shakespeare and the great war the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, ‘albeit with the cultures in this
instancebeing mainly predicated on class’.^48 Porter constantly insists on the vast
divide between English cultures; in effect, there were different, and remarkably rich,
cultural worlds. That richness, and its commonness, can be glimpsed in another of
Gurney’s poems, ‘First Time In’. The poem records a group of soldiers arriving for
the first time at the front, fearing what they might meet, particularly in the light of
the tales they have been told. As it happens, they meet a group of Welsh-speaking
soldiers, who
Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions
To human hopeful things. And the next day’s guns
Nor any Line-pangs ever quite could blot out
That strangely beautiful entry to War’s rout.^49A little later in the poem, the poet commemorates the songs themselves: ‘ ‘‘David
of the White Rock’’ ’—the song that Aneirin Lewis had sung—and ‘the ‘‘Slumber
Song’’ so soft, and that|Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit
boys|Are sung’. It is a poem, of course, that is a part of the transformation
it describes, and it shares in the particular mixture of precision and lyrical
release that marks many of Gurney’s finest poems: the ‘former notions’ are not
changed to ‘human things’, but ‘human hopeful things’, a distinction that forces
acknowledgement that the war is a human thing itself, if perhaps a human hateful
thing; while that ‘beautiful tune’ remains unnamed, though located in the world
of the poverty and wit of the mines. Also, and what is strangely beautiful to the
ear, it is ‘war’s rout’ that is ‘blotted out’. What Gurney does not mention in the
poem is what else he spoke of with the Welsh: in a letter to Catherine Abercrombie
(the wife of Lascelles, the Georgian poet, academic, and at that time munitions’
examiner) he tells of how one amongst his fears was of meeting a ‘rather rough type’
in the trenches. The Welsh, however, delighted him not only with their songs, but
also with their conversation: they talked of ‘Welsh folksong, of George Borrow, of
Burns, of the RCM; of—yes—of Oscar Wilde, Omar Khayyam, Shakespeare and
the war: distant from us by 300 yards’.^50
Yet there is a great difference between the possession of a rich cultural tradition
and the ability to produce literature, which demands a sophisticated knowledge of
literary convention. According to Partridge and Brophy, song was the distinctive
cultural product of the private soldier. In their collection,Songs and Slang of the
British Soldier: 1914–1918, there seem to be no Shakespearean relationships of
significance. (The editors themselves do draw Shakespearean parallels. Brophy sees
(^48) Bernard Porter,Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 20.
(^49) Gurney, ‘First Time In’, inRewards of Wonder, 62.
(^50) Gurney to Catherine Abercrombie, n.d. [probably 7 June 1916], quoted in Hurd,Ordeal of Ivor
Gurney, 72.