‘many sisters to many brothers’ his thoughts are on ‘towns|Crouchedslumbering beneath the threat of death’.^31
Travelling south-westward to Devon, he is gradually brought back to life by the
springtime fecundity of the Englishlandscape: ‘Here was the slated threshold of his
home,|And here his lighted hearth; here daffodils|Shone amber in the firelight.’
The safety of the hearth here is heightened by the pilot’s waiting wife, who embraces
him, drawing him back into the light of the hearth and back to England. Rose
Macaulay juxtaposes the guns of France with the English countryside in ‘Picnic’:
And life was bound in a still ring,
Drowsy, and quiet, and sweet...
When heavily up the south-east wind
The great guns beat.^32The ‘Flanders mud’ is ‘muffled and far away’, as the walls of England protect
those within. The poem ends with the words ‘should break...’ repeated twice,
and the ellipses allow a note of warning to enter this pastoral vision of the Surrey
hills. Notes of warning are ignored in Alice Meynell’s ‘Summer in England, 1914’,
which clearly endorses the pre-war innocence/post-war experience arc described
by Scutts. 1914 is characterized in this poem as one of unparalleled harvest: ‘The
hay was prosperous, and the wheat;|The silken harvest climbed the down:|Moon
after moon was heavenly-sweet.’^33 Christian imagery is used throughout this poem
to emphasize the sacrifices made to protect this land of bliss and fruitfulness.^34
Certainly, an abrupt discontinuity caused by the war is foregrounded in most of
these poems, which draw upon the elegiac to stress how much England—and
Englishness—has to lose if the war is lost.
Some of the most provocative, and consequently problematic, poems produced
by the women war poets are those which either take on the voice of a soldier or
imagine life in the trenches. This can, at times, result in poems which are mawkishly
sentimental in their account of soldiering, drawing heavily upon religious imagery.
For example, while in ‘Over the Top’ Sybil Bristowe uses some remarkable imagery
to describe fear—‘It’s like as if a frog|Waddled round in your inside’^35 —she falls
back on religious sentiment to conclude the poem as the soldier heads over the
top. Winifred M. Letts provides a more realistic account of life on the wards in
recounting the death of a soldier:
They put the screens about his bed;
We might not play the gramophone,(^31) Lilian M. Anderson, ‘Leave in 1917’, ibid. 3. (^32) Rose Macaulay, ‘Picnic’, ibid. 66.
(^33) Alice Meynell, ‘Summer in England, 1914’, ibid. 73.
(^34) In this poem, Joan Montgomery Byles argues, the ‘themes of nature and nurture are constantly
contrasted with the martial values...One is whole, the poet suggests, onlywhen the soul is in harmony
with the landscape’ (Byles, ‘Women’s Experience of WorldWar One: Suffragists, Pacifists and Poets’,
Women’s Studies International Forum, 8/5 (1985), 481).
(^35) Sybil Bristowe, ‘Over the Top’, in Reilly (ed.),The Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and
Verse, 13.