stacy gillis
And so we played at cards instead
Andleft him dying there alone.^36The white of the counterpane juxtaposes with the red of the screens in this poem
to evoke the gendered models of care within the hospital—it is the female nurse
who puts up the screens to hide his death, whilst the male patients play cards. Once
the patient has died, the poem ends with the assertive claim that they will ‘make
the row we did before’ before tritely amending this by saying ‘But—Jove!—I’m
sorry that he’s dead.’ While Nosheen Khan argues that the ‘light-hearted tone
of the poem’s conclusion does not stem from any shallowness of emotion, but
reflects the veneer of indifference assumed by those who tended the dying as a
safeguard that enabled them to cope with such tragedies’,^37 there is certainly a
slight tone of resentment at the curtailed activities here. In short, the living resent
the dying for imposing strictures upon their activities. Margaret Postgate Cole
uses the figure of the badly wounded soldier, but to different effect. The blinded
and abandoned soldier in Cole’s poem speaks of how ‘all the nightmares of each
empty head|Blew into air’.^38 The irony of the title—‘The Veteran’—emerges in
the final lines when the soldier reveals that he is not yet 19.^39 Jane Dowson argues
that the women war poets ‘projected themselves into male roles in order to engage
imaginatively with the men at the Front’.^40 These poems demonstrate that there was
no unanimity of creative engagement, whether in terms of form, style, or subject.
What does mark them all, however, is the way in which they attempt to engage with
loss.
War losses form the subject-matter of many of the other poems produced
by women during and after the war. These poems are also elegiac in tone, but
are usually more visceral in their account of loss. For Marian Allen, ‘It seemed
impossible that you should die’,^41 asentimentwhichisechoedbymanyother
women. Vera Brittain’s poems ‘Perhaps—’ and ‘To my Brother’, written for her
fiance and brother, respectively, should certainly be understood as memorials; but ́
more poignant is the line which ends her poem ‘The Superfluous Woman’: she
asks, ‘who will give me my children?’^42 The myth of a lost generation resonates
throughout many of these poems.^43 In Nora Griffiths’s ‘The Wykhamist’, the
(^36) Winifred M. Letts, ‘Screens’, inThe Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse, 62.
(^37) Nosheen Khan,Women’s Poetry of the First World War(London: Harvester, 1988), 125.
(^38) Mary Postgate Cole, ‘The Veteran’, in Reilly (ed.),The Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and
Verse 39 , 22.
Khan argues that this poem ‘fails to impress, being marred by its moralizing tones which stem
from the writer’s pacifist sympathies’ (Women’s Poetry of the First World War, 26).
(^40) Jane Dowson,Women, Modernism and British Poetry: 1910–1939(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 41.
(^41) Marian Allen, ‘The Raiders’, in Reilly (ed.),Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse,1.
(^42) Vera Brittain, ‘The Superfluous Woman’,in Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of
the Years 1900–1925(London: Virago, 1978), 535.
(^43) For more on the myth of the lost generation, see Robert Wohl,The Generation of 1914(London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980).