Collected Poems E-Book

Ivor Gurney

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

P.J. Kavanagh's 1982 edition of the Collected Poems established Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) as one of the most original poets of the early twentieth century. His experiences in the First World War and his love of his native Gloucestershire countryside were sources of a unique poetic voice: vigorous, lyrical and passionate. In this new, substantially revised edition, Gurney can be enjoyed in his entirety by a new generation of readers. The poems have been re-ordered to take into account new work on Gurney, the texts corrected from the archive and editorial material substantially revised, while retaining P.J. Kavanagh's extensive original introduction. To many readers, the 1982 edition was a revelation. Re-reading Gurney, writes P.J. Kavanagh, 'is to be reminded how miraculously good he can be: his celebration of the ordinary, his eye for detail, his musical ear that combines traditional rhythms with the unpredictable...'

Leseprobe

IVOR GURNEY

Collected Poems

Edited with an introduction by

P.J. KAVANAGH

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

from ‘Thyrsis’

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Foreword to the New Edition

Chronology

Maps

Poems of Ivor Gurney

from Severn and Somme (1917)

To the Poet before Battle

Strange Service

The Mother

Bach and the Sentry

Song and Pain

Song (‘Only the wanderer’)

Ballad of the Three Spectres

Time and the Soldier

After-Glow

Praise

Song of Pain and Beauty

Requiem

Pain

Servitude

from War’s Embers (1919)

Turmut-Hoeing

Ypres – Minsterworth

To His Love

Old Martinmas Eve

Companion – North-East Dug-Out

The Poplar

The Battalion Is Now On Rest

Photographs

De Profundis

1917–c. 1919. Poems from letters; other early MSS and TSS

The Old City – Gloucester

Memory, Let All Slip

To the Prussians of England

Excursion

Song of Urgency

Song (‘My heart makes songs …’)

Above Ashleworth

Crickley Hill

O Tree of Pride

Equal Mistress

Above Maisemore

When From the Curve

There Was Such Beauty

The Companions

Crocus Ring

Michaelmas

Between the Boughs

Walking Song

April Gale

Personages

If I Walked Straight Slap

Sonnet to J.S. Bach’s Memory

Advice

c. 1920–1922. Poems originating in MS notebooks; other single MS or TS poems

Quiet Talk

The Change

The Songs I Had

London Dawn

Song (‘O were there anything …’)

Generations

Moments

April – Dull Afternoon

The Valley Farm

When I Am Covered

Changes

North Woolwich

Cotswold Ways

Longford Dawns

The Bare Line of the Hill

I Saw England – July Night

Clay

Saturday’s Comings

When March Blows

Yesterday Lost

Andromeda Over Tewkesbury

Wandering Thoughts

The Dark Tree

Had I a Song

The Lock Keeper

On the Night

Swift and Slow

The Telegraph Post

Fragment

We Who Praise Poets

Winter Has Clouds

Hedges

Remembrances

In the Old Time

The Dearness of Common Things

What Evil Coil

The Hoe Scrapes Earth

Compensations

The Garden

Time to Come

Rainy Midnight

Water Colours

February Dawn

Going Out at Dawn

Possessions (‘Sand has the ants …’)

Possessions (‘France has Victory …’)

Darkness Has Cheating Swiftness

Laventie

Smudgy Dawn

Half Dead

June Night

The Bargain

Roads – Those Roads

Lovely Playthings

Songs Come to the Mind

The Poet Walking

The Cloud

Daily – Old Tale

By Severn

Of Cruelty

Blighty

Small Chubby Dams

Brimscombe

Kilns

Billet

First Time In (‘The Captain addressed us …’)

The Soaking

New Year’s Eve

Glimmering Dusk

Thoughts on Beethoven

Friendly Are Meadows

Crucifix Corner

What I Will Pay

The Touchstone – Watching Malvern

Tobacco

La Gorgue

Strange Hells

That Centre of Old

Canadians

First March

After War

Riez Bailleul (‘… in blue tea-time’)

Near Vermand (‘Lying flat …’)

Early Spring Dawn

First Time In (‘After the dread tales …’)

George Chapman – The Iliad

Drachms and Scruples

Stars Sliding

Behind the Line

Schubert (‘The loved one …’)

Townshend

Brown Earth Look

Looking Out

Near Vermand (‘A park there …’)

Robecq Again

London

The Bronze Sounding

Kettle Song

Larches

Quiet Fireshine

Imitation

Old Dreams

Looking Up There

The Not-Returning

Looking There

The Escape

Thomas Heywood

Poem (‘Horror follows Horror …’)

Mist on Meadows

Bach – Under Torment

Silver Birch

Old Thought

Towards Lillers

Tobacco Plant

On Foscombe Hill

East Wind

The High Hills

From the Meadows – The Abbey

Schubert (‘Made the song …’)

Leckhampton Chimney Has Fallen Down

When the Body Might Free

All Souls’ Day 1921

Autumn’s Flame

Up There

Midnight

On a Two-Hundredth Birthday

Tewkesbury

Sonnet – September 1922

September 1922–1925. Poems written in asylums. From single MSS; TS and MS groups; boxes and late notebooks

There Is a Man

The Incense Bearers

To God

The Interview

A Wish

Hedger

There Have Been Anguishes

Riez Bailleul (‘Behind the line there …’)

Old Times

The Shame

On Somme

After ‘The Penny Whistle’

The Golden Age

Hazlitt

Cut Flowers

The Dream

War Poet

Masterpiece

Snow

March

The Awakening

The Love Song

The Sea Borders

The Motetts of William Byrd

First Poem

Like Hebridean

The Coin

Varennes

Epitaph on a Young Child

Christopher Marlowe

Song of Autumn

The Nightingales

Dawns I Have Seen

The Last of the Book

To Long Island First

Walt Whitman

Henry David Thoreau

Washington Irving

Portraits

The New Poet

The Battle

Regrets After Death

Serenade

Butchers and Tombs

Don Juan In Hell

The Bohemians

Autumn

Signallers

To Y

The Lightning Storm

The County’s Bastion

Of Grandcourt

The Silent One

The Noble Wars of Troy

Felling a Tree

The Elements

Song (‘Past my window …’)

The Poets Of My County

War Books

Song (‘I had a girl’s fancies …’)

Prelude

While I Write

The Mangel-Bury

Memory

It Is Winter

Farewell

It Is Near Toussaints

The Storm at Night

To Clare

An Appeal for Death

For Mercy of Death

Hell’s Prayer

To Crickley

The Betrayal

Gloucester

The Coppice

December 30th

St Sylvester’s Night

Poem For End

1926 and after. Late MS poems

Music Room

Early Winter

The Depths

I Read Now So

Poets’ Affection

Traffic in Sheets

Friend of the Mists

The Shelter from the Storm

The Two

The Pedlar’s Song

Going Outward

Musers Afar Will Say

December Evening

No, Come Not, Swallows

The Dancers

I Would Not Rest

If I Shall Praise

The Pleasance Window

Sea-Marge

What Was Dear

Rather I Would …

This Christmas Morning

Wood-Gathering

The House of Stone

The Bridge

The Poet

Near Spring

Where the Mire

The Wood of August

In December

The Old Walnut

Here, If Forlorn

Soft Rain

The Wind

As They Draw to a Close

Appendix

Poems from previous editions not included in main text

I Saw French Once

What’s in Time

The Dance of the September Birds

The Anger of Samson

O Tan-Faced Prairie Boy

A Madrigal

Old Tavern Folk

Then I Heard

William Byrd

‘Girl, Girl, Why Look You So White?’

Watching Music

Improvisation

The Scent of That Country

To Gloucestershire

Examples of longer autobiographical poems

The Retreat

Chance to Work

Editorial Note (1982, 2004)

Notes to the Poems

Abbreviations

Glossary

Index of Titles and First Lines

About the Author

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mr G. Matravers of Gloucester who first drew my attention to the existence of the Gurney manuscripts which have made such a difference to the preparation of this edition, and to Mrs Ronald Gurney who passed the manuscripts through me to the Gurney Archive now held in Gloucester Public Library. The letters of Ivor Gurney to Edmund Blunden from which I quote in my Introduction are owned by the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, who kindly consent to their use. I would also like to acknowledge financial assistance from the Phoenix Trust.

I am grateful for help and encouragement above all from Geoffrey Grigson, who set me on this path, and from the late Leonard Clark, Mrs Joy Finzi, Michael Hurd, Robin Haines, Mrs Voyce and all the librarians and staff of Gloucester Public Library, Anthony Boden, and especially Kate Kavanagh for the Notes and indexing, and for work on the revised edition.

P.J. Kavanagh, 1982, 2004

Ivor Gurney on a visit to Knole, Kent, late 1920s. Photograph by Marion Scott Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the Ivor Gurney Trust

Introduction

The first selection of Ivor Gurney’s poems was published in 1954, long enough ago for those who know his work to have decided what it is like. But nearly a quarter of a century later he was still being described, when a plaque to him was unveiled in Gloucester Cathedral, as a ‘local’ poet. It was well-meant – he was a local boy – but in the limiting sense of Edward Thomas’s definition of poets ‘whom we can connect with a district of England and often cannot sunder from it without harm’, Gurney was not a local poet at all.

What things I have missed today, I know very well,

But the seeing of them each new time is miracle.

Nothing between Bredon and Dursley has

Any day yesterday’s precise unpraiséd grace,

The changed light, or curve changed mistily,

Coppice, now bold cut, yesterday’s mystery.

A sense of mornings, once seen, forever gone,

Its own for ever: alive, dead, and my possession.

(‘Yesterday Lost’)

You do not have to know Bredon or Dursley to see what he is driving at. His Gloucestershire is real, of course, but it is also a region of the mind, The Good Place. He is sparing of topography and more interested in the seasons (especially autumn) and in sky-effects – clouds, dawn-lights, sunsets, even ‘Novembery’ lightlessness (he likes that too)1. If he is to be given a locality, he could with more justice be called a sky-poet.

But, like most poets, he is dependent on the particular and on being able to name it. After the war, when he could give the names of the places in France where he had served, his war poetry gains in immediacy. He had found wartime censorship more than usually cramping: ‘forbidden names or dates without which the poets / are done for …’ (from ‘Jackson’, an ‘Appeal’, not included here). His details – the Machonachie tinned stew, the shared fag, the noise of the cleaning-out of dixies – and his awareness that everything is happening in one place rather than another, at a certain hour, under a never-to-be-repeated pattern of sky, are what give these poems distinctiveness. Whereas the other war poets (Owen, Sassoon, and so on) reacted against the war rhetoric of their elders with indignation and tell us truths we ought to have guessed, Gurney gives us pictures we would not have imagined: the gentleness of his first reception in the front line (in two poems, both called ‘First Time In’), the effect of a clarinet played in the trenches (‘New Year’s Eve’ and ‘Crucifix Corner’). It is the poetry of a particularised, not a generalised humanity, of the flesh and nerves rather than of the intellect. His precisions can be journalistic but he almost invariably looks up to notice the behaviour of the French sky. This widening of view after such narrowness of observation can be startling, putting the war itself in its place.

The avoidance of predictable anger, and the fastening upon the unexpected detail, make Gurney himself present in his war poems, even when he is talking about someone else. For example, ‘The Silent One’, which begins:

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 …

There is no mythologising of the dead boy on the wires – surely the most appalling and demoralising sight the troops on the Western Front had to endure – nor any attempt to shock. What is missed is his ‘chatter’: not loss of promise, ending of beauty and youth – grander conceptions which may come later – but the sudden cessation of the small inconsequences of life. That the chatter had the stamp of Buckinghamshire on it would have been as significant to the dead soldier as Gurney’s Gloucestershire background was to him. Then the poem, in a domestic fashion, goes on to describe how Gurney disobeyed an order, on the grounds of common sense, and apparently got away with it:

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’ …2

‘Finicking’ is precise, and the exchange of politenesses comic. Already, quickly moving, impressionistic, this is not quite like any war poem one has read. But there is more surprise to come. Gurney tells us he kept flat under the bullets:

And thought of music – and swore deep heart’s deep oaths (Polite to God) …

That parenthesis could only have been written either by a man with no sense of the absurd (which we know from the previous lines, and from his letters, was certainly not the case with Gurney) or by a man who had risen above the absurd, who had lost all fear of being laughed at, had now no wish to appear sophisticated or knowing (although he was capable of appearing so) and who was in unembarrassed touch with the most childlike part of his nature.

So, at all events, I felt when I first read this poem, with its queer diction that matches the queer but precise content, an unpompous formality that controls shifts of tone and mood. Then, reading on among his other war poems and his agonised personal pieces, his exultations, praises, desperations, I found among his lyrics (which do truly sing) ‘The High Hills’:

The high hills have a bitterness

Now they are not known

And memory is poor enough consolation

For the soul hopeless gone.

Up in the air there beech tangles wildly in the wind –

That I can imagine

But the speed, the swiftness, walking into clarity,

Like last year’s bryony are gone.

The tune matches the sense, is a part of the meaning, and that is rare. I began to wonder why I had not come across his work before. True, among the knowledgeable his name was sometimes mentioned: above all, by Geoffrey Grigson. W.H. Auden had printed ‘The High Hills’ in his commonplace book A Certain World; but where were the learned articles, biographies, generous selections in anthologies?

Then, as I learned more about Gurney,3 I began to suspect that, apart from his own disinclination to compete, or pretend, several other things were working against him. First, he was acknowledged to be a musician, a composer of songs, of genius – and we always doubt whether a man can be good at two things. Second, he was mentally unbalanced: from about 1912, when he was twenty-two, he had been subject to mental breakdowns, and in 1922 he was put in an asylum (where he wrote some of his best poems) for the last fifteen years of his life. So, Gurney was not only ‘primarily’ a musician (and a ‘local’ poet and an odd sort of war poet) he was a ‘mad’ poet too, and the combination of all these things had caused him to be shunted off into a siding.

But at least seventy out of every hundred poems included here show no sign of mental disturbance at all – unless to be a poet is to be in such a condition, which is possible, and certainly Gurney showed himself unsuited to the routines of ‘ordinary’ life. Also, where there are signs of unbalance, they are obvious; too many of his preoccupations crowd in at once and fall over each other: his sense of having been betrayed, his memories of his comrades in France, of Gloucestershire, of walks at night. The result, though seldom completely incoherent, is confused and painful. But these are also the themes of his best work and, right up to the end of his working life, he is capable of sudden, pictorial, simplicities.

Because there are so many interesting distractions on the way to a reading of Gurney’s verse, my dearest wish would be for the reader to approach him first with no knowledge at all of his medical history. With a fate so dramatic and terrible this is hardly possible. But, so far as his poetry goes, by far the most extraordinary thing is that, apart from the occasional, terrible, shouts of indignation to God, there is hardly an event, certainly no fellow inmate, or attendant, from those last confined years, despite continuous writing, that is mentioned. It is as though, so far as the sources of his poetry are concerned, he simply ignores his situation. This surely should be a hint to the reader, at least at first, to do the same.

Ivor Bertie Gurney was born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester, on 28 August 1890, the son of a tailor. A young clergyman, the Revd Alfred Cheesman, stood as godparent at his christening, and this was to have a significant effect on Gurney’s life. As he grew, Cheesman took him under his protection, lending him books, walking and talking with him, and became the first of the surrogate parents Gurney was to acquire. So much so that he became a mystery to his own family. In the words of his sister: ‘The truth was, he did not seem to belong to us … He simply called on us briefly, and left again without a word!’4 He was educated, as a chorister, at King’s School, Gloucester, and in 1911, encouraged and subsidised by Cheesman, won an Open Scholarship to the Royal College of Music. Marion Scott recorded her first glimpse of him at the college

wearing a thick, dark blue Severn pilot’s coat, more suggestive of an out-of-door life than the composition lesson with Sir Charles Stanford for which (by the manuscript tucked under his arm) he was clearly bound. But what struck me more was the look of latent force in him, the fine head with its profusion of light brown hair (not too well brushed!) and the eyes, behind their spectacles, were of mixed colouring – in Gurney’s case hazel, grey, green and agate – which Erasmus once said was regarded by the English as denoting genius. ‘This’, I said to myself, ‘must be the new Composition Scholar whom they call Schubert.’

This is the Marion Scott who befriended him, arranged for his first poems to be published and who sent him books when he was in France. (It was F.W. Harvey, however, his Gloucester friend, who lent him Robert Bridges’5The Spirit of Man in the trenches, with its selections from Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The latter has often been thought of as an influence on Gurney, but his initial reaction was unfavourable.) Marion Scott plays a central part in the history of Gurney and his work. It was she who kept and transcribed his music and poetry for the rest of his life. That we have any Gurney at all is largely owing to her.

The impression he made at the college was of erratic brilliance. Hurd quotes Sir Charles Stanford: ‘In later years Sir Charles declared that of all his pupils – Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Bliss and dozens more – Gurney was potentially “the biggest of them all. But [he added] he was the least teachable.”’

In 1912 Gurney began to set poems to music, including five Elizabethan lyrics. Of these Hurd, himself a musician, says: ‘Gurney jumped in one bound from mere competence to mastery and genuine originality.’ He adds that in his view the inspiration does 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 to write verse himself. His Gloucestershire friends, John Haines and F.W. Harvey, wrote poetry, John Masefield had recently had a great success with The Everlasting Mercy: poetry was on one of its periodic upward swings.

At this time too came the first signs that the pendulum of his own moods could swing too violently. ‘The Young Genius does not feel too well,’ he wrote to Marion Scott, ‘and his brain won’t move as he wishes it to.’ He fled from London, to Gloucestershire and his writing friends, where he talked, walked, wrote, smoked, starved himself (he was always poor) and afterwards compulsively ate cream buns. Then the Great War began.

He volunteered, was first turned down because of his eyesight, and then in 1915 was accepted. His letters of the time suggest how bad the previous period had been: ‘It is a better way to die; with these men, in such a cause: than the end which seemed near me and was so desirable only just over two years ago.’ That may be the self-dramatisation of a talented young man; but it is enough to dispose of the idea that Gurney’s subsequent mental illness was entirely owing to the war.

But many of his letters, quoted by Hurd, are playful, some funny. He shows himself a good critic: ‘The Sonnet of R.B. you sent me, I do not like. It seems to me that Rupert Brooke would not have improved with age, would not have broadened; his manner had become a mannerism, both in rhythm and diction. I do not like it… Great poets, great creators are not much influenced by immediate events: those must sink in to the very foundations and be absorbed.’ That ‘I do not like it’ repeated: there is something formidable about Gurney. The poem he included with the letter, however, ‘To the Poet Before Battle’, does not show him practising what he preaches.

From France he sent back more poems. Marion Scott approached the firm of Sidgwick & Jackson. They were published under the title Severn and Somme in 1917 and went into a second edition. While he was in France he also composed five song-settings (one for his own ‘Only the Wanderer’) of which Hurd says ‘four are undoubted masterpieces’.6 Two were performed in England while he was in France. In the same year he was wounded, not seriously enough for a ‘blighty’, then gassed, in uncertain circumstances, and at last sent home. After a spell in hospital he went on an easy training course, ‘owing to slight indigestion presumably due to gas: wink, wink!’

He had survived. His poems had been published and were selling, his music was being performed; he was writing more poems, more music; there is even some evidence that he fell in love with one of his nurses, though it came to nothing; there is little sign in Gurney’s work of any overt sexual drive. There are hints that he felt guilty that he was not in France, that he had let his comrades down, had somehow cheated (‘wink, wink!’). Then, in March 1918, Marion Scott received a letter which began: ‘Yesterday I felt and talked to (I am serious) the spirit of Beethoven.’

Once again, this might have been self-dramatisation; the letter ends with humour, aimed at his boyhood Gloucester friend; the composer Herbert Howells: ‘I could not get much about Howells off L. van B.; (the memory is faint) he was reluctant to speak; whether Howells is to die or not to develop I could not gather.’ But things became more serious. There were suicide letters, and by June he was asking his superiors to put him in an asylum. In October 1918 he was discharged from the army and sent back to his alarmed family in Gloucester.

The next four years are a graph of mental disturbance and recovery. He went back to the Royal College for a time, to study under Vaughan Williams, but he was too restless, and took to wandering, occasionally sleeping on the Embankment or walking through the night back to Gloucester (he was justifiably proud of being a ‘nightwalker’). Early in this period his second volume of poems, War’s Embers,7 was published, but he remained desperately short of cash. He had a small pension (twelve shillings a week) and friends helped, but they could not help enough. Like many men returned from France – and here the war surely does play its part – there is something inconsolable about him at this time. He worked as a church organist, cinema pianist, farm labourer, tax clerk, but nothing lasted for long. Sometimes he settled for periods, with his aunt at Longford outside Gloucester, or in a farm cottage on the slopes of the Cotswolds under his beloved Crickley Hill (‘Felling a Tree’ gives some idea of his life there, and the hopes he had of it). ‘What I Will Pay’ shows the unbalanced regime he set himself; he seems to have decided, for instance, to go without sleep.

Friends rallied to him, Gloucestershire ones, influential London ones – Vaughan Williams, Walter de la Mare, J.C. Squire, and others – but nothing seemed to suffice. Possibly this is because he was too preoccupied. During this time – 1919 to 1922 – sleepless or not, he was doing some of his best work in verse (he also wrote much music): ‘Walking Song’, ‘Between the Boughs’, Cotswold Ways’, ‘Longford Dawns’, ‘Clay’, ‘Yesterday Lost’, ‘The Lock Keeper’, ‘What Evil Coil’, ‘The Hoe Scrapes Earth’, ‘Time to Come’, ‘Water Colours’, ‘First Time In’, ‘Drachms and Scruples’, ‘The High Hills’ – all belong to this period. So, as often happens in the story of Gurney, just when we begin to see pathos in his situation, and perhaps unconsciously to patronise him, he satisfactorily eludes us.

Worse than pathos was to come. In September 1922 he was committed to Barnwood House, in Gloucester, a private asylum for the insane. In December he was moved to the City of London Mental Hospital at Dartford, Kent. He never saw Gloucestershire again.

I who was worker at dawn, who saw winter dawns even

Walking from work, am stiffening, wasting in one

Packed ward, where ceiling flat-white is for heaven,

Electric-lamp bulbs for the night lights or great bright sun.

If it were ever necessary or right to punish

Me, why not labouring free in the open air –

Or using for eighteen hours powers that do diminish

By not using …

(from ‘Memory’)8

This is from a poem which becomes diffuse and is not included in this collection (he wrote several called ‘Memory’), but is the only description of his physical surroundings that I have found among his papers. Apart from this brief picture he seems to have decided to live in the France and the Gloucestershire of his past; also in his reading.

The behaviour which led his family to take the step in 1922 was described to me in conversation by his sister-in-law, Mrs Ronald Gurney.

He started going to the Police Station every morning asking for a revolver because he wanted to shoot himself. In the end the police came and said we’d have to do something about him – and by that time it was either him or us – so we got a doctor and a magistrate here and when they came Ivor was as right as rain. They said, ‘We can’t commit this man. There’s nothing wrong with him.’ So Pop [Ronald Gurney] said, ‘You go into the next room, pretend to read the newspaper, and see what happens.’ They did this, and sure enough, within a few seconds, Ivor had crept up to one of them and said, ‘I say, old sport. You don’t happen to have a revolver on you, do you? I want to shoot myself.’ – and that was that. They put him in Barnwood.

It is possible to smile at the ‘I say, old sport’ without underestimating Gurney’s suffering. But there is an odd vein of teasing humour in Gurney – it is seldom in his poems, which soon became unposed and intimate (he detested irony and uses it only once, in ‘The Signallers’) – but the teasing, mildly malicious, persisted in his dealings with the world. Marion Scott tells of visiting him in 1935. When she saw that he stared at a particularly fine sunset she exclaimed at it herself, and said, ‘Isn’t it fine?’ ‘I don’t know about sunsets,’ replied Gurney. ‘I never see them now.’ This, from such an eloquent lover of skies, must surely have been a jab at the faithful Miss Scott and the outside world she represented, which he considered had betrayed him. It was, perhaps justifiably, cruel. It could also of course, and more sombrely, have been true; that he could no longer ‘see’ in the way he once had.

He had not been betrayed by the world. It seems that many did everything they could. Whether modern medicine could have saved him, it is hard to say, but his disqualifications from ordinary life do not seem serious: they appear to have consisted of the habit of walking or working all night, eating irregularly or not at all, and of being generally unpredictable and demanding; also, of being unable to keep a job. There were, as well, delusions of being persecuted by electrical waves. A companion might have kept him in the world for longer, perhaps for the rest of his life. Even an injection of cash might have helped, for it was lack of it that caused him to be a burden to others who did not have much of it themselves. His family cannot be blamed (nor did he blame them in his long ‘Appeals for Release’); he made life impossible for his brother, whom he nearly caused to become distracted himself. Besides, he knew that there was something wrong; a man who does not want something done for him – done to him – does not go round asking policemen and magistrates for revolvers.

In Barnwood – it must from the date have been among the first things he did – Gurney wrote a sheaf of poems. In one of these, ‘There Is a Man’, he tries to describe his mental condition: ‘The pain is in thought, which will not freely range’ – an echo of the letter ten years before. But another poem – and they have the appearance of being written hard upon each other – ‘The Incense Bearers’ is a technically clever untangling of a thought which is removed from his present circumstances. This is to be the pattern of his writing from now on. Apart from shouts of indignation (‘To God’) and the ‘Appeals for Release’ addressed to the Prime Minister, the Metropolitan Police, and so on, he writes on the whole as if he were free. That he kept on writing, and reading, is remarkable enough, but to do so with such disdain for his fate is heroic. ‘But my blood, in its colour even, is known fighter’:

They have left me little indeed, how shall I best keep

Memory from sliding content down to drugged sleep?

But my blood, in its colour even, is known fighter.

If I were hero for such things here would I make wars

As love for dead things trodden under in January’s stars,

Or the gold trefoil itself spending in careless places

Tiny graces like music’s for its past exquisitenesses.

Why war for huge domains of the planet’s heights or plains?

(Little they leave me.) It is a dream. Hardly my heart dares

Tremble for glad leaf-drifts thundering under January’s stars.

(‘Memory’)

His unfailing visitor, Marion Scott, found seeing him almost unendurable: ‘Ivor is so heart-breakingly sane in his insanity.’ It was now that she left instructions for everything that he wrote, music and poetry, to be preserved and sent to her.

‘Memory’ shows the way Gurney’s poems developed after his first two books. It is still traditional in shape, and Gurney always loved rhyme, but it is more direct. In a sense he consciously attempts to abjure literature – ‘He desiring books and I truth rather than the / Writing continual’ as he said of Southey (‘To Gloucestershire’).9 Whereas the early poems seem addressed to an audience, trying to impress (as was natural in a young writer), the later Gurney is

talking to himself, to the air, and his relationship with the reader becomes easier and more private. But there are plenty of indications of the later Gurney in the first books. In Severn and Somme ‘Pain’ shows that he was already better at indignation than self-pity and ‘Only the Wanderer’ is almost pure music.

War’s Embers did not mark a great advance. It contains humour (‘Companion – North-East Dug-out’) and in ‘Old Martinmas Eve’ touches a theme that recurs: the hope for music to come to him, ‘some most quiet tune’, so that he can catch and express the moment; then his regret, verbally musical, at its non-arrival. This poem is more than usually reminiscent of Edward Thomas, whose prose Gurney loved. If he had seen any poems of Thomas by this time, which seems likely, he shows himself quicker, and readier for his influence, than any of his English contemporaries. Also, in this second book, Gurney attempts transcriptions of the ordinary speech and slang of army life – dixies, whizzbangs, ‘revally’ and the like – very jaunty, leading at least one reviewer to rebuke him for being too colloquial. On the other hand, it also caused Edmund Blunden to say of his war poems, ‘to this day they express part of the Western Front secret of fifty years ago with distinctive, intimate and imaginative quickness.’ However, it was perhaps not the kind of war poetry that the public wanted. His third collection was rejected.10

Gurney begins to sound original, pressing music out of ordinary speech. With signs of the pressure too, queer contortions and omissions which became increasingly a part of his manner. They are intentional, as changes in his notebooks show, and are part of his homage to his beloved Elizabethans, especially Shakespeare: phrases like ‘nerves soothed were so sore shaken’ (the ‘that’ omitted) have an Elizabethan ring about them. He also goes in for outrageous rhymes:

… fill full

Those rolling tanks with chlorinated clay mixture

And curse the mud with vain veritable vexture.

(‘Crucifix Corner’)

Later he would carry the combination of slang and a sudden wider perspective as far as it could be carried, but the risk he takes is exhilarating:

True, the size of the rum ration was still a shocker

But at last over Aubers the majesty of the dawn’s veil swept.

(‘Serenade’)

He served as a private in the 2nd/5th Gloucestershire Regiment and his war is very much that of the private soldier: a cleaner business, humanly speaking, than that of someone with more responsibility. A conscripted private’s job in war is, rightly, to obey orders and stay alive, meanwhile making himself as comfortable as possible. In other words, to remain (unlike the officer candidates in ‘The Bohemians’) triumphantly a civilian. Thus Gurney’s account of his war contains stories of the scrounging of soft jobs (and guilt at this, for he was not, after all, an ‘ordinary’ private), descriptions of the pleasure of having clean straw to lie on, a candle-stub to write letters by. He permits himself few large statements about the war, indeed it is possible that he barely took it seriously, and in this he would surely have been at one with his fellow privates.11 This is not to say that Gurney’s war was ‘funny’ – any more than the Douanier Rousseau’s picture of War as a grinning child on a horse crossing a landscape of severed limbs is funny. But Gurney can be allowed to describe his war for himself. (The nearest thing to his version, uncannily so, is in prose, in the opening pages of Ford Madox Ford’s No More Parades, which is set in Gurney’s part of the front.)

Behind his lyric poetry the drive is a determination to celebrate the sacredness of the moment, to share sudden accesses of joy, and also to deplore its absence. The intricacies of human relations are not his subject: he attempts very little love-poetry, and when there are people in his poems (‘The Lock Keeper’) they are seen with a rather abstract, lonely, passion of respect. He is concerned with personal epiphanies, the sense of enlargement suddenly granted, say, by the silhouettes of certain trees in certain lights; and with the idea of history, present, all around him. In a sense, therefore, his subject is himself, as he said in his delightful preface to Severn and Somme: ‘I fear that those who buy the book (or even borrow), to get information about the Gloucesters, will be disappointed. Most of the book is concerned with a person named Myself, and the rest with my county, Gloucester, that whether I die or live stays always with me – being itself so beautiful, so full of memories; whose people are so good to be friends with, so easy-going and so frank.’

In some ways he is a consciously ‘unpoetical’ poet, refusing to enthuse about nightingales (‘Three I heard once…’), preferring cabbages to ‘that ink-proud lady the rose’ (‘The Garden’). In ‘The Escape’ he comes near to announcing a poetic:

I believe in the increasing of life: whatever

Leads to the seeing of small trifles,

Real, beautiful, is good; and an act never

Is worthier than in freeing spirit that stifles

Under ingratitude’s weight, nor is anything done

Wiselier than the moving or breaking to sight

Of a thing hidden under by custom – revealed,

Fulfilled, used (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight:

Trefoil – hedge sparrow – the stars on the edge at night.

‘Wiselier’ is typical Gurney. Such usages are not, I think, affectations. His occasional bathetic contrasts – the rum ration followed immediately by the majesty of the dawn in the extract from ‘Serenade’ already quoted – are also intentional and a representation of the mind’s movement. The risks that he takes with his rhymes hold the poems together, and he usually carries the meaning on and through them, avoiding the jog-trot. He is always musical, sometimes unforgettably so, but his tunes are his own, and you never feel that he has allowed them to shape his thought. His faithfulness to his meaning is allowed to yield its own music.

He is the master of first lines. To go through his first lines in the archive (a list put together in the course of making this edition) is like reading one huge mysterious poem. No poet could live up to so many splendid beginnings: grandiloquent ones such as ‘Darkness has cheating swiftness’, ‘What evil coil of fate has fastened me’, ‘Smudgy dawn scarfed with military colours’; and interestingly conversational ones, like ‘One comes across the strangest things in walks’. (That is probably the single most important thing to say about Gurney: he is almost always interesting.) He is also capable of magnificent, poem-saving, last lines.

In between, there are sometimes flaws which are obvious: flat phrases, quirky ones, confusing syntax. These are often unfortunate later additions, but not always. He is a poet, on the whole, who should not be read line by line. His poems are more like jets of energy that hurry to their end. The bubbles, the hollow places, do not diminish the force of the jet if you allow yourself to be carried along with it. Even at his most contorted, his general meaning usually comes clear if we persist, not stopping, to the end; and individual obscurities clarify themselves when we go back. Gurney did however write some perfect poems (like ‘The Songs I Had’) – he is good at the short sprint, the poem expressed in two or three breaths.

But perfection of that kind is not what he was interested in. He is not a Georgian poet who ‘broke down’ but one who consciously though unprogrammatically broke away, and was, as far as he knew, on his own, fortified by his beloved Whitman. His subjects are conventional, but the intensity with which he sees and expresses them is not. He knew this, and one can sense his impatience with his more popular contemporaries because their matter – hedgerows, skies and so on – he considered peculiarly his own. So, ‘free of useless fashions’, he tries to go behind their verse, behind the verse of preceding centuries, back to his ‘masters’, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, in much the same way as the Lake poets went back to the Ballads. The impatience is in his language, as though he wished to be as free as the Elizabethans in fashioning a new one. He wants a poetry composed on the nerves, ‘a book that brings the clear / Spirit of him that wrote’ (‘To Long Island First’), and he hurls himself headlong, so that we feel ‘The football rush of him’, as he says in admiration of George Chapman. The result is, although Gurney tells us surprisingly little about himself, that we feel he has entirely opened his heart; there is nothing withheld, or prudent.

In fact the imprudence is so obvious that any fool could have warned him that it would end in tears. The tragedy is that it did – a tragedy for us as well as for him because it seems to imply what we must not believe: that it is not possible to live – sanely – with such intensity. Whereas his advice (‘The New Poet’) is entirely sane:

Let him say all men’s thought nor sleep until

Some great thing he has fashioned of love inevitable.

For the rest, may he follow his happiness’ true will.

Although I have been determined to help him escape the limiting tag of ‘local poet’, Gurney’s landscape is nevertheless such a special one it is worth saying a few words about it.

The city of Gloucester retains a powerful personality. All sorts of histories, Roman, Dane, and later, still lurk there. Gurney’s birthplace was set on top of the Roman wall, as has recently been revealed, and under the house, unknown to him – but he would not have been surprised – built into the wall, were shops of medieval times and of the seventeenth century. Gloucester has docks as well as being a county town; these are decayed now, but they still impart to the streets a sense of the sea, of being in touch with distant places. You can hear seagulls. In Gurney’s day, the docks were busier; as a child walking with his mother he saw American seamen, overheard them talk, and dreamed of America for the rest of his life. But perhaps it is the architecture that leaves the greatest mark on Gurney’s vocabulary, sometimes mysteriously so to a reader who does not know the town. Perhaps in that sense only he is a local poet. The towers of the cathedral, the towers and spires of other churches, St Nicholas, the ‘two Maries’ and so on, imposing yet homely, had, as Blunden suggested in his Preface, much to do with Gurney’s sense of form. When he uses phrases like ‘frame such squares and lights as these’, or ‘set square to form’ – his poems are scattered with references to framed squareness – it is surely these, the first buildings he saw, that he is equating with a sense of rightness and order: ‘Rest squares reckonings Love set awry’. He says so himself in an unfinished fragment in a notebook:

The squareness of West Gloucester pleases me.

The spires and square places and the supremacy

Peter’s Place has above that white-looked stretch,

The river meadows …

‘Peter’s Place’ is the Cathedral. Gloucester has hills on one side, and the Severn River on the other, where his father came from. An easy walk out of the town – across the bridge at Over – and you are at Maisemore, ‘sacred’ Maisemore, on the river; nearby are Ashleworth, Hartpury, Framilode, and other places whose names are the litany Gurney recited in France and during the years he was out of sight of them in his asylum; sixty years later one can still see why.

As a boy, if he put his nose out of his front door, he saw, one way, the famous Cross of Gloucester – not a stone cross but the place where the four main streets have met since the foundation of the town – and if he looked the other way, down Barton Street, he saw, at the end of it (the effect is still theatrical) his mother’s country, the green Cotswold Hills. It is an ideal imaginative landscape, poised between the past and a dreamed-of liberated future, between History and Paradise, for those are the roles the town and hills play in his verse. Gurney was not really a country boy, as his middle-class London friends thought. (Sometimes to Londoners anything outside their city is ‘the country’.) He was a town boy, loving the town, but also dreaming of escape, and escape was within eye-shot. He had only to walk along his street for a couple of miles to the steep Portway and – ‘One comes across the strangest things in walks’ …

Strange the large difference of up-Cotswold ways:

Birdlip climbs bold and treeless to a bend,

Portway to dim wood-lengths without end,

And Crickley goes to cliffs are the crown of days.

(‘Cotswold Ways’)

By 1922, the poems show a darkening, although it is irregular. ‘Sonnet: September 1922’ is the most extraordinary and unforgettable. Within a few days of writing it, Gurney was in Barnwood House. There, his poems regain simplicity, which afterwards comes and goes. One of the earliest, for example, ‘A Wish’, probably inspired by something read in a newspaper, carries simplicity very far, but is deceptive. In it he suggests, in advance of his time, that the children of West Ham should be given what we would now call ‘adventure playgrounds’:

Not crowded together, but with a plot of land,

Where one might play and dig, and use spade or the hand

In managing or shaping earth in such forms

As please the sunny mind or keep out of harms

The mind that’s always good when let go its way

(I think) so there’s work enough in a happy day.

(Among Gurney’s agonies during his confinement, listed in ‘Appeal’ after ‘Appeal’, is that he was not given work.) It is typical that he should say ‘one might play’ and not ‘they might play’, and that he believes bare hands will serve for (his favourite ambitions) ‘managing or shaping’. But the parenthesis ‘(I think)’ is also revealing. Gurney’s mind had been ‘let go its way’ because he had believed that the free mind is always good; now he is not sure, and with his usual honesty says so.

The asylum period contains many successes of different kinds: ‘The Incense Bearers’, ‘On Somme’, ‘Hedger’, ‘The Mangel-Bury’, ‘The Dream’, ‘Varennes’, ‘The Silent One’, ‘The Bohemians’; the variety of tone and style makes one wonder why he was where he was. The subjects are the same, with a new one added: outrage (‘To God’). The lyrical touch is as sure, sometimes surer. He now inhabits the past, for as far as he is concerned he has no present:

I march once more with hurt shoulders,

And scent the air, a friend with soldiers.

(‘The Depths’)

1925 must have been an unusually bad year, for he went back to old poems and tried to rewrite them. It is a period from which an editor would like to rescue him. He even tried to rewrite and add to War’s Embers, and the changes confuse, belong to a different mood. But at the same time he also wrote ‘Varennes’, ‘The Coin’, and the formally adept ‘Epitaph on a Young Child’, as well as much music.

In 1926 he had one last extraordinary burst of poetic energy. All his writing and composing life he had passionately admired the Elizabethans and Jacobeans; indeed he showed signs of willing himself to become one: his notebooks contain verse addresses to Marston, Tourneur, Ben Jonson and so on, usually in the person of a contemporary. Now – and by the dates on some of the poems it seems to have been in September 1926 – he succeeds: the period suddenly speaks through his mouth, or rather, some timeless, classical utterance bursts out of him. The poems are not pastiches; they are more like acts of ventriloquism. Among confused poems of pain, with syntactical jumps difficult logically to follow (‘I Read Now So’, ‘I Would Not Rest’, ‘December Evening’), poems which nevertheless contain their own ‘rough power’, he wrote dozens of clear, almost abstract lyrics. The ones that work (‘Traffic in Sheets’, The Two’, ‘Sea-Marge’) are extraordinarily fluent; they hardly bear a correction in the MS and few preliminary drafts have been found. Gurney had been right when he said, earlier, ‘Little now to learn’.12 He now ceases to hark back to the war.

It would be good to find them his best, but they seem bloodless compared to the previous work. It is as though the long struggle to remember, to live sanely, to celebrate his comrades, his native place, himself, went up in one quick flash, scattered, and that was the end.

He remembers the Severn floods and regrets he never celebrated the way they made the meadows especially fertile:

I could have sung, but knew no fitting tunes

(For all my lore) of the spread

Of coloured sheets of the floods that ensure all June’s

Dark fan-grasses of the pretty head.

(‘Traffic in Sheets’)

He says goodbye to the town of Gloucester, which he knows is changed:

A dirty water drifts between crampt

Borders, lies and goes past the shadow.

In far ravines and in heights love delights in

The trees will pity the haggard Half-Lady

Of crystal-sprung Severn,

The flowers beneath accuse angels betraying.

(‘The Bridge’)

When one remembers his early passion for the town, that poem is possibly the saddest that he wrote. He was not beaten, but from this time on, so far as can be judged from the remaining manuscripts, he wrote mainly in prose, very variable in quality and coherence.

Over the years Marion Scott preserved the manuscripts and typed, or had typed, most of them. Occasionally she sent poems to magazines and several were printed in the 1920s and 1930s by J.C. Squire in The London Mercury. Squire also included Gurney in two anthologies: Selections from Modern Poets, 1921 and 1924, and Younger Poets of Today, 1932. Music and Letters also published the occasional Gurney poem, as did the Royal College of Music magazine and the Gloucester Journal. This represents Gurney’s publishing history of poems from 1919 to 1954.

Marion Scott prepared a selection, but this was never published. Gurney’s friend John Haines (friend, too, of Edward Thomas, W.H. Davies and many other poets) also made a (very good) selection, but the 1939 war came and the project was abandoned. Luckily for his verse, however, Gurney’s music was still being performed and in 1920 the young composer Gerald Finzi had heard a performance of ‘Sleep’, Gurney’s setting of a poem by Fletcher, composed in 1912. Finzi thought it the most beautiful thing of its kind he had come across, and made it his business to find out more about the composer. So began what was for him a lifelong effort to make Gurney better known and to have his manuscripts, of poetry as well as music, published. After Marion Scott, it is to Gerald Finzi and his wife Joy (neither of whom ever met Gurney) that we owe most.

Finzi, assisted by his friend the composer Howard Ferguson, at once ran up against an unexpected difficulty. Marion Scott, after her long guardianship, had become retentive of the manuscripts. She was also frequently unwell. This caused endless delays, but at last, in 1938, the long-projected issue of Music andLetters devoted wholly to Gurney, was published. It contained some of his poems and enthusiastic tributes from Vaughan Williams, Walter de la Mare, J.C. Squire and others. Oxford University Press had also agreed to bring out two volumes of the songs. In 1937 Gurney was ill; ‘proof copies of Music and Letters were rushed to him, but he was too weak to take the wrapping paper off the parcel and seemed not to understand what the articles signified. He was told about the songs but only murmured, ‘It is too late…’13

The impression the tribute was intended to make was muffled by the anxieties of the time and by the outbreak of war. In 1945 Gerald Finzi began again, encountering more delaying tactics on the part of Marion Scott, whom in moments of exasperation he took to calling ‘Maid Marion’. He persisted, though he was under no illusion about the difficulties he would face if he were ever allowed to go through the jumbled boxes in her keeping. He had made a preliminary report in 1935. What he said then goes to the heart of the difficulty (and to the heart of a Gurney editor). He is talking of the music, but it is equally true of the poetry:

The sorting has been even more difficult than I expected, chiefly because there is comparatively little one can really be sure is bad. Even the late 1925 asylum songs, though they get more and more involved (and at the same time more disintegrated, if you know what I mean) have a curious coherence, which makes it difficult to know whether they are really over the border. I think the eventual difficulty in ‘editing’ the later Gurney may be great: a neat mind could smooth away the queernesses – like Rimsky-Korsakov with Mussorgsky – yet time and familiarity will probably show something not so mistaken after all, about the queer and odd things. However, there are some obviously incoherent things and a good many others of which one can say that it would be better for them not to be published.14

Gurney could hardly have fallen into better hands.

Finzi approached Edmund Blunden as a possible editor for the poems, on the face of it an ideal choice. Blunden had met Gurney (remembering him as a cheery fellow, playing the piano and singing) and had shared many of his wartime experiences. But there were practical difficulties: Blunden was in Hong Kong; Marion Scott died; the Gurney family claimed the manuscripts. At last, in 1954, Hutchinson published the Poems of Ivor Gurney.Principally selected from unpublished manuscripts. With a memoir by Edmund Blunden. From first to last it had taken Gerald Finzi more than thirty years.

Blunden’s memoir, tentative, understanding, respectful, is a small masterpiece of its kind. But his selection of seventy-eight poems is eccentric. He has chosen on the whole the wilder, stranger, later poems, omitting most of the more approachable ones and the simpler lyrics. It is a relief to learn that he did this on purpose, as Gerald Finzi discovered when Blunden replied to a letter:

You are right about shorter, more gracious pieces, but I hesitated over the degree of ‘finality’ in the others, probably because I was a bit in disruption myself, or was it that I thought the book would do better on the rough power of the other sorts? Altogether, a poet is obvious all the way, and we should thank Gerald Finzi for insisting on his being ‘released’.15

Finzi enlarges on this: ‘[Blunden] deliberately avoided including much of the mellifluous Georgian work, for fear of antagonising the present critical trend. I rather regretted this, but as it was only supposed to be a first selection, I can see his point.’

Thus Finzi, in 1935 fearful that ‘a neat mind could smooth away the queernesses’, had found twenty years later an editor who, himself out of tune with contemporary taste, was only too willing to rely on Gurney’s ‘rough power’ to take him under and around and through what he understood to be the literary fortifications of the time. Blunden is soon writing: ‘I’m afraid the book has not been reviewed much … Well, there haven’t been many recent vols. of verse to my knowledge to come anywhere near this one for poetry at once traditional and original, and in the long run this must be recognized.’ Three months later he wrote, with an air of conceding defeat: ‘I’ve had one or two letters about Ivor’s “Poems” but the bright boys don’t appear, most of them, to have noticed their chance …’

After her husband’s death in 1956 Joy Finzi continued with the task of collecting, sorting and typing Gurney’s manuscripts. Anyone examining the archives comes upon her traces with relief. But to the outside world it was almost as though Blunden’s edition had never been. W.H. Auden read it, and, as has been said, printed some Gurney in his published Commonplace Book, A CertainWorld (1971). That was about all.16

What went wrong? To some extent, surely, the indifference was because Blunden (and the reader) knew that Gurney was mentally ill. This made Blunden pass ‘queernesses’, of spelling, punctuation and phrasing, in typescript copies, that sometimes cast a blur over the whole poem. But reference back to a manuscript, where one exists, shows that for the most part these curiosities are not Gurney at all, but mistakes made by the many hands that typed the poems, or more serious misreadings.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Leonard Clark fought for a further edition and in 1973 he printed (with Chatto & Windus – raising part of the money himself) a more catholic selection of 140 poems, omitting thirty-four of Blunden’s. But to some extent he was in the same difficulty. When he did reproduce a poem printed by Blunden he naturally used Blunden’s version, defective or not; so the mistakes were perpetuated. An editor faced with possibly incorrect typescripts (of poems by an unpredictable writer) is in a difficult position. Both Blunden and Clark are to be praised for not ‘smoothing away queernesses’; they were not to know that many of these were not Gurney’s.

I have been luckier. A box of MSS (now in the archive) was passed to me by Mrs Ronald Gurney, his sister-in-law, and is described in the Editorial Note. Checked now against manuscript, just a couple of examples will show how easy the many typing errors were to commit, and how unnecessarily baffling or peculiar they could make the poem. ‘Tewkesbury’ began, as printed by Blunden (though in this instance corrected by Clark):

Some Dane looking out from the water-settlements,

Of settlements there were, must have thought as I …

Gurney wrote ‘If settlements …’ He did not write:

Sword shapes, wonder threat

Brightening my first hopes …

(‘Old Times’)

but ‘wonder thereat …’, and so on, almost everywhere. Whenever possible, then, all the texts in this edition are taken or corrected from manuscript.

Leonard Clark stands last in the roll of Gurney pioneers. Without him, Gurney might have foundered under the well-intentioned weighting of Blunden’s selection.

Perhaps Gurney’s time has now come. If we are, as we think we are, an age that admires honesty, it must be clear that there is seldom any striving for effect, any ‘putting it on’, in Gurney; none at all after 1920. He wrung the neck of his early elegance (‘no swank’). What may have seemed naive and unpolished to his contemporaries has for us the stamp of sincerity. He says of his own poems (‘As They Draw to a Close’):

When you were launched there was small roughness in the touch of words,

A woman’s weapon, a boy’s chatter, a thing for barter and loss:

and he goes on to claim, with justice, adopting the persona of Walt Whitman but surely talking about himself:

But I have roughed the soul American or Yankee at least to truth and instinct,

And compacted the loose-drifting faiths and questions of men in a few words.

Like Whitman, he was concerned with finding and touching the core of innocence in his own nature and he addressed himself to ours.

The last word should belong to Gerald Finzi, because of what he did for Gurney, and because anyone who has been through the material knows that what he says of it is true. He wrote to Blunden, probably after he had lamented the latter’s omissions: ‘Besides, I’m prejudiced. All his work, even the worst, seems to have (for me at any rate) the sense of heightened perception which makes art out of artifice.’

P.J. Kavanagh, 1982

1. His interest in skies is one aspect of his difference from his ‘Georgian’ contemporaries, or he saw it so. In a rather cocky letter to the more successful Edmund Blunden, c. 1920, he says of Blunden’s own poetry ‘Had you lived in Gloucestershire more than the general background of green leafage-stuff would seem to appear to me. The clouds here are terrific. I mean that you seem to write when [you] have become absorbed by lane-look. Here it would be different.’

2. Version of poem as in revised edition.

3. (1982) The biographical omission was remedied in 1978 by Michael Hurd’s The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (OUP). There the story is told so well that I am able to be brief here. Biographical details are largely drawn from Hurd’s account.

4. Hurd, op. cit. (as are most of the following references).

5. ‘My best friend went out on patrol some weeks back, and has never returned. I am glad to say that we accidentally met on that morning and he lent me R.B.’s ‘Spirit of Man’. Mine for always I suppose now, unless that event occurs which dissolves such rights of ownership, or desire. For it is a good book, though very far below what it might be. Why all that Shelley, and Dixon, and Hopkins, or what’s his name of the crazy, precious diction?’ Letter to Ethel Voynich, Sept? 1916 (F.W. Harvey was taken prisoner in August).

6. The four songs are settings of Masefield’s ‘By a Bierside’, F.W. Harvey’s ‘In Flanders’, his own ‘Severn Meadows’ (‘Only the Wanderer’), and Raleigh’s ‘Even such is Time’. The exception Hurd makes is Yeats’ ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ (‘amiable and fluent’), which he suspects is a reworking of earlier material.

7. Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1919.

8. GA MS 15 (49). ‘Work’ as always with Gurney, means his proper work, writing and composing.

9. Appendix.

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