women’s poetry of the two world wars though, is a question of the nature of the relationship between the ‘imaginary
world’and a world war that is barely, but significantly, registered by ‘the woman’s
maternal-bound|Thought’:
The days fail: night broods over afternoon:
And at my child’s first drink beyond the night
Her skin is silver in the early light.
Sweet the grey morning and the raiders gone.This uneasiness which, as in the flower poems, is located precisely at dusk, balances
domestic urgency with an ambivalent, eerie description of her daughter’s silver
skin, a tone associated both with the new day and the perils of the night. As the year
progresses in the poem, so does the perspective of the mother begin to withdraw
from the absolute intimacy of the first months. By the end, the baby is seen as
still miraculously strange but also resoluteand able to survive a dangerous world
by being an ‘established citizen of earth’. Describing the child asleep on a double
bed in the final lines of the poem, Scovell sees her as ‘a sleeping sea-bird, guarded
best|By yielding to the sea, wild sea its friend and nest’. The ‘established citizen’,
a surprising political phrase in this poem of motherhood, suggests to the poet a
means of enduring war and of connecting the intimacy of her experience to the
threatening national context that is only once referred to overtly in the poem.
Scovell was—and remained—an undemonstrative, reticent writer. Unlike Mina
Loy, she was not a theorist or polemicist; unlike Gertrude Stein, she was not an
experimenter. Nevertheless, one poem inShadows of Chrysanthemumsdoes suggest
explicitly a strategy for women’s wartime writing that brings together the work of
these three unlikely war poets. ‘An Elegy’, the penultimate poem in the collection,
evokes a winter world of urban nature, a park in ‘this city still unraided’.^39 The
distance of war is explicitly registered this time, as is a need for finding a means
of engagement with the consequences of violence and death elsewhere. ‘It befits us
who live on|To consider and to mourn,’ she asserts. What is at issue in the poem
is the means by which such distanced mourning and engagement could take place:
How can I make a rite of these
To mourn the pang I do not know,
Death fastened on the life of man?
Sorrow uses what it can.
Take as my rite this winter tune:
The child’s walk in the darkening afternoon.It is not one of Scovell’s better poems, perhaps because of its very articulation of
questions that are normally only implied by her work, but it articulates clearly the
need to confront problems of ‘response’ and of rhetoric. The necessity to engage
with war is at once obvious and difficult, the distance of experience shaping the
(^39) Scovell, ‘An Elegy’, ibid. 43.