T. P. Cameron Wilson: 'Magpies in Picardy'

My fellow Devonian T. P. Cameron Wilson (1889-1918) belongs alongside Julian Grenfell and Patrick Shaw Stewart as a poet of the Great War who is now remembered for a single poem. Merryn Williams, who wrote a pamphlet about him several years ago, had to search long and hard for a photograph of her subject. I haven't yet seen the book to find out if she was successful.

Wilson published a novel, The Friendly Enemy, which has recently been reissued, and some of his letters appeared after he was killed in France. However, it is the title poem of Magpies in Picardy for which he is known. The internet is no respecter of line breaks; the volume can be found here in a partially mangled state. It was published in 1919 by Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, and Monro's introduction is full of hesitancy: 'His literary talent showed itself precociously early, but afterwards developed rather slowly'. Not surprisingly, the book did not sell well, but Wilson was rescued into semi-obscurity when some poems were included by Lord Wavell in Other Men's Flowers.

Looking through Magpies in Picardy now, it is hard to find much worth salvaging. Hibberd and Onions include 'A Soldier' as well as the title poem in their anthology, and a case could also be made by the generous-spirited for 'Song of Amiens' and 'During the Bombardment' (all of which are strategically positioned near the start of Monro's edition). After that, the quality falls away. A poem titled 'Stanzas Written Outside a Fried-Fish Shop' begins with mesmerising awfulness: 'O Mother Earth! Whose sweetest visions move / Through the blue night in silver nakedness'. It isn't a joke, and it doesn't get better. As for Wilson's attempts at Devon dialect, they are more extreme than anything found in supposedly humorous pamphlets from Dartmoor tea-shops.

And yet... the title poem, 'Magpies in Picardy', is a wonder, with all the strangeness of genius. Monro's edition misses two stanzas which later editors have added and which I include below. The first of them (which is now the penultimate stanza) is the weakest in the poem, and makes no grammatical sense unless considered for upwards of five minutes. (The verb is 'works on', not 'works', and 'the ancient plan' is the subject, not the object.)

Magpies in Picardy

The magpies in Picardy
Are more than I can tell.
They flicker down the dusty roads
And cast a magic spell
On the men who march through Picardy,
Through Picardy to hell.

(The blackbird flies with panic,
The swallow goes with light,
The finches move like ladies,
The owl floats by at night;
But the great and flashing magpie
He flies as artists might.)

A magpie in Picardy
Told me secret things—
Of the music in white feathers,
And the sunlight that sings
And dances in deep shadows—
He told me with his wings.

(The hawk is cruel and rigid,
He watches from a height;
The rook is slow and sombre,
The robin loves to fight;
But the great and flashing magpie
He flies as lovers might.)

He told me that in Picardy,
An age ago or more,
While all his fathers still were eggs,
These dusty highways bore
Brown, singing soldiers marching out
Through Picardy to war.

He said that still through chaos
Works on the ancient plan,
And two things have altered not
Since first the world began—
The beauty of the wild green earth
And the bravery of man.

(For the sparrow flies unthinking
And quarrels in his flight;
The heron trails his legs behind,
The lark goes out of sight;
But the great and flashing magpie
He flies as poets might.)