edna longley
by ‘First March’, in which ordinary ‘home-talk’ fails to assuage the mind’s ‘circling
greyness’.^37 Butthe poem ends:
Suddenly a road’s turn brought the sweet unexpected
Balm. Snowdrops bloomed in a ruined garden neglected:
Roman the road as of Birdlip we were on the verge,
And this west country thing so from chaos to emerge.
One gracious touch the whole wilderness corrected.A shimmering vulnerability makes Gurney’s remembered Cotswold landscapes
unbearable. As ‘Balm’, they represent ‘nerves soothed [that] were so sore shaken’
(‘After War’),^38 but the shaking continues. Yet, like the shared ‘Romanness’
of Gloucester and France, like his allusions to music, Gurney’s landscapes also
represent Europe as civilization: their ‘gracious touch’ a corrective to ‘chaos’
and ‘wilderness’. The Cotswolds figure as a kind of cultivated wilderness, even if
cultivated only by the intensity of his inner gaze. And his ‘England’, like Thomas’s,
depends on art. Noting that his collectionSevern and Somme(1917) lacks ‘the
devotion of self sacrifice’ necessary for popularity, Gurney says:
though I am ready if necessary to die for England, I do not see the necessity; it being only
a hard and fast system which has sent so much of the flower of Englands [sic]artiststo
risk death, and a wrong materialistic system; rightly or wrongly I consider myself able to do
work which will do honour to England. Such is my patriotism.^39
Gurney and Thomas validate Howkins’s stress on the regionality of the Britain
that went to war. In Gurney’s ‘Billet’, a private in the Gloucesters who ‘wishes to
bloody hell’ he were enjoying various Gloucestershire recreations ‘spoke the heart
of all of us’.^40 Gurney both finds himself at ‘home’ with, and registers difference
from, Scottish pipers, ‘a Welsh colony...whispering consolatory|Soft foreign
things’, and the tragic ‘Silent One’ on the wire who had ‘chattered through|Infinite
lovely chatter of Bucks accent’.^41 But in ‘Crickley Hill’, perhaps Gurney’s most
rapturous expression of local patriotism, thoughts of the ‘orchis, trefoil, harebells
[that] nod all day,|High above Gloucester and the Severn Plain’ cause the speaker
to ignore another soldier’s home-talk.^42 That is, until: ‘ ‘‘Crickley’’ he said. How I
started|At that old darling name of home! And...|Fell into a torrent of words’.
Early in the war, Thomas discovered the localized nature of its reception when
he ‘travelled through England, from Swindon to Newcastle-on-Tyne, listening
to people...talking about the war and the effects of it’.^43 This engendered his
idea—or aesthetic—that ‘England is a system of vast circumferences circling
(^37) Gurney, ‘First March’, inCollected Poems, 144. (^38) Gurney, ‘After War’, ibid. 145.
(^39) Gurney to Marion Scott, 27 July 1917, inCollected Letters, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (Ashington and
Manchester: MidNag/Carcanet, 1991), 288. 40
41 Gurney, ‘Billet’, inCollected Poems, 127.
Gurney, ‘Crucifix Corner’, ‘First Time In’, ‘The Silent One’, ibid. 135, 149, 250.
(^42) Gurney, ‘Crickley Hill’, ibid. 39. (^43) Thomas, ‘England’, inLast Sheaf, 111.