fran brearton
it reiterates the sense of a poetic alliance: ‘War’s a joke for me and you|Whilewe
know such dreams are true!’
Sassoon’s ‘A Letter Home’ is a poem which implies the need for an imagined
home in the future, a letter to home which seeks to find home. Graves’s reply, the
‘Familiar Letter to Siegfried Sassoon (From Bivouacs at Mametz Wood, July 13th,
1916 )’, brings that need into central focus. It envisages, to a degree which makes for
poignant reading now, given the collapse of their relationship, a shared (pastoral)
idyll for two peacetime poetic adventurers. Yet it also uncannily pre-empts their
very different futures, in which Graves in 1929 said ‘goodbye to all that’ and
‘resolved never to make England my home again’, and Sassoon purchased, in 1933,
a Georgian country estate, his own ‘English paradise’, a part of England’s past.^19
Graves’s imagined life in the poem is one in which, after recuperation in the
mythical hills of Wales, ‘Until we feel a match once more|Foranythingbut another
war...we’ll...sail away across the seas|(The God of Song protecting us)|To the
great hills of Caucasus’, where:
Robert will learn the localbat
For billeting and things like that,
If Siegfried learns the piccolo
To charm the people as we go.
······
Perhaps eventually we’ll get
Among the Tartars of Thibet,
Hobnobbing with the Chungs and Mings
And doing wild, tremendous things
In free adventure, quest and fight,
And God! what poetry we’ll write!^20‘[W]hat poetry we’ll write!’ Graves’s assumption here might more usefully now
be reread as a question about whatkindof poetry they would write. Home and
tradition, it is evident as early as 1916, mean different things—or matter in
different degrees—to Graves and Sassoon, in spite of a projected poetic alliance.
That ambiguity in relation to ‘home’ is also a measure of different attitudes towards
poetic form and tradition. Sassoon was repelled in the 1920s by certain forms
of literary experimentation, an anti-modernist stance which was to intensify as
the years went on. Much of his later poetry bears this out, holding on, as it
does, to traditional diction, forms and images, and more often than not with
an incurable nostalgia: ‘Time, whose lost siren song at evening blows|With sun-
flushed cloud shoreward on toppling seas;|Time, arched by planets lonely in
(^19) See Graves,Goodbye to All That, 2nd edn. (London: Penguin, 1960), 279. The comment is not
made explicitly in the 1929 edition, though the original Epilogue to Laura Riding makes the same
point implicitly. See also Max Egremont,Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography(London; Picador, 2005), 389.
(^20) Graves,The Complete Poems, ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2003), 37–9.