B. Osborn's The Muse in Arms (1917) argued that the greatest of all Great War poets was... Robert Nichols.

Wilfred Owen Animated

What do you make of that?

More of Jim Clark's animations here.

Charles Causley and Siegfried Sassoon

Charles Causley (1917-2003) bequeathed his papers to Special Collections at the University of Exeter. The university's archive focuses on writers associated with the South West of England: Daphne du Maurier, Ted Hughes, Agatha Christie, Patricia Beer, John Betjeman, Henry Williamson, Jack Clemo, and many others.

Causley's papers include twenty letters from Siegfried Sassoon, and two from Sassoon's son George, the last (dated June 1975) encouraging Causley to write a biography of his father. Causley did a great deal to promote a poet who, in old age, felt himself to have been forgotten except as 'the man who knew Wilfred'. Sassoon showed more pride in having known Thomas Hardy, and confided to Causley his disappointment that his old friend Robert Graves had behaved presumptuously at a commemorative event in Hardy's honour. With an emphasis conveying the long history of love, anger, betrayal and competition between the two poets, Sassoon could not resist laying bare the extent of Graves's familiarity: '(He went to Max Gate once)'.

These letters to Causley have never been published or, until now, seen by scholars. I would be keen to hear from anyone who knows the whereabouts of the other side of the correspondence: the letters from Causley to Sassoon.

Forthcoming Conferences

A number of conferences later this year have relevance to anyone interested in war poetry. The first, titled 'The (In)visibility of War in Literature and the Media', takes place in Lisbon on 7-9 May. Then there is 'The First World War: Literature, Music, Memory' in Cambridge on 11-12 July; the programme has just been announced. Finally, a conference in Gdansk on 17-19 September will consider 'Representations of Military Violence and its Consequences in Literature, Film and Popular Culture'.

Colyton at War

Colyton at War is not a book I would have read --- or would ever have heard of --- were it not that I live in the small East Devon town which is its focus. Local histories can be wildly variable in quality; this one is well-written and well-edited. I was intrigued to see how the author, Geoff Elliott, would manage to fill 150 pages about a town on which just one bomb fell (and failed to explode) during the Second World War. Exeter, 20 miles west, suffered badly in the Baedeker raids; and 40 miles further west than that, my grandmother and her family took their chances a stone's throw from Devonport Dockyard. Colyton's rural idyll must have seemed a world apart.

Great emphasis is placed on those few moments of drama: a German bomber shot down a mile away, its crew captured by local farmers; a raid on Seaton (3 miles south) in which five people were killed; more German planes flying overhead on their way to bomb Bristol. However, the book is more important for the testimonies describing everyday life, which passed unaffected by the war except for the mostly welcome intrusions of evacuees and friendly prisoners-of-war. Colyton Could Take It, and seemed to enjoy it. One local farmer states that 'Whether it was pigs or rabbits, there weren't any shortages of meat. Compared with the rations endured by people in the cities, this was a land of plenty.' Accompanying his account is a photograph of happy children holding up a dozen dead rabbits. The grown-ups had fun, too. In one military exercise, Colyton's Home Guard outwitted its Seaton counterparts, capturing that southern outpost by riding past its unsuspecting defenders on the tram.

The area had its poet: C. Day-Lewis lived a mile away in Musbury. One of his Home Guard responsibilities, his son Sean recalls, was to keep watch along the Axe Valley. (The pillboxes which still line the valley are the remains and reminder of a belief that Seaton was a likely invasion point for the German army.) 'All over the countryside', Day-Lewis wrote, 'Moon-dazzled men are peering out for invaders.' As he later admitted in his autobiography, 'if the Germans had landed, I dare say we should have been scattered like chaff.'

Flannelled Fools and Muddied Oafs

The first day of the second test between England and the West Indies seems as good an occasion as any to revisit Rudyard Kipling's 'The Islanders'. The poem dismayed many of its readers when it was first published on 3 January 1902, and its relevance to our current situation ought still to make us uneasy.

'The Islanders' was written towards the end of the Boer War. It amounts to a fierce denunciation of the British public's priorities, and a demand for national service to prepare for the coming European war which Kipling foresaw. Rounding on those who sent an ill-trained army to fight on their behalf, Kipling condemns a nation rendered complacent by bread and circuses:

So? And ye train your horses and the dogs ye feed and prize?

How are the beasts more worthy than the souls, your sacrifice?

But ye said, “Their valour shall show them”; but ye said, “The end is close.”

And ye sent them comfits and pictures to help them harry your foes:

And ye vaunted your fathomless power, and ye flaunted your iron pride,

Ere—ye fawned on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride!

Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls

With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.

At the time, those flannelled fools were touring Australia in the 1901-02 Ashes series. Meanwhile, poorly-equipped British and Australian soldiers were losing their lives in South Africa. Plus ça change: our soldiers still die for the want of basic equipment; and we are all aware of the money and attention invested in flannelled fools and especially muddied oafs. Even those who loathe football have heard of the Kop; far fewer know the battle (see its aftermath, above) after which it was named. Would wars be more urgently resolved, perhaps avoided, if the football and baseball seasons were suspended for as long as those wars continued?

Kipling did more than any poet before or since to raise the status of the British Tommy. He should be living at this hour: stories about soldiers being thrown off trains or refused a hotel room make 'Tommy' essential reading once again. For all its sound and fury, contemporary anti-war poetry ignores the experiences and usually even the existence of our soldiers. We know the reasons why, and it is not the soldiers who are discredited by them.

Samuel Beckett's Letters

Many thanks to Puthwuth for reminding me of the other important book published today.... the first volume of Beckett's Letters. It covers the period 1929-1940, so I assume that it stops at the German occupation of Paris. We will need to wait until volume 2 for any correspondence relating to Beckett's wartime work for the Resistance.

The Oxford Handbook

The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry is published today in paperback. It is more than £60 cheaper than the hardback, and contains fewer typos. It is the perfect Valentine's gift.

Dan Todman's Wilfred Owen

Spot the difference?

Whatever its title ought to be, this excellent book's author is definitely Dan Todman, an historian whose blog, 'Trench Fever', sets a trap in its subtitle: 'War --- what is it good for?' Fans of Edwin Starr might think that they know the answer ('Absolutely nothing!'), but Todman's revisionist attitudes to the Great War produce a long list of benefits. Todman, like many of his fellow historians, thinks that we the general public have been duped. We have been reading Owen and Sassoon, and watching Oh What a Lovely War, when we should have been studying our history books. As The Great War's dust-jacket states: 'The generals were often highly professional and indeed won the war in 1918.... Dan Todman shows how views of the war changed over the last ninety years, and how a distorted image of it emerged and became dominant.' We might note the concession in the word 'often', and the begging of questions in 'distorted', but the book's job is to detail the case which the blurb can only summarise. It does that very well; yet, perhaps necessarily, it overstates in order to state at all. Todman calls Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory 'a work of polemic rather than analysis'; that is true of Fussell's book --- in the same way, and to the same extent, that it is true of Todman's.

Although chapter 5 of Todman's study is titled 'Poets', he has only one poet in his crosshairs: Wilfred Owen. Todman tracks Owen's growth in popularity from its hesitant beginnings in the early 1920s to his near ubiquity on school syllabi over the last several decades. He does not quite say that Owen is overrated, but the poet evidently annoys him. There are serious points to make about Owen's reception at the expense of other Great War poets, and about the reasons why certain of Owen's poems push out his others --- and Todman makes those points brilliantly. But he does not offer a reading of a single Owen poem. Instead, he dwells on the extreme and occasionally foolish uses to which Owen's work has been put, and he often treats those uses as justified by the poems themselves. Even so, it is not Owen's fault that history teachers encourage their students to write reductive Owenite pastiche about the futility of war. It is the fault of the history teachers.

'The continuing British relationship with the literature of the First World War deserves a massive study in its own right', Todman concludes, 'far more so than the works of the soldier poets themselves, which have been studied to death.' The first half of his sentence is undeniable --- and Todman is an ideal candidate for such a study: learned, fluent, wide-ranging, provocative. But the second half exposes the flaw in his impressive book. As Todman himself has (perhaps inadvertently) shown, the war's poets have fallen foul of historical arguments, not vice versa. Owen is not so much studied as exploited, his contemporaries ignored. Far from having been 'studied to death', Great War poetry continues to live and sing. Meanwhile, we can barely hear that music against the ceaseless din of historians clashing over what they assume to be its bones.

Reading Reed

Here is Henry Reed (1914-1986). Chastised by a reviewer for failing to mention him in my Modern English War Poetry, I have since performed the penitential (but pleasurable) task of reading and re-reading Reed's Collected Poems. Reed is also fortunate enough to be the subject of a website which describes itself as 'An obsessive, armchair attempt to assemble a comprehensive bibliography, not just for the work of a poet, but for his entire life.' The site is more than an essential resource; it is a wonder. Every dead poet should have one.

Reed fulfilled the terms of Robert Frost's ambition: 'to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of.' To be precise, he lodged three: 'Naming of Parts', 'Judging Distances', and his (to my mind, rather limp) pastiche of T. S. Eliot, 'Chard Whitlow'. I would also pick out the rest of Lessons of the War (from which 'Naming of Parts' and 'Judging Distances' are taken), Reed's 'Triptych', and lurking in that most unprepossessing part of a poet's work --- 'Early poems, drafts and fragments' --- the longish and posthumously-published 'Psychological Warfare'. Jon Stallworthy's editorial note informs us that 'Psychological Warfare' had been intended as an afterpiece to Lessons of the War; like those lessons, it is based on Reed's experiences in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps during the Second World War. Comically exaggerated, the voice of the instructor nevertheless rings true:

I am, as you know, like all true professional soldiers,
A profoundly religious man: the true soldier has to be.
And I therefore believe the war will be over by Easter Monday.
But I must in fairness state that a number of my brother-officers,
No less religious than I, believe it will hold out till Whitsun.
Others, more on the agnostic side (although I do not contemn them)
Fancy the thing will drag on till August Bank Holiday.

This has an echo of an earlier World War, and before long the instructor reveals himself to be a veteran of 'the fourteen-eighteen thing', in which the enemy was 'cruelly, ruthlessly, starkly obsessed with the arts, / Music and painting, sculpture and the writing of verses'. The instructor's advice: 'Please, do not stand for it.'

Henry Reed was often confused with the (fractionally) better-known Great War poet, Herbert Read. Far from taking it amiss, he encouraged the muddle by writing radio plays about a character called Herbert Reeve. I hope he would be disappointed that no one has criticised my book for failing to mention Read's poetry.

Drummond Allison

In a recent essay on Sidney Keyes collected here, Geoffrey Hill mentions in despatches a friend of Keyes and fellow soldier-poet, Drummond Allison. Hill contrasts Keith Douglas's reputation, 'now so patent and secure', with the relative neglect of both Keyes and Allison: 'Keyes has still to be fought for... so has Drummond Allison, killed in Italy in 1943, whose Fortune Press volume The Yellow Night, containing three or four poems of distinction, is his sole literary legacy.'

Ross Davies's recent biography of Allison (published by Cecil Woolf) takes up that fight. Allison died leading a daylight infantry charge on Monte Camino, aged just 22. His literary legacy, as Hill states, may be tiny, but it is also significant. I don't know which three or four poems Hill especially admires, but Davies quotes effectively and generously enough to give the impression of a considerable talent. Here, for example, is the opening of 'Come, Let Us Pity Death':

Come, let us pity not the dead but Death
For He can only come when we are leaving,
He cannot stay for tea or share our sherry.
He makes the old man vomit on the hearthrug
But never knew his heart before it failed him.
He shoves the shopgirl under the curt lorry
But could not watch her body undivided.
Swerving the cannon-shell to smash the airman
He had no time to hear my brother laughing.

'Curt lorry' is good, and 'undivided' sufficiently gruesome, but the shock of the passage comes with the reference to the airman as 'my brother': Allison's brother had been shot down early in the war. The poem taunts and outwits Death as expertly as one of Donne's metaphysical conceits.

Davies is adept at conveying the literary milieu at wartime Oxford, as friend after friend was called up and (in many cases) killed. Allison's own call-up was delayed by a term after an injury sustained while acting in Keyes's play, The Prisoners. One reviewer described the scene: 'When a young man stood on a stage in Oxford last night and talked passionately and wildly of love and idealism, with blood streaming down his face, and his hands dyed scarlet, the audience were a little taken aback, and inclined to the view that the ghastly sight he presented was carrying stage realism a little too far.' Allison was the young man in question, and the blood was real blood. The play required that Allison's character be struck with a revolver-butt. His assailant (thought to have been Keyes himself) had taken his role rather too literally, and severed a small artery in Allison's head.

Ross Davies's book is an excellent introduction to Allison. I hope that it will help create the market for a readily available edition of Allison's poetry.

Update: Here are the full publication details. Ross Davies, Drummond Allison: Come, Let Us Pity Death (Cecil Woolf Publishers), £9.95. ISBN: 978-1-897967-91-1

Penelope Farmer: Charlotte Sometimes

I've just finished reading Charlotte Sometimes with my son and elder daughter. It's a children's novel in which Charlotte, after her first night in boarding school, wakes up forty years earlier, in 1918. She has swapped places with a girl from the past called Clare, whom we never meet.

The time-switching premise is taken from that masterpiece of children's fiction, Tom's Midnight Garden, to which Farmer's novel is indebted in other ways as well. The first half of Charlotte Sometimes seems thoroughly unmemorable and unoriginal: there are all kinds of japes and scrapes and escapes to do with unwritten homework, Charlotte's and Clare's vastly differing musical and sporting abilities, puzzled schoolfriends, and so on, as the girls swap and swap back every morning.

The novel becomes much darker and more interesting when (disaster!) Charlotte gets stuck in 1918. She and Clare's sister, Emily, are sent off to lodge with the Chisel Browns, a local family who have lost their son in the War. Mr Chisel Brown is a Hun-hater who rages every time that peace is mentioned: 'Damned peace-talk, damned conchies, hun-lovers. Should all be hanged, I say'. On the wall of Charlotte's new bedroom is 'Mark of the German Beast', a pencil drawing of a glowering face: 'But the eyes were gun-holes for shooting at unarmed men; the ears crouched women with murdered babies in their arms; the nose, the mouth, the chin all represented horrors.'

The finest and most terrifying scene in the novel describes a seance organised by the Chisel Browns in the hope of contacting their son. Contact of a sort is made, but nothing comes out quite as hoped, with horribly distressing consequences. Even Armistice Day, starting as a whirligig of celebration, descends into something sinister and unnatural.

Eventually, of course, Charlotte does arrive back in her proper time, although there is no happy ending. The War has become an inescapable legacy: 'What had happened to her would go on mattering, just as what had happened in the war itself would go on mattering, for ever.' The novelist's time-switch technique justifies itself as a means of showing that we are all still living the War and can never be freed from its burden.

The Cow in Apple Time --- War Poem or Bull?

Any reader of Robert Frost's poetry must, sooner or later, come to terms with what he called its 'ulteriority' --- its ability to say one thing and mean another. What, then, does this poem mean?

The Cow in Apple Time

Something inspires the only cow of late

To make no more of a wall than an open gate,

And think no more of wall-builders than fools.

Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools

A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,

She scorns a pasture withering to the root.

She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten

The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.

She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.

She bellows on a knoll against the sky.

Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

Frost wrote the poem in England in late 1914. At readings, he always explained that his 'heroic cow' was inspired by the group of animals at the base of the Albert Memorial (see above), having forgotten or perhaps failed to notice that the 'cow' in question is being ridden by Europa. A more obvious source is Frost's own 'Mending Wall', in which walls between neighbo(u)rs are considered especially important 'where there are cows'.

Frost thought about walls in bodily terms: 'One chief disposition of life living is cell walls breaking and cells walls making'. He also thought about them on an international level. Take, as one example among many, 'Education by Poetry', when he resists arguments against nationalism: 'Look! First I want to be a person. And I want you to be a person, and then we can be as interpersonal as you please. We can pull each other's noses --- do all sorts of things. But, first of all, you have got to have the personality. First of all, you have got to have the nations and then they can be as international as they please with each other.'

Frost's cow is transgressive. She crosses boundaries to taste forbidden fruit, and having been driven back to her proper territory, she suffers the consequences of her greed, losing the ability to nourish her own offspring. In late 1914, one ulterior meaning would have clearly presented itself. Frost's subsequent omission of Europa is the most revealing of disguises. What is the poem about, if not the outbreak of hostilities on the continent which takes its name from that mythical heroine?

It is about a cow which gorges itself in an orchard. That much, at least, we can agree on.