Mud, Blood
and Endless Poetry – Dr Jessica Meyer
House Event
– Sunday 23 March
Richard
Wilcocks writes:
It was
revelatory: few in the audience in my front room knew much, if anything, about
the poets who were the focus of Jessica
Meyer’s talk. Wilfred Owen made an appearance, but with the little-known,
seldom-analysed The Chances, which was written at Craiglockhart and published posthumously in
1919 in Wheels.
Written, as was so often the case, at a time when the literate officer classes
tried to adopt the accents of the less-educated horny-handed sons of toil, in a
nearly-accurate version of the dialect of working-class London, the poem deals
with what was known as shell-shock:
‘E’s
wounded, killed, and pris’ner, all the lot –
The ruddy
lot all rolled in one. Jim’s mad.
Jessica Meyer
knows plenty about shell-shock. Her brilliant, well-researched article on the
subject is in the recently-published Stories from the War Hospital (available from headingleyhospital@gmail.com)
in which she makes it clear that she links it with her ongoing research into masculinity in the war.
‘Woodbine
Willie’, a padre who originated in Leeds (Geoffrey Anketell Studdert Kennedy‘s
father was vicar of St Mary’s in Quarry Hill) preferred a similar dialect for To
Stretcher Bearers,
whose heroic activities are well-documented, incidentally, in Wounded by Emily Mayhew, our guest of last
week. Kennedy’s Anglican Christian convictions are made apparent in the final
lines of his vivid, dramatic poem:
‘Ere we are,
now, stretcher-case, boys,
Bring him
aht a cup o’ tea!
Inasmuch as
ye have done it
Ye have done
it unto Me.
Ewart Alan
Mackintosh (killed in action 21 November 1917 aged 24) wrote In Memoriam in
something like his own voice, that of a humane, caring officer addressing a
father:
 |
| Ewart Alan Mackintosh |
You were
only David’s father,
But I had
fifty sons
When we went
up in the evening
Under the
arch of the guns,
And we came
back at twilight –
O God! I
heard them call
To me for
help and pity
That could
not help at all.
I Have a
Rendezvous with Death
by Alan Seeger (yes, there is a link - he was Pete Seeger’s uncle), who died as
a member of the French Foreign Legion in the fighting around Verdun, is a poem
well-known in the United States, but not here. Procreation, love and happiness
is contrasted with death and destruction to great effect by a poet who knew
what was surely coming to him:
 |
| Alan Seeger |
God knows
‘twere better to be deep
Pillowed in
silk and scented down,
Where love throbs
out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to
pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed
awakenings are dear…
But I’ve a
rendezvous with Death
At midnight in
some flaming town,
When Spring
trips north again this year,
And I to my
pledged word am true,
I shall not
fail that rendezvous.
Ford Madox Ford
has come back into fashion, arguably, because of Parade on television, but an excerpt from his Footsloggers, which deals with love of one’s land and our relationship with the State in
wartime, was new to all except one in the room. Haunting memories of a
particular place which come to an officer in the trenches (a filthy
rat-infested ditch) are
the subject of From Steyning to the Ring, by Lt. John Purvis, and Simon Armitage deals with
the soldiers who survive in his 2008 poem The Not Dead:
We are the
not dead.
Neither
happy nor proud
with a
bar-code of medals across the heart
nor laid in
a box and draped with a flag,
we wander
this no man’s land instead,
creatures of
a different stripe – the awkward, unwanted, unlovable type –
haunted with
fears and guilt,
wounded in
spirit and mind.
So what
shall we do with the not dead and all of his kind?
Simon Currie
adds:
I thought you and Jessica Meyer provided a wonderful if
sobering event. I read yesterday two of the poems to our
Shakespeare-plus-poetry group at Harrogate theatre and the people were bowled
over.
