Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen

Last Remembrance Day saw the publication of a new Penguin anthology. Three Poets of the First World War: Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen is edited by Jon Stallworthy and Jane Potter. The book can be strongly recommended, not only for the poems but for its editorial apparatus. The detailed annotations for each poem enrich even the most familiar texts.

Why these poets? Penguin has always liked to publish poets in threes, so the number is unsurprising. But Owen, Gurney and Rosenberg have little in common except their genius. Gurney survived the War, Owen and Rosenberg did not; unlike Owen, Gurney and Rosenberg excelled at two arts; Gurney and Rosenberg were 'common privates', Owen an officer; Owen and Rosenberg have been central to any discussion of war poetry since the 1920s, whereas Gurney's reputation was much slower to develop; Owen and Rosenberg have been served by world-class textual scholars (Jon Stallworthy and Vivien Noakes respectively), Gurney has not---at least not across the bulk of his writings. The introduction tries to insist on coherence by claiming that these are 'three young men of the English underclass', but that's a stretcher: Owen's family was more genteel than Gurney's, and Rosenberg endured a desperate poverty far beyond the ken of either of his fellow poets. As Ezra Pound inimitably put it, Rosenberg 'has something in him, horribly rough but then "Stepney, East"… we ought to have a real burglar… ma che!!!'

Although the editors don't quite spell it out, the selection of the poets for this anthology is motivated by value judgement. There can be no more honourable criterion than that. (Were I allowed five poets, I would add Sassoon and Jones and be confident that---Sorley having died so soon and Thomas having written almost nothing in France---all the best English soldier-poets were included.) Owen and Rosenberg are represented by all their familiar works and a few unfamiliar; if you own this anthology, you have their essential poems. The situation with Gurney is more complicated, not least because so much of his best work remains unpublished; and the poetry which did appear in his lifetime was, with one or two astonishing exceptions, fairly average. It takes an act of faith to read through the first half-dozen poems in Gurney's selection, until with 'Half Dead' the reader is overwhelmed with an extraordinary vision of terrestrial hell and of brutal redemption:

Half dead with sheer tiredness, wakened quick at night
With dysentery pangs, going blind among dim sleepers
And dazed into half dark, illness had its spite.
Head cleared, eyes saw; pangs and ill body-creepers
Stilled with the cold---the cold bringing me sane....

Like so many of Gurney's poems, 'Half Dead' goes askew a few lines later. Gurney is unprecedented in his ability to juxtapose genius and incompetence, and for that reason he seems to have caused Stallworthy and Potter the most problems. But they bravely accept the challenge by including more of Gurney's poems than Owen's or Rosenberg's.

The anthology is dedicated 'with affection and gratitude' to the memory of Vivien Noakes, 'editor and champion of Isaac Rosenberg'. It is a fitting tribute to a woman whose work on Rosenberg provides an exemplary model for any textual scholar.

Isaac Rosenberg in Bristol

The events are coming thick and fast. Here, courtesy of the War Poets Association, is another one: 'Isaac Rosenberg and Bristol', a 120th anniversary celebration on Saturday 23 October. Already booked to speak are Vivien Noakes, Jean Moorcroft-Wilson and Bernard Wynick. The day will also include 'an optional walk to the venue past the birthplace of Isaac Rosenberg'.

Laurence Binyon: 'For the Fallen'

As Remembrance Day approaches, we are likely to encounter a familiar stanza from a poet whose works are otherwise almost entirely forgotten: Laurence Binyon. Binyon was a brilliant man: Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum; scholar of William Blake and of Oriental Art; a Red Cross volunteer at the Western Front; Norton Professor at Harvard in the early 30s; friend of Ezra Pound, Walter Sickert, Edmund Dulac and countless others.

Binyon was not always careful of his acquaintances' reputations. During the British Library’s move to St Pancras in 1995, a box of papers was discovered which had once belonged to him. It contained six letters from Rosenberg to Binyon and twenty-eight more from Rosenberg to another poet, Gordon Bottomley, as well as alternative versions of some of Rosenberg’s best-known poems and several memoirs of Rosenberg collected by Binyon after the war. Having made the initial effort to preserve these markers of Rosenberg's achievement, he had then lost or forgotten about them. Nevertheless, in the early 1920s Binyon did write a fifty-page tribute to Rosenberg, praising in particular the younger poet's 'ardent toil' and 'continual self-criticism'.

Geoffrey Hill has called Binyon's 'For the Fallen' 'perhaps the most widely known and widely quoted poem of the Great War'. Its challengers would presumably be Brooke's 'The Soldier' and Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'. Taken as a whole, 'For the Fallen' is less known than any of those, but its fourth stanza is proclaimed at Remembrance Day events worldwide.

For the Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in the labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

It is easy to see why that fourth stanza, alone, should have been rescued from oblivion. It constitutes the turning-point, the moment when the poem's argument for consolation emerges: the dead enjoy an eternal youth, immortalised in the memory of the living and in other more permanent ways. They are 'As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust'. Their everlastingness exists outside memory, in a form of stellification which harks back to a common motif in Greek myth.

For formal reasons as well, that fourth stanza is especially effective. Its foreshortened final line, 'We will remember them', states without embellishment. It expresses a profound recognition which would only be cheapened by rhetorical flourish. But most of all, the stanza seems sonorous because of its echo of Enobarbus's compliment to Cleopatra: 'Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety'. It may seem a long stretch from Cleopatra's beauty to the fallen youth of the First World War, but a similar principle applies: each achieves a perfection immune to the ravages of time.

Isaac Rosenberg: 'Through these pale cold days'

As a new feature for the blog, I am going to publish a war poem each week. Copyright rules out much of the twentieth century, so my focus will tend to be the Great War and earlier. This week, Isaac Rosenberg's 'Through these pale cold days', followed by some brief notes. Do please post below any comments about the poem or my interpretation.




Through these pale cold days

Through these pale cold days
What dark faces burn
Out of three thousand years,
And their wild eyes yearn,

While underneath their brows
Like waifs their spirits grope
For the pools of Hebron again---
For Lebanon's summer slope.

They leave these blond still days
In dust behind their tread
They see with living eyes
How long they have been dead.

This was the last poem Rosenberg wrote. He sent it to Edward Marsh in a letter dated 28 March 1918, calling it 'a slight thing' and commenting that 'My vocabulary small enough before is impoverished and bare'. By the time the letter arrived in England, Rosenberg was dead. He had been killed while on night patrol on 1 April.

'Through these pale cold days' has always seemed to me to be among the greatest and most mysterious of Rosenberg's poems, notwithstanding his own reservations. It is rarely anthologised, perhaps because editors remain unpersuaded that it should even be classified as war poetry. Yet its long view of Jewish history pressing into the present, and the departure of these strange revenants in the final stanza, are powerful if idiosyncratic responses to current circumstances. 'Revenants' only in one sense, because these long-dead ancestors find their descendants among inhospitable terrain --- not the familiar pools of Hebron nor Lebanon's summer slope, but the 'blond still days' which are so hostile to Jewishness: in 'The Jew', written the previous summer, Rosenberg had complained that 'the blonde', 'the bronze' and 'the ruddy' all 'sneer at me'.

Geoffrey Hill in Speech! Speech! has written of Rosenberg that 'His last efforts / to survive---like THROUGH THESE PALE COLD DAYS--- / appear belated and timely acts / of atonement'. There is a typically Hillian paradox in 'belated and timely', and Hill's preoccupation with ideas of atonement risks turning Rosenberg into Hill avant la lettre. All the same, the similarities between Rosenberg and Hill provide reminders of a debt which Hill is always prepared to acknowledge. Rosenberg, in those pale cold days, is briefly at one with his ghosts; he sees with living eyes for them; they are dead and, through him, alive. However, their visit is necessarily short; with new understanding of the future, they turn away to resume their search for the lost Edenic home. The poet is left behind, abandoned even by his own people.

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.