Charles Sorley was born in Aberdeen on 19 May 1895, the elder twin son and third surviving child of William Ritchie Sorley, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen University, and his wife Janetta. When Charles was five, his father was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, and there the boy was brought up. He went to King’s College Choir School (his father being a Fellow of that college), and absorbed from its compulsory Chapel service a knowledge of the Bible that would influence the language of his poems. In 1908, he won a scholarship to Marlborough College, where he developed a passion – like Grenfell’s – for cross-country running and wrote a number of poems. One of the earliest, ‘Barbury Camp’, a pre-Roman hill-fort on the Marlborough downs, begins:
We burrowed night and day with tools of lead,
Heaped the bank up and cast it in a ring
And hurled the earth above. And Caesar said,
‘Why, it is excellent. I like the thing.’
We, who are dead,
Made it, and wrought, and Caesar liked the thing.
In this, one sees the imagination of another public-schoolboy stamped with the martial insignia of a classical education. A later stanza employs a phrase – a concept – curiously close to Grenfell’s ‘joy of battle’, but uses it in a very different context:
So, fighting men and winds and tempests, hot
With joy and hate and battle-lust, we fell
Where we fought. And God said, ‘Killed at last then? What!
Ye that are too strong for heaven, too clean for hell,
(God said) stir not.
This be your heaven, or, if ye will, your hell.’
The ghosts of Sorley’s Roman soldiers live on in their native landscape as, he imagines in a later poem, will the soldiers marching to a later war.
In his last year at Marlborough, Sorley won prizes for English and for public reading, and a scholarship to Oxford. However, before going to university, he decided to spend some months in Mecklenburg acquiring German – and independence. He acquired both. Out on a walk in February 1914, he heard a group of German soldiers singing ‘something glorious and senseless about the Fatherland’.
And when I got home, I felt I was a German, and proud to be a German: when the tempest of the singing was at its loudest, I felt that perhaps I could die for Deutschland – and I have never had an inkling of that feeling about England, and never shall.
That emotion died with the cessation of the singing, but the affection and admiration he had acquired for the Germans continued after they became ‘the enemy’. He recognized, however, that he had to choose between the two countries, and seems to have had no hesitation in making his choice.
The singing of the German soldiers may have merged in Sorley’s imagination with the singing of British soldiers, prompting an untitled poem he wrote shortly after the outbreak of war. It begins:
Sorley’s application for a temporary commission in the army
All the hills and vales along
Earth is bursting into song,
And the singers are the chaps
Who are going to die perhaps.
Sorley’s landscape is as vibrantly animate as that of Grenfell’s poem ‘Into Battle’ (see pp. 30–1), but it is a peopled landscape. It, too, has a song, but it is far from being the song of a blackbird instructing a solitary poet:
the singers are the chaps
Who are going to die perhaps.
There is no ‘high comradeship’ with heavenly bodies here, but a sense of identification with more lowly ‘chaps’. The stanza ends:
O sing, marching men,
Till the valleys ring again.
Give your gladness to earth’s keeping,
So be glad, when you are sleeping.
A strange circularity is set up, whereby the marching men are urged to give their gladness, their song, to the earth where they can reclaim it later. This ambiguous consolation becomes less ambiguous in what follows:
Cast away regret and rue,
Think what you are marching to.
Little live, great pass,
Jesus Christ and Barabbas
Were found the same day.
This died, that went his way.
So sing with joyful breath,
For why, you are going to death.
Teeming earth will surely store
All the gladness that you pour.
Earth that never doubts nor fears,
Earth that knows of death, not tears,
Earth that bore with joyful ease
Hemlock for Socrates,
Earth that blossomed and was glad
‘Neath the cross that Christ had,
Shall rejoice and blossom too
When the bullet reaches you.
Wherefore, men marching
On the road to death, sing!
Pour your gladness on earth’s head,
So be merry, so be dead.
Letter to his aunt Mary from the trenches, 17 August 1915
At first sight this could be taken for irony, but a letter from Sorley, in which he wrote ‘The earth even more than Christ is the ultimate ideal of what man should strive to be’, suggests that it is not.
No doubt, in part because of his conflicting feelings about Germany, Sorley was critical of anything that smacked of ‘jingoism’. ‘England –’ he writes, ‘I am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy, that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling “imaginative indolence” that has marked us out from generation to generation.’ He was particularly critical of the jingoistic strain in Rupert Brooke’s poetry, and a letter to his mother about Brooke’s death in 1915 highlights the principal difference between them:
That last sonnet-sequence of his, of which you sent me the review in the Times Lit. Sup., and which has been so praised, I find (with the exception of that beginning ‘Their hearts were woven of human joys and cares. . .’ which is not about himself) overpraised. He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) as a highly intense, remarkable and sacrificial exploit, whereas it is merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstances, where the non-compliance with this demand would have made life intolerable. It was not that ‘they’ gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control and he must fight to recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude.
As this shows, Sorley was himself far from sentimental. Brooke had also lived in Germany before the war, but whereas his most famous sonnet, ‘If I should die’, invokes the noun England no less than four times, Sorley writes a sonnet (some months earlier) entitled ‘To Germany’. It begins:
British troops returning from the Battle of Loos, 1915
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
The sestet moves from present blindness to a prophetic vision of future sight that has an interesting relation to the piercing recognition and reconciliation of Englishman and German in Owen’s poem ‘Strange Meeting’ (see pp.112–13). Sorley is much more optimistic:
Trenches in Ploegsteert Wood, 1915
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other’s truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.
Much as one may admire the attitudes expressed in this poem, it has to be said that its impact is diminished by the euphemistic metaphor with which it ends,
But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.
German frontline trench filled with German dead, 1916
One remembers other poems in which he writes exultantly of wind and rain – what Robert Graves was to call ‘Sorley’s Weather’. There are no such euphemisms, however, in the sonnet found in his kit after his death on the Western Front in October 1915. He was twenty years old.
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
Sorley was one of the first poets to get the numbers right – there are ‘millions of the mouthless dead’ – and, responding perhaps to Brooke’s ‘If I should die’ (one of those sonnets he had criticized for their excessive concern with self), there is no first-person pronoun, no ‘I’, in his poem. Where Brooke had urged his reader to ‘think only this of me’, Sorley tells us to
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Those negatives are followed by others, as with unsparing irony he punctures the platitudes of consolation:
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know,
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
In November 1914, writing to the Master of Marlborough, Sorley had quoted a line from the Iliad, spoken by Achilles – ‘Died Patroclus too who was a far better man than thou’ – adding ‘no saner and splendider comment on death has been made’. As his last sonnet enters its sestet, he echoes that Homeric line with another instruction to his reader:
Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
Sorley’s dead are blind, deaf, gashed. They are not heroic Homeric shades, garlanded with glory, but an indistinguishable ‘o’ercrowded mass’. He did not live long enough to acquire the technical skills of an Owen or a Sassoon, but he understood the truth about the war before they did, and found words for it before them. He stands as an attractive transitional figure between the first wave of poets and those of the second wave soon to follow them.
Telegram notifying Professor W. R. Sorley of his son’s death
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other’s dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other’s truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.
1914
A hundred thousand million mites we go
Wheeling and tacking o’er the eternal plain,
Some black with death – and some are white with woe.
Who sent us forth? Who takes us home again?
And there is sound of hymns of praise – to whom?
And curses – on whom curses? – snap the air.
And there is hope goes hand in hand with gloom,
And blood and indignation and despair.
And there is murmuring of the multitude
And blindness and great blindness, until some
Step forth and challenge blind Vicissitude
Who tramples on them: so that fewer come.
And nations, ankle-deep in love or hate,
Throw darts or kisses all the unwitting hour
Beside the ominous unseen tide of fate;
And there is emptiness and drink and power.
And some are mounted on swift steeds of thought
And some drag sluggish feet of stable toil.
Yet all, as though they furiously sought,
Twist turn and tussle, close and cling and coil.
A hundred thousand million mites we sway
Writhing and tossing on the eternal plain,
Some black with death – but most are bright with Day!
Who sent us forth? Who brings us home again?
1914
I |
Saints have adored the lofty soul of you. |
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Poets have whitened at your high renown. |
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We stand among the many millions who |
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Do hourly wait to pass your pathway down. |
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You, so familiar, once were strange: we tried |
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To live as of your presence unaware. |
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But now in every road on every side |
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We see your straight and steadfast signpost there. |
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I think it like that signpost in my land, |
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Hoary and tall, which pointed me to go |
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Upward, into the hills, on the right hand, |
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Where the mists swim and the winds shriek and blow, |
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A homeless land and friendless, but a land |
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I did not know and that I wished to know. |
II |
Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat: |
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Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean, |
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And this we know: Death is not Life effete, |
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Victor and vanquished are a-one in death: |
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1915 |
I have not brought my Odyssey
With me here across the sea;
But you’ll remember, when I say
How, when they went down Sparta way,
To sandy Sparta, long ere dawn
Horses were harnessed, rations drawn,
Equipment polished sparkling bright,
And breakfasts swallowed (as the white
Of eastern heavens turned to gold) –
The dogs barked, swift farewells were told.
The sun springs up, the horses neigh,
Crackles the whip thrice – then away!
From sun-go-up to sun-go-down
All day across the sandy down
The gallant horses galloped, till
The wind across the downs more chill
Blew, the sun sank and all the road
Was darkened, that it only showed
Right at the end of the town’s red light
And twilight glimmering into night.
The horses never slackened till
They reached the doorway and stood still.
Then came the knock, the unlading; then
The honey-sweet converse of men,
The splendid bath, the change of dress,
Then – O the grandeur of their Mess,
The henchmen, the prim stewardess!
And O the breaking of old ground,
The tales, after the port went round!
(The wondrous wiles of old Odysseus,
Old Agamemnon and his misuse
Of his command, and that young chit
Paris – who didn’t care a bit
For Helen – only to annoy Pa
He did it really, κ. τ. λ.)
But soon they led amidst the din
The honey-sweet ἀoιδóϛ in,
Whose eyes were blind, whose soul had sight,
Who knew the fame of men in fight –
Bard of white hair and trembling foot,
Who sang whatever God might put
Into his heart.
And there he sung,
Those war-worn veterans among,
Tales of great war and strong hearts wrung,
Of clash of arms, of council’s brawl,
Of beauty that must early fall,
Of battle hate and battle joy
By the old windy walls of Troy.
They felt that they were unreal then,
Visions and shadow-forms, not men.
But those the Bard did sing and say
(Some were their comrades, some were they)
Took shape and loomed and strengthened more
Greatly than they had guessed of yore.
And now the fight begins again,
The old war-joy, the old war-pain.
Sons of one school across the sea
We have no fear to fight, for we
Have echo of our deeds in you
We have our ἀoιδóϛ too.
And soon, O soon, I do not doubt it,
With the body or without it,
We shall all come tumbling down
To our old wrinkled red-capped town.
Perhaps the road up Ilsley way,
The old ridge-track, will be my way
High up among the sheep and sky,
Look down on Wantage, passing by,
And see the smoke from Swindon town;
And then full left at Liddington,
Where the four winds of heaven meet
The earth-blest traveller to greet.
And then my face is toward the south,
There is a singing on my mouth:
Away to rightward I descry
My Barbury ensconced in sky,
Far underneath the Ogbourne twins,
And at my feet the thyme and whins,
The grasses with their little crowns
Of gold, the lovely Aldbourne downs
And that old signpost (well I knew
That crazy signpost, arms askew,
Old mother of the four grass ways).
And then my mouth is dumb with praise,
For, past the wood and chalkpit tiny,
A glimpse of Marlborough ἐρατεινή!
So I descend beneath the rail
To warmth and welcome and wassail,
And you, our minstrel, you our bard,
Who makes war’s grievous things and hard,
Lightsome and glorious and fair
Will be, at least in spirit, there.
We’ll read your rhymes, and we will sing
The toun o’ touns till the roofs ring.
And if you’ll come among us, then
We shall be most blest of men,
We shall forget the old old pain,
And hearken all the tales you tell
And bless our old ἀoιδóϛ.
Well,
This for the future. Now we stand
Stronger through you, to guard our land,
I do but give the thanks of each
(Thanks far far greater than my speech)
Of those who knew or did not know
(For all knew you) not long ago
In places that we see in sleep
Our eyes are dry but our hearts weep
Warm living tears that memory dear
Calls up the moment that we hear
(For we do hear it) your kind voice
Who understood us, men and boys.
So now and for the ages through
We are all dead and living too.
Our common life lies on your tongue
For as the bards sang, you have sung.
This from the battered trenches – rough,
Jingling and tedious enough.
And so I sign myself to you:
One, who some crooked pathways knew
Round Bedwyn: who could scarcely leave
The Downs on a December eve:
Was at his happiest in shorts,
And got – not many good reports!
Small skill of rhyming in his hand –
But you’ll forgive – you’ll understand.
12 July 1915
