12
Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain presents a paradox to poetry lovers. On the one hand, with universal education and a press never more literate, widely read and diverse, it was a great age for reading. It was also the period of many new literary reviews. Yet most of the poetry of the period turns out to be disappointing – mushy, pallid, derivative. It was a turbulent period, with the zenith of Empire bringing huge wealth to the British middle classes, who were able to look out and know more about the rest of the world than ever before. Explorers, scientists and lecturers were bringing new knowledge to all parts of Britain. Politically, the rise of the trade unions and socialism brought open conflict onto the streets of the country ahead of the First World War. The mighty Liberal Party was threatened by the last stand of the aristocratic House of Lords, and by increasingly dangerous turbulence in Ireland. Yet very little of this is reflected in poetry, except the most vapid and forgettable occasional verse. The so-called Georgian poets, energetically promoted by Edward Marsh’s magazine Georgian Verse, are little-read today. The most radical poetic movement, the Decadents led by Oscar Wilde, now seems merely wearisome; Wilde himself only finds real poetic form when he gets onto the subject of his own sexual martyrdom and imprisonment. In all of this, there are however some big figures.
One of them, Rudyard Kipling, remains controversial today because of his supposed hyper-patriotic enthusiasm for an imperial project that was causing misery in many parts of the world. A second, Thomas Hardy, was known to generations as one of England’s greatest novelists before it became apparent that he was, first and foremost, the greatest poet since the Romantics, and perhaps greater than them too. It’s a terrible thing to say, but one of the outcomes of 1914 was to save British poetry by giving it a subject beyond all others. Of the major figures who engaged freshly with the English countryside, one, Edward Thomas, died in the war. The other, A.E. Housman, was a brilliant Latin scholar who spent most of his life in cloistered academia, tortured by the need to repress his homosexuality.
Before we come to them, we need to look at the other poetry which was popular from the late 1900s until the First World War. One of the disadvantages poets faced in this Britain was the apparently mesmerising and deadening influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, who covered the country in swirls of prettified medieval claptrap, the worst of Victorianism. If that seems harsh, dear reader, read on. Here is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, founder of the original Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, in characteristic form. He had a thing about damozels, and his paintings feature dark-tressed, huge-jawed women with mad eyes. Each, I suppose, to his own.
The blessèd damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters still’d at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary’s gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.
Herseem’d she scarce had been a day
One of God’s choristers;
The wonder was not yet quite gone
From that still look of hers;
Albeit, to them she left, her day
Had counted as ten years.
(To one, it is ten years of years.
… Yet now, and in this place,
Surely she lean’d o’er me – her hair
Fell all about my face …
Nothing: the autumn-fall of leaves.
The whole year sets apace.)
It was the rampart of God’s house
That she was standing on;
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is Space begun;
So high, that looking downward thence
She scarce could see the sun.
It lies in Heaven, across the flood
Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge.
Fretful midge, indeed. Dante Gabriel’s sister, Christina Rossetti, was a much better poet, and her vividly-coloured, rollicking ‘Goblin Market’ is a reliable guess for any collection of Victorian poetry. But she too suffers from flowery sentimentalism, and a whiff of an ill-remembered fourteenth century:
Twist me a crown of wind-flowers;
That I may fly away
To hear the singers at their song,
And players at their play.
Put on your crown of wind-flowers:
But whither would you go?
Beyond the surging of the sea
And the storms that blow.
Alas! your crown of wind-flowers
Can never make you fly:
I twist them in a crown to-day,
And to-night they die.
It’s more than sentimentalism, though. There is a morbidity, a longing for death, which pervades the movement. Christina again:
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
By far the most socially engaged of these poets was the Christian socialist and brilliantly talented designer William Morris. But even he is deep in the medievalism he believed key to escaping the dislocations and unhappiness of modern market society. Mostly, this means that instead of writing directly through his poetry about the world around him, he’s harking wistfully back:
Through thick Arcadian woods a hunter went,
Following the beasts upon a fresh spring day;
But since his horn-tipped bow but seldom bent,
Now at the noontide naught had happed to slay,
Within a vale he called his hounds away,
Hearkening the echoes of his lone voice cling
About the cliffs and through the beech-trees ring.
But when they ended, still awhile he stood,
And but the sweet familiar thrush could hear,
And all the day-long noises of the wood,
And o’er the dry leaves of the vanished year
His hounds’ feet pattering as they drew anear,
And heavy breathing from their heads low hung,
To see the mighty corner bow unstrung.
Even when Morris turns directly to ‘condition of England’ questions, there is a medieval veil drawn across the subject. This poem insists that God is the God of the poor – Deus est Deus pauperum – but is it really a work from the industrial and socialist world at all?
There was a lord that hight Maltete,
Among great lords he was right great,
On poor folk trod he like the dirt,
None but God might do him hurt.
Deus est Deus pauperum.
With a grace of prayers sung loud and late
Many a widow’s house he ate;
Many a poor knight at his hands
Lost his house and narrow lands.
Deus est Deus pauperum.
He burnt the harvests many a time,
He made fair houses heaps of lime;
Whatso man loved wife or maid
Of Evil-head was sore afraid.
Deus est Deus pauperum.
He slew good men and spared the bad;
Too long a day the foul dog had,
E’en as all dogs will have their day;
But God is as strong as man, I say.
Deus est Deus pauperum.
Member of no movement, and certainly not a socialist, Algernon Charles Swinburne points the way to another, rather strange, problem with later Victorian poetry. Sensitive, highly classically-trained writers, cut off in universities and then surrounded by coteries of their own kind, produced verse that was almost too technically good – mellifluous, post-Keatsian in its music, which lisps and swoons and billows, rather like the music of Delius – and yet in the end is not about anything very much. This is the opening of Swinburne’s tribute to Charles Baudelaire, the far greater French Decadent:
Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea,
Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel,
Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave,
Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve?
Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before,
Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat
And full of bitter summer, but more sweet
To thee than gleanings of a northern shore
Trod by no tropic feet?
For always thee the fervid languid glories
Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies;
Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs
Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,
The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave
That knows not where is that Leucadian grave
Which hides too deep the supreme head of song.
Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were,
The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear
Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong,
Blind gods that cannot spare.
Poets brought up in the shadow of this kind of stuff must have asked themselves what poetry was any longer allowed to be about – what was its fit subject? The Decadent movement deployed the languorous death-wish as a weapon against optimistic bourgeois Christianity; aestheticism against athleticism. It must have seemed a good idea at the time, but it produced poetry which simply seems too limp, too yellow, too affected. The hearty, boorish mockers maybe had a point. One of the most characteristic of the Decadent poets, much read and influential in his time, was Arthur Symons. He is highly sensitive to colour, and tends to write about moments:
Mauve, black, and rose,
The veils of the jewel, and she, the jewel, a rose.
First, the pallor of mauve,
A soft flood flowing about the body I love.
Then, the flush of the rose,
A hedge of roses about the mystical rose.
Last, the black, and at last
The feet that I love, and the way that my love has passed.
The following poem is simply called ‘Pastel: Masks and Faces’:
The light of our cigarettes
Went and came in the gloom:
It was dark in the little room.
Dark, and then, in the dark,
Sudden, a flash, a glow,
And a hand and a ring I know.
And then, through the dark, a flush
Ruddy and vague, the grace
(A rose!) of her lyric face.
It’s not medieval, or cod-medieval. It has a certain, quite compelling, compression, and it’s about modern people – note the cigarettes. Even the colour mauve, used in clothing in the previous poem, was a relatively recent chemical invention. Symons and his colleagues had found a new way to write. But in the end this kind of thing works better in oil paint than syllables. Oscar Wilde himself proves it:
Against these turbid turquoise skies
The light and luminous balloons
Dip and drift like satin moons
Drift like silken butterflies;
Reel with every windy gust,
Rise and reel like dancing girls,
Float like strange transparent pearls,
Fall and float like silver dust.
Now to the low leaves they cling,
Each with coy fantastic pose,
Each a petal of a rose
Straining at a gossamer string.
Then to the tall trees they climb,
Like thin globes of amethyst,
Wandering opals keeping tryst
With the rubies of the lime.
These were hugely talented, ambitious men; and it’s hard to resist the suspicion that what they really lacked, living relatively comfortable lives, was a proper subject. Oscar Wilde found his in the worst possible way, after his homosexuality led to his imprisonment in the extremely harsh Reading Gaol. His famous ballad is full of wisdom, and achieves the hypnotic power of Coleridge:
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘That fellow’s got to swing.’
Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.
I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved
And so he had to die.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty place
There were other ways to escape the languorous fingers of Edwardian decadence. Some would escape it in the trenches of Flanders. Others, above all William Butler Yeats, escaped it by eventually growing up. In the twentieth century Yeats would become one of the greatest Irish poets of all time. But how well remembered would he be, were it only for his Edwardian verses of the ‘Celtic Twilight’?
We who are old, old and gay,
O so old!
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told:
Give to these children, new from the world,
Silence and love;
And the long dew-dropping hours of the night,
And the stars above:
Give to these children, new from the world,
Rest far from men.
Is anything better, anything better?
Tell us it then:
Us who are old, old and gay,
O so old!
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told.
Yeats is a poet of the very first order, and even his relatively young poetry shows what could still be done within the confines of late-Victorian and Decadent traditions. We will come to him properly later on, but it is astonishing that ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ was published as early as 1893. It has all the languor, though not the morbidity, of the Decadent movement, and its love of twilight and subtle colour effects. But it has a magic that Symons and even Wilde never got close to:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Yeats, who helps to bulk up so many anthologies of English poetry, is of course anything but English. But the same is true of Rudyard Kipling. Born in India, he spoke Hindi before he spoke English. As a small boy he was sent to the Home Counties first with a family who took in boarders, and then at boarding school, and loathed the experience, feeling unsettled in the country that was in theory ‘home’. In adult life he settled briefly in London after roaming America, but he then went back to the United States, and might well have made his home there permanently had it not been for a bitter political row. He would put down roots in England, in a seventeenth-century stone house, but he was always heading off to South Africa, or to France. Much of his best poetry comes from the India of the Raj, and if the young Kipling appears to have any real home, it’s the British Army.
Kipling was indeed the poet of Empire, but he was a questioning poet, impatient of anything easy. Of all the writers included in this collection, nobody was as purely male a poet as Kipling. He could be a wonderful mimic, but only of male voices. His virtues – pluck, determination, comradeship – are soaked in testosterone. His marriage wasn’t notably happy. All his life, male friendships mattered very much.
Once, every second educated household in Britain would have had some Kipling on the shelf – generally small, red-leather-bound volumes with a neat gold swastika stamped on the spine (the Indian symbol of good luck, chosen by Kipling long before German anti-Semites appropriated it; in his old age, as Hitler was establishing himself in power, Kipling had the swastikas removed from new editions). He has hardly vanished from popular culture even today, thanks to the Disney takeover of his children’s story The Jungle Book and to the poem ‘If’, recently voted the most popular British poem. T.S. Eliot admired him, but he fell dramatically in popularity from the 1960s onwards, being regarded as a hopeless white supremacist and imperialist. George Orwell, as so often, hit him fairly and squarely on the head when he said that Kipling ‘dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the “enlightened” utterances of the same period.’ Kipling can be sententious, but he certainly expanded the circle of things poetry could be about, embracing travel, engineering, history and ethnography alongside his military songs and his religious ones. Here is one of his relatively early poems, ‘Christmas in India’ – not, I think, very well known, but wonderfully vivid in its observation and riotous energy. If we want to know something about what it was like to live in the British Raj, then this kind of poetry certainly helps:
Dim dawn behind the tamarisks – the sky is saffron-yellow –
As the women in the village grind the corn,
And the parrots seek the riverside, each calling to his fellow
That the Day, the staring Easter Day is born.
Oh the white dust on the highway! Oh the stenches in the byway!
Oh the clammy fog that hovers
And at Home they’re making merry ’neath the white and scarlet berry –
What part have India’s exiles in their mirth?
Full day behind the tamarisks – the sky is blue and staring –
As the cattle crawl afield beneath the yoke,
And they bear One o’er the field-path, who is past all hope or caring,
To the ghat below the curling wreaths of smoke.
Call on Rama, going slowly, as ye bear a brother lowly –
Call on Rama – he may hear, perhaps, your voice!
With our hymn-books and our psalters we appeal to other altars,
And to-day we bid ‘good Christian men rejoice!’
High noon behind the tamarisks – the sun is hot above us –
As at Home the Christmas Day is breaking wan.
They will drink our healths at dinner – those who tell us how they love us,
And forget us till another year be gone!
Oh the toil that knows no breaking! Oh the Heimweh, ceaseless, aching!
Oh the black dividing Sea and alien Plain!
Youth was cheap – wherefore we sold it,
Gold was good – we hoped to hold it,
And to-day we know the fulness of our gain.
Grey dusk behind the tamarisks – the parrots fly together –
As the sun is sinking slowly over Home;
And his last ray seems to mock us shackled in a lifelong tether
That drags us back how’er so far we roam.
Hard her service, poor her payment – she is ancient, tattered raiment –
India, she the grim Stepmother of our kind.
If a year of life be lent her, if her temple’s shrine we enter,
The door is shut – we may not look behind.
Black night behind the tamarisks – the owls begin their chorus –
As the conches from the temple scream and bray.
With the fruitless years behind us, and the hopeless years before us,
Let us honour, O my brother, Christmas Day!
Call a truce, then, to our labours – let us feast with friends and neighbours,
And be merry as the custom of our caste;
For if ‘faint and forced the laughter’, and if sadness follow after,
We are richer by one mocking Christmas past.
It’s not exactly an example of the puffed chest, is it? Kipling’s sympathies were with the makers of the Empire – soldiers and engineers – and generally not with the comfortable middle classes back home. The best of his verse catches the rhythms of ordinary conversation far from the polite world of Edwardian Britain – none better than the still-stinging ‘Tommy’:
I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ’e up an’ sez, ‘We serve no red-coats here.’
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, go away’;
But it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins’, when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins’, when the band begins to play.
I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but ’adn’t none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-’alls,
But when it comes to fightin’, Lord! they’ll shove me in the stalls!
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, wait outside’;
But it’s ‘Special train for Atkins’ when the trooper’s on the tide,
The troopship’s on the tide, my boys, the troopship’s on the tide,
O it’s ‘Special train for Atkins’ when the trooper’s on the tide.
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, ’ow’s yer soul?’
But it’s ‘Thin red line of ’eroes’ when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s ‘Thin red line of ’eroes’ when the drums begin to roll.
We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints;
While it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, fall be’ind’,
But it’s ‘Please to walk in front, sir’, when there’s trouble in the wind,
There’s trouble in the wind, my boys, there’s trouble in the wind,
O it’s ‘Please to walk in front, sir’, when there’s trouble in the wind.
You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all:
We’ll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don’t mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow’s Uniform is not the soldier-man’s disgrace.
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’
But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!
That, like his poem about an army execution, ‘Danny Deever’, is well known and much loved. But Kipling’s imagination ranged wide, deep back in history and in his own time, embracing nautical engineers such as Mr McAndrew, a Scottish Calvinist reflecting in a ship’s boiler room. The poem continues with a great deal of technical detail, expertly dealt with in metrical form, but the following extract gives a sense of it:
From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, O God –
Predestination in the stride o’ yon connectin’-rod.
John Calvin might ha’ forged the same – enorrmous, certain, slow –
Ay, wrought it in the furnace-flame – my ‘Institutio’.
I cannot get my sleep to-night; old bones are hard to please;
I’ll stand the middle watch up here – alone wi’ God an’ these
My engines, after ninety days o’ race an’ rack an’ strain
Through all the seas of all Thy world, slam-bangin’ home again.
Slam-bang too much – they knock a wee – the crosshead-gibs are loose;
But thirty thousand mile o’ sea has gied them fair excuse …
During the nineteenth century, British naval superiority had allowed the Empire to swell by some ten million square miles, and four hundred million new subjects. Large swathes of the world beyond the formal Empire, from Argentina to China, were also under Britain’s effective economic domination. Such an enormous swelling, happening so fast, must come at a price. Part of the price was a complacent widespread racialism: the British came to think themselves simply better, more grown-up and more moral than anybody else. Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ – in fact written in 1899 to jolly up the Americans as they effectively took over the Philippines – seems to exemplify this sense of racial and cultural superiority. Today, it does seem offensive – but read it carefully and you see that it is very far from celebratory:
Take up the White Man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man’s burden –
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain.
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.
Take up the White Man’s burden –
The savage wars of peace –
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to naught.
Take up the White Man’s burden –
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper –
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!
Take up the White Man’s burden –
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard –
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: –
‘Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?’
Take up the White Man’s burden –
Ye dare not stoop to less –
Nor call too loud on freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.
Take up the White Man’s burden –
Have done with childish days –
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
Kipling was saved from simple-minded jingoism by his religious pessimism. Nowhere is this clearer than in the poem ‘Recessional’, which he wrote for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee of 1897. The moment called for something triumphalist, something not too complicated. Kipling failed to oblige:
God of our fathers, known of old –
Lord of our far-flung battle-line –
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies –
The captains and the kings depart –
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
Far-call’d our navies melt away –
On dune and headland sinks the fire –
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe –
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard –
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard –
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Had Kipling been a ‘jingo’, then for him the First World War, to which he was completely committed, offering himself as a propagandist to the British government, would have been a terrible punishment. His beloved son John, rejected by the army when he volunteered because of his poor eyesight, was helped into the Irish Guards by his father. He died, apparently horribly, with his face torn off, at the Battle of Loos in 1915, shortly after his eighteenth birthday. Kipling’s poem ‘My Boy Jack’ may or may not have been written to express his grief and remorse at his son’s fate (it’s as likely to be about a generic lost sailor), but a poem he wrote at the end of the war, ‘A Death-Bed’, which deals with the consequences of all-mighty state power – represented for Kipling by the Kaiser’s Germany – is devastating in its account of the realities of trench life. From this poem on, when we talk about Britain’s great war poets we have to include Kipling, who envisages the Kaiser dying of throat cancer:
This is the State above the Law.
‘The State exists for the State alone.’
[This is a gland at the back of the jaw,
And an answering lump by the collar-bone.]
Some die shouting in gas or fire;
Some die silent, by shell and shot.
Some die desperate, caught on the wire –
Some die suddenly. This will not.
‘Regis suprema voluntas Lex’
[It will follow the regular course of – throats.]
Some die pinned by the broken decks,
Some die sobbing between the boats.
Some die eloquent, pressed to death
By the sliding trench as their friends can hear
Some die wholly in half a breath.
Some – give trouble for half a year.
‘There is neither Evil nor Good in life
Except as the needs of the State ordain.’
[Since it is rather too late for the knife,
All we can do is to mask the pain.]
Some die saintly in faith and hope –
One died thus in a prison-yard –
Some die broken by rape or the rope;
Some die easily. This dies hard.
‘I will dash to pieces who bar my way.
Woe to the traitor! Woe to the weak!’
[Let him write what he wishes to say.
It tires him out if he tries to speak.]
Some die quietly. Some abound
In loud self-pity. Others spread
Bad morale through the cots around.
This is a type that is better dead.
‘The war was forced on me by my foes.
All that I sought was the right to live.’
[Don’t be afraid of a triple dose;
The pain will neutralize all we give.
Here are the needles. See that he dies
While the effects of the drug endure …
What is the question he asks with his eyes? –
Yes, All-Highest, to God, be sure.]
But we can’t leave Kipling without mentioning his most famous poem, ‘If’. In any account of Britishness, it’s important for its Christian stoicism – the ideals, or perhaps rather the temperament, that built the Empire. It was originally written in 1910 about the actions of a blundering mercenary, Leander Starr Jameson, admired by Kipling but who helped provoke the Boer War. Yet it still speaks to millions of people, and has been claimed in India as the essence of the message of the Bhagavad Gita. Mock if you like; mock if you dare. Its form is advice, from a father to his son:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son.
Kipling wasn’t alone in turning to the voices of the street and an earthy colloquialism, so unlike the Georgian poets, and so refreshing. The Scottish poet John Davidson, the son of an evangelical minister, was educated in science at the Highlanders’ Academy, Greenock, and spent his early years as a schoolteacher in Scotland before moving to London. His politics seem to have been almost the opposite of Kipling’s, and his interest in science gave him unusual insight – his poems about snow, and the weather, are unlike anybody else’s – but what he shared with Kipling was an instinct for the ballad, and an ear for how people at the end of the nineteenth century actually spoke. Here are parts of his famous ‘Thirty Bob a Week’, the lament of a very ordinary London office clerk – the grandson, as it were, of many Dickens characters, and a figure you can find in the fiction of the time, but rarely in poetry. He begins by lamenting that he is not a man of genius and wealth. He’s an early version of that familiar modern figure, the overworked commuter.
I couldn’t touch a stop and turn a screw,
And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth – I hope, like you –
On the handle of a skeleton gold key;
I cut mine on a leek, which I eat it every week:
I’m a clerk at thirty bob as you can see.
But I don’t allow it’s luck and all a toss;
There’s no such thing as being starred and crossed;
It’s just the power of some to be a boss,
And the bally power of others to be bossed:
I face the music, sir; you bet I ain’t a cur;
Strike me lucky if I don’t believe I’m lost!
For like a mole I journey in the dark,
A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar’d Halls* and broad Suburbean Park,
To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight,
A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.
And it’s often very cold and very wet,
And my missus stitches towels for a hunks;
And the Pillar’d Halls is half of it to let –
Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks.
And we cough, my wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,
When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.
But you never hear her do a growl or whine,
For she’s made of flint and roses, very odd;
And I’ve got to cut my meaning rather fine,
Or I’d blubber, for I’m made of greens and sod:
So p’rhaps we are in Hell for all that I can tell,
And lost and damn’d and served up hot to God.
I ain’t blaspheming, Mr. Silver-tongue;
I’m saying things a bit beyond your art:
Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung,
Thirty bob a week’s the rummiest start!
With your science and your books and your the’ries about spooks,
Did you ever hear of looking in your heart?
I didn’t mean your pocket, Mr., no:
I mean that having children and a wife,
With thirty bob on which to come and go,
Isn’t dancing to the tabor and the fife:
When it doesn’t make you drink, by Heaven! it makes you think,
And notice curious items about life.
And it’s this way that I make it out to be:
No fathers, mothers, countries, climates – none;
Not Adam was responsible for me,
Nor society, nor systems, nary one:
A little sleeping seed, I woke – I did, indeed –
A million years before the blooming sun.
I woke because I thought the time had come;
Beyond my will there was no other cause;
And everywhere I found myself at home,
Because I chose to be the thing I was;
And in whatever shape of mollusc or of ape
I always went according to the laws.
I was the love that chose my mother out;
I joined two lives and from the union burst;
My weakness and my strength without a doubt
Are mine alone for ever from the first:
It’s just the very same with a difference in the name
As ‘Thy will be done.’ You say it if you durst!
They say it daily up and down the land
As easy as you take a drink, it’s true;
But the difficultest go to understand,
And the difficultest job a man can do,
Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week,
And feel that that’s the proper thing for you.
It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It’s walking on a string across a gulf
With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;
And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.
By the end of the poem we are back close to the territory of William Blake, though without his supernatural system – Davidson’s is a rather comfortless, materialistic stoicism, and after a long immersion in his poems one isn’t surprised to find that he died of suicide, by drowning. The twentieth-century Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid wrote one of his most moving lyrics about Davidson – and again, the older poet in his agnosticism, and his interest in science, was a precursor of much that came later. Like Kipling, he was a great noticer. This comes from his poem ‘A Loafer’:
I hang about the streets all day,
At night I hang about;
I sleep a little when I may,
But rise betimes the morning’s scout;
For through the year I always hear
Afar, aloft, a ghostly shout.
My clothes are worn to threads and loops;
My skin shows here and there;
About my face like seaweed droops
My tangled beard, my tangled hair;
From cavernous and shaggy brows
My stony eyes untroubled stare.
I move from eastern wretchedness
Through Fleet Street and the Strand;
And as the pleasant people press
I touch them softly with my hand,
Perhaps I know that still I go
Alive about a living land.
Where Davidson differed from most of the poets of his own time was in his commitment to a scientific view of the world. And the Edwardian period is indeed the first great age of popular science. After the great breakthroughs of the Victorians, the basic laws of physics, evolution and chemistry were spreading through schools and colleges, and go-ahead people, such as the popular novelist H.G. Wells, felt that a grounding in science was essential to being properly educated. But how would science affect British poetry, still mostly wallowing in its gauzy bucolic medievalism? Davidson’s poem ‘Snow’ isn’t an unqualified success, but it’s a damned good try at seeing the natural world anew.
‘Who affirms that crystals are alive?’
I affirm it, let who will deny:
Crystals are engendered, wax and thrive,
Wane and wither; I have seen them die.
Trust me, masters, crystals have their day,
Eager to attain the perfect norm,
Lit with purpose, potent to display
Facet, angle, colour, beauty, form.
Water-crystals need for flower and root
Sixty clear degrees, no less, no more;
Snow, so fickle, still in this acute
Angle thinks, and learns no other lore:
Such its life, and such its pleasure is,
Such its art and traffic, such its gain,
Evermore in new conjunctions this
Admirable angle to maintain.
Crystalcraft in every flower and flake
Snow exhibits, of the welkin free:
Crystalline are crystals for the sake,
All and singular, of crystalry.
Yet does every crystal of the snow
Individualize, a seedling sown
Broadcast, but instinct with power to grow
Beautiful in beauty of its own.
Every flake with all its prongs and dints
Burns ecstatic as a new-lit star:
Men are not more diverse, finger prints
More dissimilar than snow-flakes are.
Worlds of men and snow endure, increase,
Woven of power and passion to defy
Time and travail: only races cease,
Individual men and crystals die.
Thomas Hardy was older than Davidson by seventeen years – he was born in 1840 in Dorset – and he lived a lot longer. He was also a much greater poet, indeed one of the greatest poets in British literature; but he shared certain interesting traits with Davidson. He too was a profoundly pessimistic man, with a great interest in scientific and modern thought. Though he had an emotional attachment to the Anglican Church, Hardy couldn’t accept the traditional religious view of the world, and famously once advised a clergyman to study Darwin and followers such as Herbert Spencer. Davidson and Hardy are both writers attempting to make sense of a world which now has a God-shaped hole in it; and as such, they speak for millions of less talented Britons at the time. Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ was written in response to the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, but also expresses his dark view of fate, and the follies of a culture that had come to think itself superior to nature. For those of us today who suspect that our fast-growing and greedy civilisation will one day get its comeuppance, this is an almost essential text:
I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
III
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
IV
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’ …
VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her – so gaily great –
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
IX
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.
X
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one August event,
XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
The underlying pessimism of Hardy, and other Edwardian writers, is so noticeable that it’s hard for the modern reader not to see it as an eerie premonition of the horrors of the First World War to come. Ezra Pound, the American poet working in London while Hardy was writing his best poetry, declared famously that poets were ‘the antennae of the race’. Hardy proves it in his ‘Channel Firing’, which imagines the buried dead in a Dorset church reacting to British naval gunnery practice in the Channel. What’s extraordinary – even spooky – is that it was written and published in 1914, well before the war had begun.
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the judgement day
And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,
The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:
‘All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.
‘That this is not the judgment hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening …
‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).’
So down we lay again. ‘I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,’
Said one, ‘than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!’
And many a skeleton shook his head.
‘Instead of preaching forty year,’
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
‘I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.’
Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
But I am in danger here of suggesting that Hardy is in some way a political poet. He is not. He is a poet of ideas, and of his time, certainly, but his best work is personal, above all in the Poems of 1912 –13, when he looks back with intense regret and shame on his failed marriage to his first wife Emma. He had been faithless. She had turned her back on him, scandalised by his anti-religious views. As Hardy goes back to try to recapture their early love in the places they knew best, he achieves an almost unbearable honesty about failure in human love. Here are two of my favourites from the sequence. The first is called ‘The Voice’:
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
The second, referring to one of their favourite walks, is called ‘At Castle Boterel’. If, kind reader, you don’t feel your eyes welling at the end of it, there’s something wrong with you.
As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet
Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony’s load
When he sighed and slowed.
What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led, –
Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.
It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.
Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is – that we two passed.
And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.
Thinking of the British landscape, and feelings of pessimism ahead of the First World War, there’s one other essential poet. A.E. Housman was considered to be the most brilliant classical scholar of his day – and his day was crammed with brilliant classical scholars. A gay man at a time when this was criminal and extremely dangerous, his best-known sequence of verses was called ‘A Shropshire Lad’ – a kind of long anthem to doomed youth, and an elegy to an English pastoral Eden which seemed, as the new century loomed, to be vanishing:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
And:
Far in a western brookland
That bred me long ago
The poplars stand and tremble
By pools I used to know.
There, in the windless night-time,
The wanderer, marvelling why,
Halts on the bridge to hearken
How soft the poplars sigh.
He hears: no more remembered
In fields where I was known,
Here I lie down in London
And turn to rest alone.
There, by the starlit fences,
The wanderer halts and hears
My soul that lingers sighing
About the glimmering weirs.
Housman’s sense of the English countryside was as history-drenched as Thomas Hardy’s – an endlessly lived-in, lived-on narrative. But in Housman’s Shropshire the actual countrymen seem vaguer, sketched in, rather than the dialect-speaking, three-dimensional characters of Hardy’s Dorset. This perhaps reflects the underlying story Housman tells – an England being emptied of bold young men, sent off to fight and die for the Empire abroad. But it means that, again and again, the most vivid characters in Housman’s verses are ghosts.
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon* the city stood;
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare;
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
Today the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
Housman seems to have been a mostly lonely man, and mostly repressed, famous for his savage treatment of less talented scholars. But he wrote one very powerful poem about the war against homosexuals, after the trial of Oscar Wilde. It is, I suppose, the first gay protest poem in English literature:
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;
Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.
Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,
And they’re taking him to justice for the colour of his hair.
Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,
And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.
We are now on the very edge of the First World War, the first definitive shock to inherited notions of Britishness in modern times. But to get some sense of what the war would do to established ideas of patriotism and Britain’s place in the world, we must end with Sir Henry Newbolt. Like Kipling a poet fashioned through the rhythms and language of hymns, popular verse and the music hall, Newbolt was educated at Clifton College, part of the new generation of public schools formed to provide the Empire with austere, stoical and reliable public servants. A comfortably-off barrister as well as a highly successful writer, Newbolt might seem to be the very epitome of the smug and conventional imperialist Englishman of Edwardian times, just as Clifton College might seem the epitome of the kind of school that produced such men. But real life is messier, and more interesting. Sir Henry spent much of his life in a three-way affair involving his wife and their mutual, thus bisexual, lover. Clifton was in fact an unusually open-minded school, welcoming in boys from poorer backgrounds and reserving a special house for Jewish boys. Nevertheless, there isn’t much room for doubt in Newbolt’s most famous poem, ‘Vita Lampeda’, or ‘the lamp of life’. Written in 1892, it was massively popular. When the war started, Sir Henry volunteered for the government’s propaganda bureau; this poem was especially mocked and hated by a new generation shivering and dying in the trenches:
There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –
Ten to make and the match to win –
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’
The sand of the desert is sodden red, –
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’
This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind –
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’
Hardly anyone, presumably, sets out to be a war poet: it’s a fate that happens to some unlucky people at some unlucky moments. Rupert Brooke, remembered as one of the most uncomplicatedly patriotic of the First World War poets, actually spent most of his life as a peacetime poet, before being killed by an infected mosquito bite off Greece in 1915. If, somewhere in our collective consciousness, we have a half-buried notion that poets ‘ought’ to be particularly good-looking, then Rupert Brooke is probably to blame. Yeats called him ‘the best looking young man in England’, and photographs display a floppy-haired, chisel-jawed youth with a curiously intense stare. Today’s children are taught the war poets from the latter end of the conflict – the most disaffected, angry anti-war poets there have ever been. But Rupert Brooke was rather more of the Sir Henry Newbolt way of thinking. He had a fierce prejudice for England and the English. His poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, a romantic hymn to the small village outside Cambridge, is now mostly famous for its closing lines: ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?’ But it begins with Brooke in Berlin, where he was recuperating from an unhappy and complicated romantic tangle, and in a sourly homesick frame of mind:
Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow …
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
– Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe …
‘Du lieber Gott!’
Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; – and THERE the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
Interesting, isn’t it, that for the casual English anti-Semite of 1912, German Jews are just part of the German furniture, drinking their beer? Brooke stands up for the liberal English idyll, an unregulated country where the state is not yet powerful; his xenophobia, however, reeks. He throws himself into a historical reverie about the glories of the English countryside, before radically changing mood and energetically libelling, in a very funny passage, many of his countrymen:
God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
What does this tell us? Two things, I think. First, that it’s by now possible to be both patriotic and satirical about the realities of English life, particularly if you’re looking down on them. Edwardian culture was more relaxed than Victorian culture, especially amongst intellectuals – and Rupert Brooke was a friend of the so-called Bloomsbury group. Brooke really means it when he says that England is the only place to live; but he also means it when he describes a countryside full of misbehaving and unappetising peasants. England, more than Scotland or Wales, was still a highly hierarchical and class-conscious society; Rupert Brooke was a flamboyant representative of the snobs at the top.
Second, it reminds us that this was also still a country of intense local rivalries. Small towns and villages did indeed tell terrible stories about one another, and most people’s sense of identity was closely bound up with the village, or the few urban streets, in which they happened to be born and to live. Edwardians, particularly from the poorer classes, did not travel very far, unless they were on military or imperial duties. Their strong sense of locality, a kind of civic patriotism almost, would lead to the ‘Pals’’ battalions of Kitchener’s conscript army – young men, all from the same small area, joining up, serving and often dying together. Only now, at the end of the poem, does Rupert Brooke change tone again, in his famous celebration:
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) …
Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? … oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
Brooke’s patriotism goes a long way towards explaining why so many young Englishmen volunteered so quickly to go to France and die. It’s a patriotism we have largely lost, partly because of the twentieth-century wartime experiences, and partly because we know so much more about the rest of the world. But we are allowed to regret the loss: it gave those who felt it a sense of confidence and warm belonging that gurgled away with the bloodied rainwater of Flanders:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
* The clerk’s ironic description of his small suburban house.
* Housman’s name for a Roman settlement under what is now Wroxeter.