fran brearton
World War, or more recently in the verse letters written by Michael Longley and
DerekMahon in the context of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’. In all these instances,
the exchange of verse letters fulfils a need in the poet to affirm artistic integrity
at a time when poetry is seen to be under threat—its ‘use and function’ surely
at their most questionable. Yet perhaps there is a further critical perspective to
be inferred, since in each case the verse letters attempt to posit shared aesthetic
principles, but on the whole serve to expose aesthetic differences. Auden and
MacNeice’s very different responses to the outbreak of the Second World War are
a case in point, given Auden’s ambiguous ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ in his
1939 elegy for W. B. Yeats,^25 and MacNeice’s counter-argument inThe Poetry of
W. B. Yeats; or we might remember the quarrel between Mahon and Longley in
the December 1971New Statesmanfollowing the publication of Longley’s ‘Letter
to Derek Mahon’. In the case of Graves and Sassoon, the surface affection of the
1916 verse letters elides aesthetic differences that were to surface later; yet they
may now be read in similar terms. As much as they propose unity, they also
obliquely suggest that the wartime poetic alliance is likely to prove temporary;
the hopes and aspirations outlined in these poems may be a necessary survival
tactic for the present moment, but they are not, in the end, a blueprint for the
future.
Hopes and dreams aside, the verse letters are not themselves poems which find a
new wartime music for the lyric voice, in spite of Sassoon’s belief in what he calls
that ‘Secret Music’ which ‘No din this side of death can quell’^26 —which is another
version of the ‘dreams’ that will ‘triumph’. Sassoon’s poems show one obvious debt
to 1890s decadence in their preoccupation with music, and his habitual association
of music with transcendence, joy, and redemption. The early poem ‘To Victory’,
quoted by Graves above, longs for a ‘Return, musical, gay with blossom and
fleetness,|Days when my sight shall be clear and my heart rejoice’.^27 ‘A Mystic as
Soldier’ wills ‘music’ to ‘sound again’;^28 ‘The Poet as Hero’ claims ‘absolution’ in
his ‘songs’;^29 ‘France’ has its ‘harmonies as might|Only from Heaven be downward
wafted—|Voices of victory and delight’.^30 The close of ‘Secret Music’, in which
‘music dawned above despair’, ultimately finds its fulfilment in Sassoon’s superb
celebration of the Armistice, ‘Everyone Sang’: ‘O, but Everyone|Was a bird; and
thesongwaswordless;thesingingwillneverbedone.’^31 The poem, according to
Sassoon, was written in April 1919 without apparent effort in only a few minutes; its
(^25) W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, inThe English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic
Writings 1927–1939 26 , ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 242.
Sassoon, ‘Secret Music’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956, 29.
(^27) Sassoon, ‘To Victory’, ibid. 12. (^28) Sassoon, ‘A Mystic as Soldier’, ibid. 13.
(^29) Sassoon, ‘The Poet as Hero’, inThe War Poems, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber, 1983),
- 30
Sassoon, ‘France’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956, 11.
(^31) Sassoon, ‘Everyone Sang’, ibid. 114.