hugh haughton
A Crown of Amaranth,a collection of heroic elegies for ‘brave and gallant gentlemen
of all ranks’ culled from journals and newspapers fromThe TimestoThe Woman at
Home, designed to offer ‘heartease to those who proudly mourn’, like the ‘earliest
tribal bards’, but with a ‘loftier’ sense of patriotism.^19 Twelve of the forty-one poets
represented were women, including Katharine Tynan and Alice Meynell, veterans
of many anthologies. A poem called ‘The Women’ asserts the patriotism of those
who ‘give our dearest to be food|For lyddite, shrapnel, mitrailleuse and shell’, and
affirms, ‘Not they who die, not they alone, but we,|Uphold the Flag against the
constant stars.’^20 It is hard not to read such poems in the light of Sassoon’s ‘Glory
of Women’, with its ferocious rebuff that ‘You love us when we’re heroes home
on leave’,^21 but such poems remind us that the war represented an unprecedented
crisis of solidarity and mourning for women. As Claire Buck notes, ‘of the more
than 2,000 poets publishing during these years a quarter were women. By contrast
soldiers on active service wrote less than a fifth of the total output.’ This is not, she
observes, ‘recorded in later anthologies or criticism’.^22
The soldier-poet arrived, in patriotic dress, with Galloway Kyle’sSoldier Poets:
Songs of the Fighting Men(1916) published in a special ‘Trench edition’. It included
poems on ‘Givenchy Field’ and ‘No Man’s Land’ which anticipate now familiar
verse by Sassoon and Owen, as well as poems addressed ‘To the Rats’ and on ‘A
Lark above the Trenches’, which point towards Rosenberg. Nonetheless,Songs of
the Fighting Menand its follow-up,More Songs of the Fighting Men(1917), combine
realism with patriotism in ways very different from them. There are two poems
entitled ‘Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori’, for example. In one, dead soldiers
gain ‘a name of lasting glory’ in ‘the People’s narrative’, while in the other we
hear ‘If England calls to-day—|The last long call of all,|Valhalla’s trumpet call’.^23
These are soldier poems which embody just the kind of patriotic bugle-work that
Owen’s poetry was trying to combat in his poem with the same title.
E. B. Osborn’sTheMuseinArms(1917) was designed, according to the editor,
‘to show what passes in the British Warrior’s soul when, in moments of aspiration
(^19) See Erskine MacDonald and S. Gertrude Ford, ‘Editorial Note’, inidem(eds.),ACrownof
Amaranth: Being a Collection of Poems to the Memory of the Brave and Gallant Gentlemen who have
Given their Lives for Great & Greater Britain, MCMXIV–MCMXVII(London: Erskine MacDonald,
1917), n.p.
(^20) B. M. Hetherington, ‘The Women’, ibid. 39.
(^21) Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Glory of Women’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956(London: Faber, 1984), 72.
(^22) Claire Buck, ‘British Women’s Writing of the Great War’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.),The Cambridge
Companion to the Literature of the First World War(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 87.
(^23) Sydney Oswald, ‘Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria Mori’, in Galloway Kyle (ed.),Soldier Poets:
Songs of the Fighting Men(London: Erskine MacDonald, 1916), 69; Harold John Jarvis, ‘Dulce et
Decorum est Pro Patria Mori’, in Kyle (ed.),More Songs of the Fighting Men: Soldier Poets: Second
Series(London: Erskine MacDonald, 1917), 73.