edna longley
Blunden, who virtually terms himself a war pastoralist in the last phrase of his
memoirUndertonesof War(‘a harmless young shepherd in a soldier’s coat’^47 ), is
at his best in poems shocked by the disjunction between a farming countryside and
its devastation or appropriation by war. ‘Rural Economy’ ironically conflates sword
and ploughshare by portraying enemy artillery as a ‘thoughtful farmer’: ‘The field
and wood, all bone-fed loam,|Shot up a roaring harvest home.’^48 A battered ‘House
in Festubert’, identified with the human body (‘itself one wound’), has ‘blossoming
trees robed round’, although now a British gun post: ‘Home! Their home is
ours.’^49 The poem ends with images of ‘steel-born bees, birds, beams’, and the
question: ‘Could summer betray you?’ A key motif of Blunden’s is ‘Deceitful Calm’
(subtitle of ‘Gouzeaucourt’). It shapes his mostunheimlichpoem ‘Illusions’, which
begins: ‘Trenches in the moonlight, allayed with lulling moonlight,|Have had their
loveliness’; and moves towards ‘the nemesis of beauty’: ‘Death’s malkins dangling in
the wire|For the moon’s interpretation’.^50 Blunden’s intermittent power to stand
back and strip away deceit may have influenced Keith Douglas’s desert pastoral.
Gurney’s poetry, whether set in France, England, or some disturbed hybrid of
Severn and Somme, does not change its bearings in 1918. He carries theunheimlich
over into post-war poems where georgic remains forever interrupted. Like his
strange syntax, this cannot be discounted as only an effect of his mental illness. ‘The
Mangel-Bury’, perhaps Gurney’s finest poem and one of his several poetic tributes
to Edward Thomas, brings the trenches back home by updating Thomas’s ‘Swedes’:
‘it was February; the long house|Straw-thatched of the mangels stretched two wide
wings;|And looked as part of the earth heaped up by dead soldiers.’^51 The poet
helps a farmer to load a cart with the mangels, and hopes to learn local lore from
him. However, war complicates this rural conversation too: ‘But my pain to more
moving called|And him to some barn business far in the fifteen acre field.’
Edward Thomas is the major exponent of First World War pastoral, because he
absorbs war into a larger metaphysic: an eco-historical long view, as much post-
as pre-industrial.^52 His ‘earth’, like his ‘England’, is not Brooke’s. Thomas’s eco-
centric perspective offers no more ‘consolation’ or commemorative reassurance
than do Owen’s ‘elegies’. His proleptic vision extends pastoral elegy to humanity’s
obsolescence as an ‘inhabitant of earth’ (‘The Other’), and hence to pastoral itself.
His houses and dwellings, from ‘a woodpecker’s round hole’ to ‘the farmer’s home’
to poetry, symbolize the fragility of earthly habitats and memorials. All this makes
Thomas’s war pastoral ‘marginal eclogue’ as well as ‘interrupted georgic’, if its
marginality is wholly temporal. Between August 1914 and departure for France, he
had time to think.
(^47) Edmund Blunden,Undertones of War(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 242.
(^48) Blunden, ‘Rural Economy’, ibid. 254. (^49) Blunden, ‘A House in Festubert’, ibid. 245.
(^50) Blunden, ‘Illusions’, ibid. 247. (^51) Gurney, ‘The Mangel-Bury’, inCollected Poems, 263.
(^52) See my essay ‘ ‘‘The Business of the Earth’’: Edward Thomas and Ecocentrism’, inPoetry &
Posterity(Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000), 23–51.