vivien noakes
Rosenberg, asserted that ‘the human race often seems to shame God, for even the
mostwise Deity and most pitiful could hardly refrain from triumph and shame
to see how nobly men endure in schemes far beyond their comprehension’.^62 For
Gurney, the ability to endure came from three things: the courage and comradeship
of ordinary men with whom he shared his life; the strange natural beauties he could
still find in the ravaged countryside around him; and the remembered beauties of his
native Cotswold. These provide the subject-matter for many of his trench poems.
He experienced the love of comrades, ‘Whose laughing spirit will not be
outdone’,^63 on his first night in the line. Then the relieving troops had been made
welcome by the outgoing men, Welsh pit boys who sang ‘their own folksongs with
sweet natural voices. I did not sleep at all for the first day in the dugout—there was
too much to be said, asked, and experienced...It was one of the notable evenings
of my life.’^64 ‘That strangely beautiful entry to War’s rout’,^65 which echoes Jones’s
sense of the extraordinary in his first going into the line, was the subject of two
poems, both entitled ‘First Time In’. Here, the horror they had expected to find
was masked not just by the welcome they received, but even more by that singing
whose beauty was thrown into relief by the harsh noise of the guns.
This counterpoise is characteristic of many of Gurney’s war poems. He speaks
of the additional joy that can be experienced by those who live in shadows as he
delights in the shimmering summer heat and blue autumn mists at Laventie, in
the rosy mist that mingles with the afterglow of sunset at Crucifix Corner, in the
clear golden stars at which he gazes, half-dead with tiredness, in the ‘relief of first
dawn, the crawling out to look at it,|Wonder divine of Dawn, man hesitating
before Heaven’s gate’.^66 Whereas Rosenberg found beauty in an abstract, parallel
existence, Gurney looked around him to seek out all that was good. And beyond
that, he would retreat into the pleasant places of his faithful dreams, the hills and
woods and wide water-meadows of his native Gloucestershire.
But on the other side of the balance is the pain that is a recurring theme,
particularly in his first volume of poems,Severn & Somme, published in 1917. Just
as horror gave added power to beauty, so that very awareness of beauty made the
pain more difficult to endure: ‘Pain, pain continual; pain unending;|Hard even to
the roughest, but to those|Hungry for beauty...’^67 Reading the works of Edward
Thomas in 1917, Gurney recognized the same torment of mind from which he
suffered, and which prevented serenity for any but the shortest time. When the war
was over, he would look back and know that it was ‘Out of the heart’s sickness
(^62) Gurney to Marion Scott, 10 Jan. 1918, inCollected Letters, 391–2.
(^63) Gurney, ‘Servitude’, inCollected Poems, ed. P. J. Kavanagh (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), 16.
(^64) Gurney to Marion Scott, 7 June 1916, inCollected Letters, 86.
(^65) Gurney, ‘First Time In’, inRewards of Wonder: Poems of Cotswold, France, London,ed.George
Walter (Ashington and Manchester: MidNag/Carcanet, 2000), 62. The other poem entitled ‘First Time
In’ appears at pp. 97–8.
(^66) Gurney, ‘Laventie’, ibid. 34. (^67) Gurney, ‘Pain’, inCollected Poems, 15.