Ivor Gurney was born in Gloucester on 28 August 1890, the elder son and second of four children of David Gurney, proprietor of a small tailoring business, and his wife Florence. He was educated at the King’s School as a chorister of Gloucester Cathedral, then as an articled pupil of the cathedral organist and, finally, at the Royal College of Music, to which he won a scholarship on the strength of prodigious gifts as a composer. His teacher there, Sir Charles Stanford, used to say that of all his pupils – Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Arthur Bliss, and dozens more – Gurney was, potentially, ‘the biggest of them all, but the least teachable.’
In 1912 Gurney began setting poems to music, including five Elizabethan lyrics. His biographer, Michael Hurd (himself a musician) said of these: ‘Gurney jumped in one bound from mere competence to mastery and genuine originality.’ He added that, in his view, the inspiration did not seem to be a musical one at all, but in direct response to the innocence and freedom of the poetry. So it is not surprising that about this time Gurney began writing poetry himself. He also began to manifest signs of instability, which suggests that, while the intermittent madness of his last fifteen years was clearly triggered by the war, it was not the sole cause.
He was rejected by the army in 1914 on grounds of defective eyesight, but managed to enlist in February 1915 while still a student and, in May 1916, crossed to France with the 2nd/5th Gloucesters. There, he continued to write poems and, by 1917, had enough for a first book. This he called Severn and Somme, juxtaposing the much-loved river of his childhood with the one that had given its name to the battle in which he had been fighting. Many of these poems have the word ‘song’ in their titles and/or are song-like. One of the best takes its title, ‘Ballad of the Three Spectres’, from another, related musical form:
As I went up by Ovillers
In mud and water cold to the knee,
There went three jeering, fleering spectres,
That walked abreast and talked of me.
The first said, ‘Here’s a right brave soldier
That walks the dark unfearingly;
Soon he’ll come back on a fine stretcher,
And laughing for a nice Blighty.’
The second, ‘Read his face, old comrade,
No kind of lucky chance I see;
One day he’ll freeze in mud to the marrow,
Then look his last on Picardie.’
Though bitter the word of these first twain
Curses the third spat venomously;
‘He’ll stay untouched till the war’s last dawning
Then live one hour of agony.’
Liars the first two were. Behold me
At sloping arms by one – two – three;
Waiting the time I shall discover
Whether the third spake verity.
Ivor Gurney with Matilda and Marjorie Chapman, 1919
Manuscript of Gurney’s song, ‘In Flanders’
On Good Friday 1917, Gurney was first wounded (though not seriously enough to be sent home), then gassed, and only then sent home. Two years later he produced a second book, War’s Embers, that contained what many consider his masterpiece, the song-like elegy ‘To His Love’ (see p. 157 for its manuscript):
He’s gone, and all our plans
Are useless indeed.
We’ll walk no more on Cotswold
Where the sheep feed
Quietly and take no heed.
His body that was so quick
Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn river
Under the blue
Driving our small boat through.
You would not know him now . . .
But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.
Cover him, cover him soon!
And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers –
Hide that red wet
Thing I must somehow forget.
Both the title and the opening euphemism, ‘He’s gone’, conceal the fact that the subject of the poem is dead (or mistakenly believed to be dead: he, F.W Harvey, was in fact a prisoner of war). Grief is held in check by the pastoral forms, the pastoral convention. The truth begins to emerge in the second stanza – ‘His body that was so quick’ – but first euphemism, and then memory draw the veil:
Knew it, on Severn river
Under the blue
Driving our small boat through.
Memory makes that body, momentarily, as quick as ever. But reality will not be denied. The pastoral elegy, however, can propose its traditional consolation. As the dead man had lived under the blue canopy of Gloucestershire sky, the speaker wishes him now concealed under a purple canopy of Gloucestershire flowers:
[. . .] cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.
The voice is elegiac but as controlled as ever. Only with the final stanza does the control begin to crack, at first with a near-hysterical repetition: ‘Cover him, cover him soon!’ That is followed by a sentence which again tries to veil truth with tradition, before finally admitting the horror:
And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers –
Hide that red wet
Thing I must somehow forget.
After so much pastoral formality, the colloquial informality of ‘that red wet/Thing’ comes with shattering force. Humanity floods into the poem with the imprecision of that noun and with the irreconcilable demands of memory and forgetfulness.
The same word, ‘thing’, is used repeatedly in a very different context, in the poem ‘First Time In’, that begins:
A tin box sent to Gurney at the front by the Chapmans, 1915
View of earthworks from the bridge over the Omignon, April, 1917
After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line
Anything might have come to us; but the divine
Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony
Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory
Soft foreign things. Then we were taken in
To low huts candle-lit, shaded close by slitten
Oilsheets, and there the boys gave us kind welcome,
So that we looked out as from the edge of home,
Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions
To human hopeful things. And the next day’s guns
Nor any line-pangs ever quite could blot out
That strangely beautiful entry to war’s rout.
There is a touching honesty about those ‘soft foreign things’, those ‘Welsh things’, that cannot be identified more specifically because they are in a foreign language. This is not to suggest that Gurney’s poetry lacks specificity. Far from it. In this poem, he goes on to catalogue the gifts that the Welshmen give the Englishmen:
Candles they gave us, precious and shared over-rations –
Ulysses found little more in his wanderings without doubt.
‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Slumber Song’ so soft, and that
Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys
Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the guns’ noise.
Gurney never acquired the technical control of an Owen or a Sassoon – neither of whom would have admitted the filler ‘without doubt’ (to rhyme with ‘that’) – but, as with Hardy, his clumsiness can be a source of strength. He is an honest, humane and touching poet, never more so than in ‘The Silent One’:
Field postcard from Ivor Gurney
Who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two –
Who for his hours of life had chattered through
Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent:
Yet faced unbroken wires; stepped over, and went
A noble fool, faithful to his stripes – and ended.
But I weak, hungry, and willing only for the chance
Of line – to fight in the line, lay down under unbroken
Wires, and saw the flashes and kept unshaken,
Till the politest voice – a finicking accent, said:
‘Do you think you might crawl through, there; there’s a hole.’ In the afraid
Darkness, shot at; I smiled, as politely replied –
‘I’m afraid not, Sir.’ There was no hole no way to be seen
Nothing but chance of death, after tearing of clothes.
Kept flat, and watched the darkness, hearing bullets whizzing –
And thought of music – and swore deep heart’s deep oaths
(Polite to God) and retreated and came on again,
Again retreated – and a second time faced the screen.
There is no Sassoon-like indignation here – not even against the officer who invites him to crawl to his death. Instead, there is a delight in the varieties of human voice – the ‘lovely chatter of Bucks accent’, the ‘finicking accent’ of the officer – and the grief in the poem (as its title suggests) stems from the silencing of the Bucks accent. Gurney’s own Gloucestershire voice was not silenced by the war, but after it he had to face a darker ‘screen’: the madness that, in 1922, led his family to commit him, first to Barnwood House Asylum and then to the City of London Mental Hospital in Dartford, Kent. There, like that earlier countryman poet, John Clare, he went on writing poems; among them some of his best.
There is a last heart-rending glimpse of him in an essay by Edward Thomas’s widow, Helen, who visited him in the Dartford asylum:
We arrived at the asylum which looked like – as indeed it was – a prison. A warder let us in after unlocking the door, and doors were opened and locked behind us as we were ushered into the building. We were walking along a bare corridor when we were met by a tall gaunt dishevelled man clad in pyjamas and dressing gown, to whom Miss Scott introduced me. He gazed with an intense stare into my face and took me silently by the hand. Then I gave him the flowers which he took with the same deeply moving intensity and silence. He then said: ‘You are Helen, Edward’s wife and Edward is dead.’ I said, ‘Yes, let us talk of him’ [. . ..]
We spoke of country that he knew and which Edward knew too and he evidently identified Edward with the English countryside, especially that of Gloucestershire. I learned from the warder that Ivor Gurney refused to go into the grounds of the asylum. It was not his idea at all of countryside – the fields and woods and footpaths he loved so well – and he would have nothing to do with this travesty of something that was sacred to him [. . ..]
The next time I went I took with me one of Edward’s own well-used Ordnance maps of Gloucester where he had often walked. This proved to have been a sort of inspiration, for Ivor Gurney at once spread it out on his bed and he and I spent the whole time I was there tracing with our fingers the lanes and byeways and villages of which he knew every step and over which Edward had walked. He spent that hour in re-visiting his beloved home, in spotting a village or a track, a hill or a wood and seeing it all in his mind’s eye, a mental vision sharper and more actual for his heightened intensity. He trod, in a way we who were sane could not emulate, the lanes and fields he knew and loved so well, his guide being his finger tracing the way on the map. It was most deeply moving, and I knew that I had hit on an idea that gave him more pleasure than anything else I could have thought of. For he had Edward as his companion in this strange perambulation [. . ..]
Ivor Gurney died in 1937, after fifteen years in that asylum.
One of Gurney’s letters from the Dartford aslyum
Watching the dark my spirit rose in flood
On that most dearest Prelude of my delight.
The low-lying mist lifted its hood,
The October stars showed nobly in clear night.
When I return, and to real music-making,
And play that Prelude, how will it happen then?
Shall I feel as I felt, a sentry hardly waking,
With a dull sense of No Man’s Land again?
1917
If it were not for England, who would bear
This heavy servitude one moment more?
To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor
Of filthiest hovels were noble to compare
With this brass-cleaning life. Now here, now there
Harried in foolishness, scanned curiously o’er
By fools made brazen by conceit, and store
Of antique witticisms thin and bare.
Only the love of comrades sweetens all,
Whose laughing spirit will not be outdone.
As night-watching men wait for the sun
To hearten them, so wait I on such boys
As neither brass nor Hell-fire may appal,
Nor guns, nor sergeant-major’s bluster and noise.
1917
One would remember still
Meadows and low hill
Laventie was, as to the line and elm row
Growing through green strength wounded, as home elms grow.
Shimmer of summer there and blue autumn mists
Seen from trench-ditch winding in mazy twists.
The Australian gunners in close flowery hiding
Cunning found out at last, and smashed in the unspeakable lists.
And the guns in the smashed wood thumping and griding.
The letters written there, and received there,
Books, cakes, cigarettes in a parish of famine,
And leaks in rainy times with general all-damning.
The crater, and carrying of gas cylinders on two sticks
(Pain past comparison and far past right agony gone),
Strained hopelessly of heart and frame at first fix.
Café-au-lait in dug-outs on Tommies’ cookers,
Cursed minniewerfs, thirst in eighteen-hour summer.
The Australian miners clayed, and the being afraid
Before strafes, sultry August dusk time than Death dumber –
And the cooler hush after the strafe, and the long night wait –
The relief of first dawn, the crawling out to look at it,
Wonder divine of dawn, man hesitating before Heaven gate.
(Though not on Cooper’s where music fire took at it.
Though not as at Framilode beauty where body did shake at it)
Yet the dawn with aeroplanes crawling high at Heaven’s gate
Lovely aerial beetles of wonderful scintillate
Strangest interest, and puffs of soft purest white –
Seeking light, dispersing colouring for fancy’s delight.
Of Machonachie, Paxton, Tickler and Gloucester’s Stephens;
Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evens
Of trench food, but the everlasting clean craving
For bread, the pure thing, blessèd beyond saving.
Canteen disappointments, and the keen boy braving
Bullets or such for grouse roused surprisingly through
(Halfway) Stand-to.
And the shell nearly blunted my razor at shaving;
Tilleloy, Fauquissart, Neuve Chapelle, and mud like glue.
But Laventie, most of all, I think is to soldiers
The town itself with plane trees, and small-spa air;
And vin, rouge-blanc, chocolat, citron, grenadine:
One might buy in small delectable cafés there.
The broken church, and vegetable fields bare;
Neat French market-town look so clean,
And the clarity, amiability of North French air.
Like water flowing beneath the dark plough and high Heaven,
Music’s delight to please the poet pack-marching there.
1919–22
Thick lie in Gloucester orchards now
Apples the Severn wind
With rough play tore from the tossing
Branches, and left behind
Leaves strewn on pastures, blown in hedges,
And by the roadway lined.
And I lie leagues on leagues afar
To think how that wind made
Great shoutings in the wide chimney,
A noise of cannonade –
Of how the proud elms by the signpost
The tempest’s will obeyed –
To think how in some German prison
A boy lies with whom
I might have taken joy full-hearted
Hearing the great boom
Of autumn, watching the fire, talking
Of books in the half gloom.
O wind of Ypres and of Severn
Riot there also, and tell
Of comrades safe returned, home-keeping
Music and autumn smell.
Comfort blow him and friendly greeting,
Hearten him, wish him well!
1919
1919
In October marching, taking the sweet air,
Packs riding lightly, and homethoughts soft coming,
‘This is right marching, we are even glad to be here,
Or very glad?’ But looking upward to dark smoke foaming,
Chimneys on the clear crest, no more shades for roaming,
Smoke covering sooty what man’s heart holds dear,
Lillers we approached, a quench for thirsty frames,
And looked once more between houses and at queer names
Of estaminets, longed for cool wine or cold beer.
This was war; we understood; moving and shifting about;
To stand or be withstood in the mixèd rout
Of fight to come after this. But that was a good dream
Of justice or strength-test with steel tool a gleam
Made to the hand. But barb-wire lay to the front,
Tiny aeroplanes circled as ever their wont
High over the two ditches of heart-sick men;
The times scientific, as evil as ever again.
October lovely bathing with sweet air the plain.
1919–22
