Some Desperate Glory (15 page)

‘Rain' was written in a hut in the camp, conveying fear of a ruined land and culture and also the power of memory to keep goodness alive. In March came ‘Home', about his life as a soldier. In May the poem ‘The Sun Used to Shine' evokes escape into a rosy past; ‘As the Team's Head-Brass' tells how the war touched each field and village. Thomas decided to take a commission; and in July, in spite of his occasional diabetes, was accepted by the artillery. Looking back, he told Frost that ‘I don't believe I often had as good times as I have had, one way and another, these past 13 months.'

Thomas now wanted to be at the war: to ‘run risks, to be put through it', for (as he told Frost) ‘this waiting troubles me'. An officer cadet in the Royal Artillery, he went to Bloomsbury for training, then in September to Trowbridge barracks in Wiltshire, where he wrote ‘The Trumpet', worthy of Rupert Brooke. Helen and the younger children moved to Essex – after Thomas had left. By November 1916, the month of ‘Lights Out' with its title taken from a bugle call, he knew that he wanted to risk his life.

 

1916 POEMS

‘
August 1914
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
Rain
' – Edward Thomas

‘
The Troop Ship
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
A Worm Fed on the Heart of Corinth
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
Home
' – Edward Thomas

‘
The Kiss
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
The Festubert Shrine
' – Edmund Blunden

‘
As the Team's Head-Brass
' – Edward Thomas

‘
The Sun Used to Shine
' – Edward Thomas

‘
Break of Day in the Trenches
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
Strange Service
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
The Death Bed
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
The Trumpet
' – Edward Thomas

‘
Lights Out
' – Edward Thomas

‘
Bach and the Sentry
' – Ivor Gurney

 

 

August 1914

What in our lives is burnt

In the fire of this?

The heart's dear granary?

The much we shall miss?

 

Three lives hath one life –

Iron, honey, gold.

The gold, the honey gone –

Left is the hard and cold.

 

Iron are our lives

Molten right through our youth.

A burnt space through ripe fields,

A fair mouth's broken tooth.

I
SAAC
R
OSENBERG

 

 

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me

Remembering again that I shall die

And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks

For washing me cleaner than I have been

Since I was born into this solitude.

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:

But here I pray that none whom once I loved

Is dying to-night or lying still awake

Solitary, listening to the rain,

Either in pain or thus in sympathy

Helpless among the living and the dead,

Like a cold water among broken reeds,

Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,

Like me who have no love which this wild rain

Has not dissolved except the love of death,

If love it be towards what is perfect and

Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

 

The Troop Ship

Grotesque and queerly huddled

Contortionists to twist

The sleepy soul to a sleep,

We lie all sorts of ways

And cannot sleep.

The wet wind is so cold,

And the lurching men so careless,

That, should you drop to a doze,

Wind's fumble or men's feet

Is on your face.

I
SAAC
R
OSENBERG

 

 

A Worm Fed on the Heart of Corinth

A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,

Babylon and Rome.

Not Paris raped tall Helen,

But this incestuous worm,

Who lured her vivid beauty

To his amorphous sleep.

England! famous as Helen

Is thy betrothal sung.

To him the shadowless,

More amorous than Solomon.

I
SAAC
R
OSENBERG

 

 

Home

Fair was the morning, fair our tempers, and

We had seen nothing fairer than that land,

Though strange, and the untrodden snow that made

Wild of the tame, casting out all that was

Not wild and rustic and old; and we were glad.

 

Fair, too, was afternoon, and first to pass

Were we that league of snow, next the north wind.

 

There was nothing to return for, except need,

And yet we sang nor ever stopped for speed,

As we did often with the start behind.

Faster still strode we when we came in sight

Of the cold roofs where we must spend the night.

Happy we had not been there, nor could be,

Though we had tasted sleep and food and fellowship

Together long.

‘How quick', to someone's lip

The words came, ‘will the beaten horse run home.'

 

The word ‘home' raised a smile in us all three,

And one repeated it, smiling just so

That all knew what he meant and none would say.

Between three counties far apart that lay

We were divided and looked strangely each

At the other, and we knew we were not friends

But fellows in a union that ends

With the necessity for it, as it ought.

 

Never a word was spoken, not a thought

Was thought, of what the look meant with the word

‘Home' as we walked and watched the sunset blurred.

And then to me the word, only the word,

‘Homesick', as it were playfully occurred:

No more.

 

If I should ever more admit

Than the mere word I could not endure it

For a day longer: this captivity

Must somehow come to an end, else I should be

Another man, as often now I seem,

Or this life be only an evil dream.

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

 

The Kiss

To these I turn, in these I trust –

Brother Lead and Sister Steel.

To his blind power I make appeal,

I guard her beauty clean from rust.

 

He spins and burns and loves the air,

And splits a skull to win my praise;

But up the nobly marching days

She glitters naked, cold and fair.

 

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:

That in good fury he may feel

The body where he sets his heel

Quail from your downward darting kiss.

S
IEGFRIED
S
ASSOON

 

 

The Festubert Shrine

A sycamore on either side

In whose lovely leafage cried

      Hushingly the little winds –

Thus was Mary's shrine descried.

 

‘Sixteen Hundred and Twenty-Four'

Legended above the door,

      ‘Pray, sweet gracious Lady, pray

For our souls,' – and nothing more.

 

Builded of rude gray stones and these

Scarred and marred from base to frieze

      With the shrapnel's pounces – ah,

Fair she braved War's gaunt disease:

 

Fair she pondered on the strange

Embitterments of latter change,

      Looking fair towards Festubert,

Cloven roof and tortured grange.

 

Work of carving too there was,

(Once had been her reredos),

      In this cool and peaceful cell

That the hoarse guns blared across.

 

Twisted oaken pillars graced

With oaken amaranths interlaced

      In oaken garlandry, had borne

Her holy niche – and now laid waste.

 

Mary, pray for us? O pray!

In thy dwelling by this way

      What poor folks have knelt to thee!

We are no less poor than they.

E
DMUND
B
LUNDEN

 

 

As the Team's Head-Brass

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn

The lovers disappeared into the wood.

I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm

That strewed the angle of the fallow, and

Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square

Of charlock. Every time the horses turned

Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned

Upon the handles to say or ask a word,

About the weather, next about the war.

Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,

And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed

Once more.

 

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest

I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,

The ploughman said. ‘When will they take it away?'

‘When the war's over.' So the talk began –

One minute and an interval of ten,

A minute more and the same interval.

‘Have you been out?' ‘No.' ‘And don't want to, perhaps?'

‘If I could only come back again, I should.

I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose

A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,

I should want nothing more … Have many gone

From here?' ‘Yes.' ‘Many lost?' ‘Yes, a good few.

Only two teams work on the farm this year.

One of my mates is dead. The second day

In France they killed him. It was back in March,

The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if

He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'

‘And I should not have sat here. Everything

Would have been different. For it would have been

Another world.' ‘Ay, and a better, though

If we could see all all might seem good.' Then

The lovers came out of the wood again:

The horses started and for the last time

I watched the clods crumble and topple over

After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

 

The Sun Used to Shine

The sun used to shine while we two walked

Slowly together, paused and started

Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked

As either pleased, and cheerfully parted

 

Each night. We never disagreed

Which gate to rest on. The to be

And the late past we gave small heed.

We turned from men or poetry

 

To rumours of the war remote

Only till both stood disinclined

For aught but the yellow flavorous coat

Of an apple wasps had undermined;

 

Or a sentry of dark betonies,

The stateliest of small flowers on earth,

At the forest verge; or crocuses

Pale purple as if they had their birth

 

In sunless Hades fields. The war

Came back to mind with the moonrise

Which soldiers in the east afar

Beheld then. Nevertheless, our eyes

 

Could as well imagine the Crusades

Or Caesar's battles. Everything

To faintness like those rumours fades –

Like the brook's water glittering

 

Under the moonlight – like those walks

Now – like us two that took them, and

The fallen apples, all the talks

And silences – like memory's sand

 

When the tide covers it late or soon,

And other men through other flowers

In those fields under the same moon

Go talking and have easy hours.

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

 

Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old Druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet's poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems, odd thing, you grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver – what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man's veins

Drop, and are ever dropping,

But mine in my ear is safe –

Just a little white with the dust.

I
SAAC
R
OSENBERG

 

 

Strange Service

Little did I dream, England, that you bore me

Under the Cotswold Rills beside the water meadows,

To do you dreadful service, here, beyond your borders

And your enfolding seas.

 

I was a dreamer ever, and bound to your dear service,

Meditating deep, I thought on your secret beauty,

As through a child's face one may see the clear spirit

Miraculously shining.