david goldie
Wander’d in Ancient Oxford marvelling:
Callingthe storied stone to yield its dead:
And I have seen the sunlight richly thrown
On spire and patient turret, conjuring
Old glass to marled beauty with its kiss,`
And making blossom all the foison sown
Through lapsed years.`^6As a poem of education this clearly owes a great deal more to Arnold’s ‘Scholar
Gypsy’ than to the Scottish idea of the ‘lad o’ pairts’: it is, in other words,
unreconstructedly British rather than self-consciously Scottish.^7
Similar observations might be made about the poetry of Hamish Mann and
Alexander Robertson, both former pupils of George Watson’s College in Edinburgh.
Mann, a 2nd lieutenant in the 8th Black Watch, who was killed (like Edward
Thomas) at Arras in 1917, was not educated in England, but the poems of his
A Subaltern’s Musingshave much in common with those of Sorley and Sterling.
Several are even more fervidly self-dramatizing than anything found in Sterling
(‘sometimes I would have my own eyes melt|With the infinitely dear sadness of
my songs’^8 ). But apart from a couple of experiments in the style of Burns, his
poetry, as seen in ‘Britain is Awake’, ‘Weep Not for Me’, ‘Rupert Brooke’, and
‘The Poet’ (‘They do not know my deep, poetic soul,|That sometimes heaves
tempestuous and fierce’^9 ), could be mistaken—as these titles alone suggest—for
that of any sensitive, poetically inclined British public schoolboy of the era.
Robertson had time to acquire the life experience that was denied to Mann, but
his life and work are similarly inflected with the characteristic attitudes of the
educated British middle class. Educated at Edinburgh and Oxford universities,
Robertson was 32 and a lecturer in history at Sheffield University at the outbreak
of war. He enlisted as a private in the 12th Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment,
the ‘Sheffield Pals’, and along with many of their number was killed attacking
Serre on the first day of the Somme. Robertson was a highly cultured poet, as
can be seen from his wide range of reference to English and European authors
and in some excellent burlesques such as ‘Spencer loquitur: Moi, j’ ́ecoute en
riant’. He was a promising Scottish historian,writing two well-received historical
biographies,butitisonlywithagreatdealofeffortthathecanbethoughtofas
a principally Scottish poet. Looking at poems such as ‘To my Comrades—12th
York and Lancasters’, ‘On Passing Oxford in a Troop Train’, and (again) ‘Rupert
(^6) Robert W. Sterling, ‘To Pembroke College’, inThe Poems of Robert W. Sterling(London: Oxford
University Press, 1915), 45.
(^7) In fact, the short memoir published in hisPoemsmakes no mention of Sterling’s Scottish origins.
It does, however, make a great deal of his Sedbergh and Oxford days, and of the fact that he died on
St George’s Day, 1915—coincidentally, the day on which Rupert Brooke died. SeePoems of Robert W.
Sterling 8 , pp. v–xv.
Hamish Mann, ‘The Ideal’, inA Subaltern’s Musings(London: John Long, 1918), 10.
(^9) Mann, ‘The Poet’, ibid. 36.