G K Chesterton: 'For a War Memorial'

Towards the end of this post is a question to which I hope that one of my readers may have the solution.

As reported previously, I am currently editing a large anthology of First World War poetry for Oxford World's Classics. Each poem will be annotated and given a date of composition. Allusions to places, poems, battles, and so on will be noted and explained.

Charlotte Mew will be represented by three poems, the longest of which is 'The Cenotaph'. The poem first appeared in The Westminster Gazette on 7 September 1919, and it seems reasonable to assume that Mew wrote it in July or August of that year. The word 'Cenotaph' (from the Greek for 'empty tomb') was current thanks to Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose wood-and-plaster structure was unveiled at Whitehall in July 1919; he replaced it with a near-identical stone structure at the same spot in 1920. (Lutyens had been commissioned to design a 'catafalque'; the 'cenotaph' was his own term.)

Mew may also have known Lutyens’s plans for a more elaborate war memorial in Southampton, a city which she passed through regularly on family trips to the Isle of Wight.
However, neither the London nor the Southampton Cenotaph depicts what Mew describes: 'Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column’s head’. Her poem is an example of what John Hollander calls 'notional ekphrasis'—the verbal representation of an imaginary work of art.

Mew's was by no means the only poem to consider the proprieties and the inadequacies of war memorials at that time. G. K. Chesterton's 'For a War Memorial' (below) was collected in The Ballad of St Barbara and Other Verses (1922). Chesterton's editor, Aidan Mackey, proposes a date of composition between 1918 and 1920, and he has told me that he considers 1919 most likely. The mystery is: who had read whom? 'The hucksters haggle in the mart', Chesterton begins, either remembering or inspiring Mew's depiction of 'every busy whore's and huckster's face / As they drive their bargains' in 'the Market-place'.

In the absence of further evidence, I have to assume that Chesterton had read Mew. But if any reader knows of an earlier publication date for Chesterton's poem, please let me know.

For a War Memorial
(Suggested Inscription probably not selected by the Committee.)

The hucksters haggle in the mart
The cars and carts go by;
Senates and schools go droning on;
For dead things cannot die.

A storm stooped on the place of tombs
With bolts to blast and rive;
But these be names of many men
The lightning found alive.

If usurers rule and rights decay
And visions view once more
Great Carthage like a golden shell
Gape hollow on the shore,

Still to the last of crumbling time
Upon this stone be read
How many men of England died
To prove they were not dead.

Remembrance of Things Past

It's the time of year when visitors turn up in vast numbers at this blog looking for Laurence Binyon's 'For the Fallen'. I like to be helpful, so here in one handy blogpost are all your Remembrancetide needs. Binyon is your man if you are prepared to wait until stanza 4; McCrae is punchier, certainly more pugilistic: you will need to ignore the final stanza's call to arms, or at least pretend that, as long as it is read in a suitably sombre tone, no one need worry about what it means.

Laurence Binyon, 'For the Fallen'

John McCrae, 'In Flanders Fields'

Then there is David Cameron's favourite poem, Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'; or, if you want something more unusual, you could choose Charlotte Mew's 'The Cenotaph'. Mew tells us the uncomfortable truth---which politicians of all stripes never fail to confirm---that remembrance can be conveniently reduced to nothing more than a public gesture, a performance, a token monument. As Geoffrey Hill, our greatest living poet, bitterly complains, England has become 'a nation / with so many memorials but no memory'.

Charlotte Mew: 'May, 1915'

Last weekend, I attended the Decadent Poetics conference in Exeter, and gave a talk on one of my favourite poets, Charlotte Mew. Mew seems to me to be scandalously underappreciated. Hers is a narrow achievement---only one book appeared during her lifetime---but at her best she bears comparison with any of her contemporaries. I am currently writing an essay on her work for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, and will enthusiastically accept any further invitation to proselytise on her behalf.

Mew's poetry is one of the few redeeming features of Scars Upon My Heart, an anthology of 'women's poetry and verse of the First World War' which eschews value judgement in favour of inclusivity. Mew and the other significant poets collected there (Cannan, Cole, Farjeon, Meynell) almost disappear beneath waves of mediocrity. Thankfully, the anthology prints all three of Mew's poems explicitly addressing the War. The best known is 'The Cenotaph', which I have previously discussed here. There are also two shorter poems: 'May, 1915' and 'June, 1915'. Here is 'May, 1915' as edited by John Newton in the most reliable edition of Mew's poetry.

May, 1915

    Let us remember Spring will come again
    To the scorched, blackened woods, where all the wounded trees
    Wait, with their old wise patience for the heavenly rain,
  Sure of the sky: sure of the sea to send its healing breeze,
      Sure of the sun. And even as to these
        Surely the Spring, when God shall please
      Will come again like a divine surprise
To those who sit to-day with their great Dead, hands in their hands, eyes in their eyes,
At one with Love, at one with Grief: blind to the scattered things and changing skies.

I have argued elsewhere that this is a poem fractured across its middle. The first four and a half lines may require a willed act of remembrance in order to assert the therapeutic powers of seasonal cycles, but the emphasis remains positive: no matter how badly damaged, nature will recover in time. The problem occurs in the second half of the poem, when the speaker wants to draw parallels between the patient trees and the mourning relatives of the Great War's dead. 'And even as to these': the awkwardness of the phrase is an acknowledgement that the simile remains problematic. That is followed by more special pleading (or wishful thinking) in the word 'Surely': the switch from the confidence of the thrice-repeated 'Sure' to 'Surely' betrays scepticism more than faith. By May 1915, 'Love' and 'Grief' have become synonymous, expanding as the lines expand, and blinding the bereaved even to the divinely ordained Spring and its supposed healing qualities.

Charlotte Mew: 'The Cenotaph'

I have never understood why Charlotte Mew's achievement is so rarely celebrated. She seems to me to have been one of the very great poets of the last century. Bizarrely, her work is more likely to appear in anthologies of Victorian poetry, even though the only book published in her lifetime was The Farmer's Bride (1916, expanded 1921), most of which she wrote after 1912. Defenders of the canon often protest that identity politics should not be allowed to replace aesthetic judgements. Yet here is one of our most important poets, a woman and a lesbian, whose work continues to be overlooked by all sides because it does not lend itself to lazy categorisation.

I once enquired after the possibility of editing Mew's letters. My publisher expressed a keen interest, but the reaction of an existing editor of Mew's work, whose proprietorial senses were outraged, soon dissuaded me. A decade later, the edition which (I was assured) she was already working on seems no closer to being finished. It is a great shame. Mew's poetry is most easily available through a very poor edition by Eavan Boland, the prose is out of print, and most of the letters languish unread. Mew has been badly served, although this valuable website makes some of her work available.

I have blogged previously that Mew wrote three poems explicitly addressing the Great War. They are not quite at the level of a masterpiece like 'Madeleine in Church' (extracts here), but like that untouchably perfect monologue of religious doubt, each challenges and overturns familiar consolatory conventions. The best known of the three is 'The Cenotaph'. As an admissions tutor at Bristol, I used to set the poem as an unseen. The strongest candidates wrote brilliantly about its changing rhymes and rhythms; the worst would seem not even to notice that the lines vary in length from four syllables to 23, so determined were they to escape into a caricaturing account of the futility myth, usually with reference to 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.

The Cenotaph

Not yet will those measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed;
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.
But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column's head.
And over the stairway, at the foot---oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread
Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things
Speaking so wistfully of other Springs
From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.
In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers
     To lovers---to mothers
     Here, too, lies he:
Under the purple, the green, the red,
It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see
Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!
Only, when all is done and said,
God is not mocked and neither are the dead.
For this will stand in our Market-place---
     Who'll sell, who'll buy
     (Will you or I
Lie each to each with the better grace)?
While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's face
As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.

The poet excoriates herself, and at the same time acknowledges her distance: 'it must break some women's hearts'. She and her readers are among the whores and hucksters, horribly captured in that most disgusted of rhymes: buy/I/lie. God is not mocked, Galatians tells us, 'for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap'. Yet here there is no salvatory transformation. We are lost in our money-grubbing littleness, unredeemed by the deaths of those young men. Nor do they find hope of resurrection. The unknown soldier is also Christ, but his 'young, piteous, murdered face' remains unregenerated by spring.

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.