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English Studies Forum The Forum Reviews |
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Our World’s Death Songs Andrew Motion, ed. First World War Poems. Faber, 2004. 171 pp. £12.99 By John Sears, Manchester Metropolitan University
The 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War approaches, and Andrew Motion has compiled a new anthology of the poetry of that War. In doing so, he allows us to experience again the immense book of respect that War poetry constitutes, and addresses, directly and indirectly, a series of issues that have demanded critical attention in recent years. These include the roles poems play in the processes of cultural memory, the functions of canonicity in different historical contexts, the intricate relations between literature and those historical contexts, and, of course, the insights that theoretical approaches – cultural materialist, historicist, psychoanalytical, gender-based – may bring to bear on the literature of war. Critics like Tate have demonstrated that the literature of the War invites and can be fruitfully analyzed through new critical assessments; recent feminist scholarship (exemplified in anthologies edited by Reilly and Marlow) has rediscovered or re-assessed the contributions of women writers to the literature of the War, from Vera Brittain’s memoirs to poems published in newspapers and popular magazines. Such critical and theoretical considerations address reasons why poetry of the First World War retains its capacity to influence readers in emotional and political ways, and retains its significance as a symbolic expression encompassing an aesthetic of suffering, outrage, dignity and pity. Motion is well aware of these different significances, and offers, in his introductory remarks, a thoughtful discussion of why a new anthology of such well-known poems should be “necessary” (xii). First World War poetry is, he notes, “a sacred national text” “dripped into the national bloodstream at a steady rate” (xi). A new anthology, Motion argues, should allow us to see the poems anew, outside of their roles as “state furniture”, their “ossified” (xii) historical familiarity. Certainly individual poems survive the test of repeated acquaintance (as anyone who teaches the poetry will know); they sustain a resonance that few other literary texts can manage, and speak with equal levels of import and directness to widely different levels of experience. The First World War remains a literary war, and Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory remains its key literary history. The poems, even the memoirs, are far more familiar than the paintings or the photographs; the War seems to have made little long-term impact as subject matter on cinema history, unlike the Second World War. The War exists for the modern public as an event whose principal mediation has been through the written word. One consequence of this is that the literature assumes the status of a seemingly authentic image-reservoir, somehow removed from the distancing effects of mechanical reproduction, residing in words crafted by hands that fought and suffered, providing us with the apparently shocking, first-hand reality of apparently direct but actually linguistically-mediated experience. “Their value as witnesses”, Motion rightly asserts of the poets, “became inseparable from their role as makers” (xi), makers of those literary versions of the War experience that subsequent generations have, for various reasons, remembered. Motion’s editorial contribution to this process of remembering is to offer not only the conventional, historically bound version of War Poetry, but an additional survey of the War as memory in subsequent poetry, a tracing of the War as a poetic trace of itself. Simultaneously his anthology extends the boundaries of conventional poetic canons to include works by anonymous poets, and particularly the songs of the soldiers, such as “The Old Battalion.” In each case, one is left both intrigued and frustrated by the project – intrigued by the possibilities opened up, frustrated by their not being further pursued (where are the post-War poems addressing the War written by women? How does the list of poets included in this category – Pound, Eliot, McDiarmid, Larkin, Enright, Scannell, Hughes, Heaney, Longley, Muldoon, Maxwell – relate, in poetic, political and canonical terms, to the selection of War poets included here?). One consequence of the inclusion of post-War poems is that the War Poetry can be read in relation to a future tradition, where, conventionally, it becomes both an extension of the past (pushing the Romantic lyric and the pastoral into new directions in response to historical and experiential necessities) and a break with the past (the reading of nascent Modernism as a series of ruptures, fracturing traditions). Motion opens, somewhat conventionally, with Hardy’s ‘Channel Firing’, which, in this context, resonates through its immense historical scale (driving the reader from the false Judgment day of 1915 to “starlit Stonehenge” [4] via the bewildered presence of the dead as interlocutors with modernity). Brooke, too, looks forward in order to look back (‘The Soldier’ meditates on mortality as a future present); Helen Mackay’s remarkable, anxiety-ridden ‘Train’ insists on the imminence of a future that just will not come (“Will the train never start? / God, make the train start.” [11]) Each of these early poems expresses anxiety about the future in terms of desire for an ending, clouded by uncertainty, drawing on conventionally deistic tokens of transcendence in order to articulate its emotional response to a reality increasingly threatening. Only Mackay breaks with traditional form, offering instead an irregular, fraught narrative bound up in its own contradictory impulses: “Terrible that the minutes go, / terrible that the minutes never go” (9). Such juxtapositions set the tone for the rest of the collection, oscillating between the formally conventional and the more adventurous, between the memorial and the desiring. What Wilfrid Gibson calls “the heart-break in the heart of things” (49) becomes a sequential, chronologised, historicised experience in which the greater poets transform the material to hand into something simultaneously intensely personal (who else has experienced this?) and immensely general. The function of the poetry as a discourse of cultural memory rests uneasily alongside the necessity of forgetting, symbolised by Ivor Gurney in “that red wet / Thing I must somehow forget” (69); the ritualised ceremonial repetition jars with other repetitions (death, burial, Sassoon’s “thudding of the guns” [90] that repeats Hardy’s “great guns” that “shook all our coffins as we lay” [3]) constituted as central to the deadly monotony of War. This monotony manifests itself poetically in the modality of modesty, expressed in the recurrent use of the word “only”. Hardy, in ‘In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’’, describes “Only a man harrowing clods”, “Only thin smoke without flame” (7); Brooke instructs us, after his future death, to “think only this of me” (8); Owen asks “What passing bells”, and answers: “Only the monstrous anger of the guns. / Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle” (102); Rosenberg describes his companionable “droll rat” as “Only a living thing” (80), retaining the ambiguity of solely/merely; “Only the wanderer”, Gurney assures us, “Knows England’s graces” (68). (Douglas’s ‘Desert Flowers’, in the Second World War, of course, can “only repeat” Rosenberg [Graham 102].) Elsewhere, in the extraordinary ‘War Books’, Gurney inverts with the emptiest irony this modesty: “There we wrote . . . our world’s death songs, ever the best” (79). That most conventional symbol of modern memory, the photograph, is oddly absent from the War poems. Sassoon notes, in ‘A Working Party’, one of his more straightforward narrative poems, how his hero, with “meagre wife / and two small children in a Midland town”, “showed their photographs to all his mates” (88); these are photographs guaranteeing an authenticity and existence about to be negated. For Hughes and Maxwell, writing long after the War, photographs function as guarantees of historical truth and distance, recording a time from which we can measure the extent of change. Hughes’s ‘Six Young Men’ are fixed into a strange photographic afterlife; again, the present and the historically ancient somehow combine to subvert the possibility of a future:
In Maxwell’s ‘My Grandfather at the Pool’, the photograph evokes presence in absence, and invokes the “pity” that Owen made so central to our comprehension of War poetry:
Maxwell, born in 1962, experiences the War at two generations’ remove, through the inherited symbolism and shared textuality of poetry and photography. His poem closes Motion’s anthology, and allows retrospection, as well as a kind of formal introspection, the final word. Motion’s choices seem limited in relation to selections by Roberts, or the European range of Silkin; the inclusion of Hughes, Maxwell and others offers some alleviation, allowing the War poems, like mourning bells, to echo.
Works Cited Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth. London: Virago 1978. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. Graham, Desmond, ed. The Complete Poems of Keith Douglas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978. Marlow, Joyce, ed. The Virago Book of Women and the Great War. London: Virago 1998 Reilly, Catherine, ed. Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War. London: Virago, 1981. Roberts, David, ed. Minds at War: The Poetry and Experience of the First World War. London: Saxon Books, 1996. Silkin, Jon, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Tate, Trudi. Modernism, History and the First World War. London: Routledge, 1998.
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