Some soldier poets

Front matter

SOME SOLDIER POETS

BY

T. STURGE MOORE

Julian Grenfell

JULIAN GRENFELL

The war has confounded matter-of-fact calculation and made most people aware of unprized volcanic resources in human nature. However, some men, many young men, have always felt moved, supported or opposed by agencies of which they could give no consistent account to the seasoned worldling. Rhythms and cadences which express or seem to lead on to the expression of life's hidden value take possession of young minds, control and contort their speech into jangling rhyme which, since the war, has acquired increasing popularity, till critics remember how during the wars of Napoleon verse sold better than prose, and wonder whether this may not happen again. The customs and cares of civil life dishearten and depress, and a run on poetry would be proof of reawakened sensibility. Let us hope that England, where life has seemed both stablest and stalest, is to be refreshed by a wave of finer enthusiasm. The young will feel it first, for they are never stale or established. Of all the young men whom England has sent out to fight, he who has produced the best poem seems to have least hesitated, answering the call to fight with ecstatic joy.

Captain the Hon. Julian H. F. Grenfell, D.S.O., was born on 30th March 1888, obtained a commission in the 1st Royal Dragoons in September, 1909, and died of wounds on 26th May 1915, having written the following poem about a month earlier:—

INTO BATTLE

The naked earth is warm with Spring, And with green grass and bursting trees Leans to the sun's gaze glorying, And quivers in the sunny breeze; And life is Colour and Warmth and Light, And a striving evermore for these; And he is dead who will not fight, And who dies fighting has increase.

The fighting man shall from the sun Take warmth, and life from glowing earth; Speed with the light-foot winds to run And with the trees to newer birth; And find, when fighting shall be done, Great rest, and fulness after dearth.

All the bright company of Heaven Hold him in their bright comradeship, The Dog star, and the Sisters Seven, Orion's belt and sworded hip:

The woodland trees that stand together, They stand to him each one a friend; They gently speak in the windy weather; They guide to valley and ridges end.

The kestrel hovering by day, And the little owls that call by night, Bid him be swift and keen as they, As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

The blackbird sings to him: "Brother, brother, If this be the last song you shall sing, Sing well, for you may not sing another; Brother, sing."

In dreary doubtful waiting hours, Before the brazen frenzy starts, The horses show him nobler powers;— O patient eyes, courageous hearts!

And when the burning moment breaks, And all things else are out of mind, And only joy of battle takes Him by the throat and makes him blind,

Through joy and blindness he shall know, Not caring much to know, that still Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so That it be not the Destined Will.

The thundering line of battle stands, And in the air Death moans and sings; But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

Many readers are exhilarated by this who cannot be at the pains to ravel out its secret; and I propose to help them, that the impression may last longer and satisfy more completely. Young Grenfell exults at fulfilling an inborn promise. At last he feels free to be what instinct and capacity make him; general consent and his own conscience permit him to kill and to die. The ecstasy is like that of married love: a fundamental instinct can be gratified untaxed by inward loss or damage and with the approval of mankind. Harmony between impulse and circumstance creates this joy; but not only is it more complex than that of the young male stag who attacks the leader of the herd, there is in it an element of quite a different order, a sense that wrong within can be defeated by braving evil abroad. The strain between worldly custom and that passion for good which begets spiritual insight, finds relief in fighting, looks for peace in death. Only the noblest spirits when young so intolerably feel this strain that they welcome such an end as delicious satisfaction. Acquiescence in evil seems to them too high a price to pay for life. As though it were a devil, they would cast out all complicity with it from themselves as from others. This is the focus of their activity and until it is found they have no peace. Shelley is recognised as a type of the young poet, and this eagerness to attack evil in the world and this readiness to die characterise him, though his weapon was the pen and he faced death in crazy boats and fever-stricken hovels and not in battle.

The intimate delicacy and justness of this marvellous lyric will appear more brilliantly yet if we contrast the aspects which arouse its eloquence with those more commonly selected when the theme is war.

Throughout the poem no hint is given of the nature of the enemy; he does not proclaim, as so many have done, that he fights for right or against tyranny. He does not himself look forward to tasting the fruits of victory; he accepts death as the natural necessary reward of taking up arms. Even in peace he had chosen to serve by being ready to fight. Yet he does not cry up devotion to England. You will say his was obvious. That is just it, true poetry does not say what is unnecessary.

That a young man of this gentleness should be glad both to kill and be killed shows that the martyr and the soldier are not opposite types but stand before the deeply moved conscience as equal heroes. Both are finest when each most resembles the other: the martyr, courageous, unflinching, capable of detachment and courtesy to the last: the soldier, conscientious, humane and unaggressive: St Stephen and St George. The quality of emotion in these stanzas will serve as a touchstone to imperialist and pacifist theories. True peace is not signed by governments, but is something never yet achieved on earth. That so-called peace which preceded the war must have created the exultant relief to have done with it which this young man felt. And we know he was right, we know its foul shame, we know how unworthy it was of the name we so fondly gave it. Peace indeed!

The sanity of a true inspiration is miraculous and avoids errors which we all breathe and utter, and yet does not fall into the opposition of that half illumination which, like a bee on a window-pane, angrily buzzes itself to death because it sees but cannot enter the light. Neither is it passive, disclaiming part and parcel in humanity's tragedy, as though there were any other means of support than man's widespread good will. Men and nations, we all depend for what we are permitted to be on friendliness and co-operation.

The senses both of mind and body are tender, all callousness impairs them. The slaves of machinery, with their real-politik and subserviency to fact, are in all countries striving to stifle liberty, poetry, joy. But kindness is stronger than discipline and courtesy more victorious than munitions.

Since I wrote this a pamphlet has been published with extracts from Julian Grenfell's letters; these strengthen and endorse the impression received from his poem. He was a born fighter: there is a wonderful description of a boxing match he had with a champion at Johannesburg, too long to quote here but very worth reading. After he had been knocked down three times he remarks that his "head was clearing." Yet he can also write:

"I hate material books, centred on whether people are successful. I like books about artists and philosophers and dreamers, anybody who is just a little bit off his dot."

Success in this present world is a little incompatible with real success; one is a trifle beside the mark of the other even when they seem to coincide.

"I longed to be able to say that I liked it, after all that one has heard of being under fire for the first time. But it is beastly. I pretended to myself for a bit that I liked it, but it was no good; it only made me careless and unwatchful and self-absorbed; but when one acknowledged to oneself that it was beastly, one became all right again and cool."

So his head began to clear again just in time.

"Here we are in the burning centre of it all, and I would not be anywhere else for a million pounds and the Queen of Sheba."

Consciously or unconsciously he repeats the sentiment that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Henry V. at Agincourt and Sir Henry Newbolt into Nelson's in his Admirals All. That sentiment characterises the born leader: when facing danger he feels that he is where he can best prove what he is. He felt "utterly ashamed" of himself when he had met a German officer prisoner with a scowl, the other looked so "proud, so resolute, smart and confident in his hour of bitterness." This instant challenge and rebuke of himself was akin to his mastery and initiative. He begged to be allowed to go out into "No Man's Land" stalking Germans, and was refused. At last:

"They told me to take a section with me, and I said I would rather cut my throat and have done with it. So they let me go alone."

His experiences are as good reading as the fight at Johannesburg, but too long to quote.

"I got back at a sort of galloping crawl and sent a message to the 10th that the Germans were moving up their way in some numbers.... They made quite a ridiculous fuss about me stalking, and getting the message through.... It was up to someone to do it instead of leaving it all to the Germans and losing two officers a day through snipers. All our men have started it now. It is a popular amusement."

But first is first to-day just as when David met Goliath. A piece of bursting shell has deprived us of a great leader, with the characteristics of the finest kings of men. And though wealthy enough to travel with dogs and horses wherever he went, he could not bear to think that a friend had deserted the Socialist cause out of respect for "the loaves and the fishes." This friend writes:

"I don't suppose many people knew what an ardent love he had for honesty of purpose and intellectual honesty, and what sacrifices he made for them—sacrifices of peace-of-mind abhorrent to most Englishmen ... caused himself no end of worry and unhappiness."

Yes, facing discomfort clears the will, as facing physical danger clears the head, and wrong within can be defeated by braving evil abroad. And now while intellectual honesty is at a premium I will confess that the last two lines of his Into Battle always disappoint me. They ring hollow and empty; it is as though he had been disturbed and scribbled in haste something that looks like an end but is not, and never given his mind to the poem again.

The other poems published since are slighter in mood and more boyish in execution. Though they are not bad, they are not good enough to enhance the effect of Into Battle.

Physically, mentally and morally splendid, he might seem to have done little in this world but be and be destroyed. Yet to have been, and to be known to have been such as he was, may well in time seem one of the grandest facts of these times. Such admiration as we owe to him is an experience as rare as it is beneficent, and will outlast a vast number of topics and crazes. Two phases of his worth he revealed even to those who never met him: the one in his poem, the other in his letters; and they tally as the like aspects have rarely tallied in other men. This proves the density of the integrity that was destroyed by a fragment of iron. He lay wounded a few weeks before he ceased to suffer.

The worst horror of modern war is not the vastness of its destructions but the number of spirits whom it enslaves to machinery; and in this it closely resembles modern peace. The plough lacerates the turf, many lowly and lovely lives are sacrificed that wheat may be sown and a taller, straighter growth raised to sustain a higher pulse of life. But how many of our modern machines create what is useless or harmful, at the expense of the best life both of those whose profit is intended and of those whom they exploit! Is there so much choice between the horrors of war and those of peace when they are truly estimated that the pacifist should prefer them or the imperialist wish to re-establish them? That men should be forced by the self-seeking of others to linger in want or to die in cruel torture is equally abhorrent. The hope of all generous spirits is to have done by means of the war with the peace that they have known and to usher in a better order. And Grenfell cheers this hope as few can, foreshowing a better proportioned life. The limpidity and strength of his emotion, though it creates beauty and reveals wisdom, was seconded by no matured art; yet those who have this at command are so liable to fail just where he succeeds, in sureness of aim.

Rupert Brooke

RUPERT BROOKE

Rupert Brooke was beginning to be known both as a poet and for rare personal beauty when his death at the age of twenty-eight, on his way out to the Dardanelles, set him beside Sir Philip Sidney as scholar, soldier, poet and patriot.

There was a factitious element in this burst of acclamation, something we can hope the man himself would have responded less and less to. Though the beauty of his person and the daintiness of his verse and the gentleness of his manners made worldlings eager to spoil him, he was not averse to hard work, and maintained a certain reserve which augured a better future for him than that of a darling of fashion. He and his young Cambridge friends of both sexes seem to have cherished an ideal of free comradeship, and to have realised it in an uncommon degree without paying toll in scandals to the censorious world. In like manner his verse, though playful and ornamental, so toys with philosophical inquiries as to hint at latent resources of graver power. Such problems as whether any communions are possible, whether I can know you or you me, and whether existence is absolutely conditioned by time and space, are whimsically put and illustrated in such instances as a fish, or a single moment of one particular tea in a dining-room.

Oh! never fly conceals a hook, Fish say, in the Eternal Brook, But more than mundane weeds are there, And mud, celestially fair; Fat caterpillars drift around, And Paradisal grubs are found; Unfading moths, immortal flies, And the worm that never dies. And in that heaven of all their wish, There shall be no more land, say fish." Only an arch levity saves this from being trite. I should have to quote too much before I could illustrate his amusement with the possible delusions of men's thoughts. But occasionally a serious shudder is glimpsed behind the smiling mask.

And suddenly there's no meaning in our kiss And your lit upward face grows, where we lie, Lonelier and dreadfuller than sunlight is, And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky."

His sovran preoccupation, that which inspired his best poems, was the least suitable for one whom some have imagined cut out for the part of a modern Antinous, to whom the elite of London, both male and female, should corporately play the part of a platonic Hadrian. His thoughts flocked about death. At first he dallies with them.

Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire Of watching you; and swing me suddenly Into the shade and loneliness and mire Of the last land! There, waiting patiently, One day, I think I'll find a cool wind blowing, See a slow light across the Stygian tide, And hear the dead about me stir, unknowing, And tremble. And I shall know that you have died And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream, Pass light as ever, through the lightless host, Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam— Most individual and bewildering ghost!— And turn and toss your brown delightful head Amusedly, among the ancient Dead."

But his contemplation of possible significance in life's end passes gradually into serener moods.

CLOUDS

Down the blue night the unending columns press In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow, Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow Up to the white moon's hidden loveliness. Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless, And turn with profound gesture vague and slow, As who would pray good for the world, but know Their benediction empty as they bless. They say that the Dead die not, but remain Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth. I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these, In wise majestic melancholy train, And watch the moon and the still-raging seas, And men, coming and going on the earth."

At last in his finest poem these reveries rise to an expression worthy of the classics of our language.

THE DEAD (1914)

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares, Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth, The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs, And sunset and the colours of the earth. These had seen movement, and heard music; known Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended; Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone; Touched flowers and furs, and cheeks. All this is ended. There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter And lit by the rich skies all day. And after, Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance In wandering loveliness. He leaves a white Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, A width, a shining peace, under the night.

The remoteness and impersonality of this sadness, with the wide horizon and unifying candour, compel our deepest welcome. The effort to startle, allure, or amuse has vanished. No doubt the devotion to England, dwelt on in the other sonnets of the 1914 sequence, won more of the praise; but some who acutely felt his charm were conscious of a falsetto emphasis in those efforts to say the right thing at the right moment, although his death had doubled their appeal.

Poems demand to be read aloud by someone who has instinctive sympathy for the pace, tone and address proper to each. For many the interest must at first, and perhaps long, lie in the mental attitude revealed. Nor is this attitude a small or insignificant part of the impression which ought to be made by poetry—the most perfect speech of man, as it has been called—that is, the utterance to which the greatest number of his faculties combined in harmonious balance contribute. The way the speaker has borne himself, and the way he now confronts the world, must influence this harmony profoundly. His words betray his past and present to those whose attention is sufficiently continuous and searching, by indices that lie around and beyond the mere meaning of the sentences used—indices gleaned from their interplay and the degree in which each alters and defines the whole sense, as much as from the melody of the words or the rhythm of their just enunciation. This aroma, which arises from the organism of the meaning, translators can often convey to other nations; for the beauties of diction and rhythm, many among those who speak the same tongue should accept the verdict of trained appreciators. Now melody and rhythm often engross trained apprehension, and the less learned may therefore be more ready to note the grave drift of wonder which flows beneath the playful, indulged and indulgent surface of Brooke's art, than were his æsthetic admirers. Those eyes which gaze out from behind his poems have been fascinated by the contrast between the momentousness of life to us, and our strangely casual relation to its vast movement, which is not at all suited to nourish our hopes of divining the whole truth. Those eyes seem to dance; for has not methodic inquiry begun to reconsider what it had denounced as entirely fabulous? Death's door, which Spencer, Renan and Nietzsche regarded as finally closed, is well-nigh ajar once more. Brooke's amused alertness is like that of a child who watches a door emphatically closed upon a cupboard declared to be empty by grown-up assurance; it creaks, and mysteriously seems to stir; other little boys and girls, his playmates, pay scant attention to its unaccountable behaviour. He himself thinks he has seen that the cupboard was vacant, and yet, in spite of himself, is fascinated by the possibility of a ghostly opener. Smiling over his own fancies, Brooke seems to have sat half abstracted at a pleasure party till the outbreak of war. He immediately volunteered, though delicate and but recently returned from a voyage across America and through the Pacific Islands in search of health—health which finally failed him before he had struck a blow or fired a shot, though he had been to Antwerp with the naval expedition.

To-day he stands with Julian Grenfell, as I see them through their work, in attitudes that suggest statues more worthy of the acropolis of the supreme city than any of those which the public figures of these times have yet assumed. What is done is always faulty, but what is intended may sometimes be divinely fair; and early death leaves this untampered with. Finely wrought bronze, these youths and their peers from other lands stand in that lofty garden above the ideal town, listening to their "friends" the trees. At their feet children play on the grass, and young girls crumble bread to lure doves down from the heroic shoulders; while for the men who glance at them in passing the inspiration of their bearing is all that remains of the Great War. The ardent Grenfell leaps forward; Brooke with smiling grace escapes from the uncomfortable admiration of a bygone age—both bent on grasping by the hand their new and best friend, Death.

A Half Pleiade

A HALF PLEIADE

Let St Beuve's avowal justify this title: "All these Academies, between you and me, are pieces of childishness, at any rate the French Academy is. Our least quarter of an hour of solitary reveries or of serious talk, yours and mine, in our youth, was better employed; but as one gets old one falls back into the power of these nothings; only it is well to know what nothings they are." So the significance of serious thought and discussion about art is apt to hold an inverse ratio to the number and age of those who think and discuss; for the future is always invisible. Robert Nichols, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, friends by their own avowal, have possibly had this importance in intimate conclave. Who can be sure that they have not deserved my title? They make no claim to be reformers or a movement, but such announcements are perhaps a fashionable foible, a trait which will disparage and date our period a hundred years hence. "The political virus even infected literature; writers and artists called themselves impressionists, symbolists, futurists, imagists and cubists; they published programmes and manifestoes, the charlatans!" as some unborn Taine may phrase it.

Rupert Brooke's verse had a conscious elegance that diverse judges attribute either to his treasuring a meagre vein or to a wary nature's perception that there had only yet been time to polish one of its many facets. In Robert Nichols' work variety and abundance are more evident than artistry and selectness. As if to make up for this he has prefaced his volume with two quotations from An Introduction to the Scientific Study of English Poetry, by Mark Liddell. These passages, though neither new nor perfectly expressed, suggest that Nichols' attention has been absorbed by the rehearsal of passionate experience or its reverberation through imagined scenes, rather than by niceties of style or prosody. All that he means by "a rhythm of ideas" is that the sense of the words should inspire the cadences of their sound; for, of course, in its major structures as well as in line and stanza, rhythm is a sensuous character only applicable to ideas by a metaphor. Poetry is, he thinks, "a marvel of the brain" fundamentally the same in all men; the poet only excels by more perfect organs of perception and expression—a conception in generous contrast to that of the young man, who is so keen on distinguishing his work as to whittle his gift away in the effort to remove all trace of kinship with other minds. On the other hand, only time will show whether Nichols will say a great deal in a manner not sufficiently distinct to live, or will fulfil the promise everywhere apparent in this book.

On either hand the slender trees Bow to the caressing breeze, And shake their shocks of silver light Against skies marbled greenish-white, Save where, within a rent of blue, The tilted slip of moon glints through, Glittering upon us as we dance With a soft extravagance Of limbs as blonde as Autumn boughs And gold locks floating from moony brows. While anguished Pan the pipes doth blow Fond and tremulous and low...."

A good omen! We are reminded of the sweetest music of classical English. It is not easy to imitate; let those who think it is, echo so fine a strain so freshly. Nothing comes of nothing, but out of imitative admiration grow the grand wings of the Muses. However, this Faun's Holiday is a rambling, shapeless poem, though it constantly threatens to be better than it anywhere is. With the anxiety of one who expects to surpass himself Mr Nichols appends "Oxford, Early Spring, 1914," to the poem, which is preceded by a note telling us that one part is adapted from a version of 1912 and another only composed as late as July, 1914. To set so seriously about helping your biographer is charmingly youthful. Another pre-war poem called The Tower describes Judas leaving the Last Supper:

". . . one arose to depart Having weakness and hate of weakness raging within his heart And bowed to the robed assembly whose eyes gleamed wet in the light"—

and at the bottom of the tower found beside the door—

Mary of Seven Evils, Mary Magdalen. And he was frighted at her. She sighed: 'I dreamed him dead. We sell the body for silver . . .' Then Judas cried out and fled."

Though the texture of the poem has been accepted too easily, these are touches of imaginative power which may lead to greater things. Possibly his best poem is—

THE RECKONING

The whole world burns, and with it burns my flesh. Arise, thou spirit spent by sterile tears; Thine eyes were ardent once, thy looks were fresh, Thy brow shone bright amid thy shining peers. Fame calls thee not, thou who hast vainly strayed So far from her; nor Passion, who in the past Gave thee her ghost to wed and to be paid; Nor love, whose anguish only learned to last. Honour it is that calls; canst thou forget Once thou wert strong? Listen, the solemn call Sounds but this once again. Put by regret For summons missed, or thou hast missed them all. Body is ready. Fortune pleased; O let Not the poor Past cost the proud Future's fall.

With that he turns to enlist. It is a little difficult to guess what "Fortune pleased" may refer to. Possibly that, in sounding him this new, terrible summons, Fortune shows herself pleased to give him a new chance of retrieving whatever in his life had gone awry. The rest is touching in its sincerity, all the more for its somewhat grandiloquent address.

Wistful, hesitant, eager, boyish, yet already regretful over things done ill—all the ingenuous flutter of an ambitious but not yet fully sinewed nature—with what image shall we associate the attitude of Robert Nichols in this book? Sculpture is too definite. But a fresco in the Prytaneum. Not a large panel nor in a central place. I see a boy battling in a strong wind with a shirt from which he cannot free his wrists. Splash! splash! his companions plunge into the sea, he totters with impatience, half laughs at his own misfortune, blushes at seeming to lag behind, yet thrills at the possibility of retrieving all and being first at the goal. But many of these poems are dreamy! and was not our lad in a muse when he forgot to unbutton those wrist-bands, before pulling his shirt over his head? Look, the sky is grey, the water rough, the wind deafening; only those who swim for honour will not defer the race.

With Siegfried Sassoon we have "glad confident morning"; he does easily and well what he desires to do. His rhythms never hark back to Milton's youth as Robert Nichols' did; they stop short at John Masefield and Thomas Hardy. The longest poem is a monologue. The speaker, an old huntsman, has become inn-keeper, only to lose his savings instead of increasing them; he lazily maunders about life and religion, the point being the piquancy of vulgar notions of hell and heaven, when travestied in images drawn from his narrow round of experience with the pack and behind the bar. It might be claimed by those anxious to show that this young poet's roots strike deeper than I have suggested that this poem resembles Browning's Caliban on Setebos. The book at first seems merely smart, buoyed on good health and good fortune, "like little wanton boys who swim on bladders."