was there a scottish war literature? in, and enthusiasm for, Shakespeare, Housman, Hardy, and what he described as
the‘honest Saxon words’ of Masefield, as well as German poetry and philosophy.
Above all in his pre-war letters, he stresses his affiliation to the writer he considers
his ‘countryman’, and ‘the greatest of English visionaries’, Richard Jefferies. Indeed,
Sorley imbibed so much of Jefferies and of the atmosphere of Marlborough that
hewasmorethancontent,asheputit,to‘countmyselfasWiltshire’.^4 This
connection dominates the poetry in both its form and its content. His posthumous
collection of verse,Marlborough and Other Poems(1916), contains along with its
small clutch of brilliantly wry, disenchanted war poems a preponderance of verses
on the English landscape exhibiting in varying degrees the thematic and formal
influence of Meredith, Housman, Hardy, Masefield, and the Georgians.^5 While it
might be nice, from a Scottish point of view, to claim such bitterly incisive poems
as ‘All the Hills and Vales Along’ and ‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless
Dead’ for Scotland, the poems themselves plainly refuse such an identification.
Sorley’s Scots credentials are tenuous, but he is not, in fact, very different in
experience and attitude from many other less problematically Scottish writers of the
war. Take, for example, the case of Robert W. Sterling, who was born in Glasgow and
educated at Glasgow Academy, Sedbergh School, and Pembroke College, Oxford.
When war came, he was commissioned in the 1st Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers,
which suggests a positive gestural identification on his part with the land of his
birth and early schooling. His poetry, however, shows few signs of such national
allegiance, and bears instead many of the hallmarks of genre and caste that mark
it as the work of a British public school and university man. His posthumously
collectedPoemsis a moving testimony to his potential and his technical ability—he
had won the Newdigate prize in 1914 and made an impressive attempt to revive
the Saxon epic form in his long poem ‘Maran’—but also a confirmation of his
rootedness in the same English landscape tradition that inspired Sorley, as well as
Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, and Edmund Blunden. Sterling was denied the time
to develop and individualize this voice, however, and as a consequence his poems
offer a fascinating record—like those, say, of Roland Leighton—of a tremendous
but rather unfocused idealism. His writing is skilful, graceful, and passionate, but
it is tied too closely to the assumptions and models of the British public school
tradition from which it comes. The result is that his work, as a poem like ‘To
Pembroke College’ illustrates, is seldom able to free itself from the self-dramatizing
lyricism of undergraduate ennui:
Full often, with a cloud about me shed
Of phantoms numberless, I have alone(^4) Charles Sorley,The Letters of Charles Sorley: With a Chapter of Biography, ed. W. R. Sorley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919), 34, 241, and 201.
(^5) See Charles Sorley,The Collected Poems of Charles Hamilton Sorley, ed. Jean Moorcroft Wilson
(London: Cecil Woolf, 1985).