Okay, let's let's make a start. Thank you very much, everyone, for coming. I hope you're not here to see John Garth, who unfortunately was meant to be presenting today, but. And couldn't because he was, as I mentioned last week, he was tracked as part of the hurricane in Florida and was dealing with all the fallout of that. So, I've stepped in, to offer a talk on token and GB Smith, and I've entitled it to Forgotten War Poets.
And this is, this is cutting edge research because a lot of what I'm going to talk about, particularly with token, has only been available for about five weeks. So this is this is pretty new. I'll come onto all that in a second. But I thought I might start just, with this quote. It's quite a well-trodden quote from the preface to the Lord of the rings that came out in the second edition in 1965.
It seems now often forgotten that to be caught in use by 1914 was no less hideous an experience to to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead. Now it's interesting why Tolkien chose to write that and put it in, possibly as a reaction to some of the misinterpretations of the Lord of the rings that had happened in the previous decade or so, possibly also 1965 1964, the 50th anniversary of the First World War.
The country was awash with nostalgia, with events surrounding it, and he just felt inspired to talk about it. This talk, though, is not about how the First World War influences the Lord of the rings. I will come on to that a bit, but it really is about these these two men, these two young men, two friends, GB Smith and J.R.R. Tolkien. And their poetical reaction to the war, which for the first time we can now judge side by side.
So I appreciate that people may not know who who we're talking about here. Well, I assume you know, J.R.R. Tolkien is, but we'll go through that. So JB Smith, Geoffrey Bak Smith was born in 1894, gives the plot away. He he dies in 1916. So we visit King Edward's and he was a member of that. Really close knit groups of friends Rob Gilson, Christopher Wiseman, Smith and Tolkien, the Tccb, yes, the Tea Club and Peruvian society, which they had at the school. Smith comes up to corpus in 1913.
Is an exhibition there in history. And then he goes into the Lancashire fusileers using the Ox and Bucks, but then goes into Lancashire fusileers in April 1915. He sent to France November 1915, and he's there throughout the battle of the Somme in 1916. But unfortunately he gets hit by shrapnel and dies on the 3rd of December 1960. Token, on the other hand, Matt Smith at school were great friends, and when Smith comes up to college here, they become even closer. Token.
By that time, it's been a year in extra college where he's studying classics and then moves to English. This is all hopefully well familiar to you, but token eventually becomes commissioned in the Lancashire Fusileers. He desperately wanted to go in the same battalion as Smith, but they just didn't, agree to that. And token doesn't get out to France to 5 or 6 months later than Smith. So he's out there in June.
Not a good time to go out to the Western Front, June, because a few days later, at the beginning of July, the battle of the Somme starts, tokens actually on in and out of the Somme, I will say. Then he contracted trench fever and spends the rest of the war pretty much in England, moving around various army camps and so on. So that's the biography. But now I just wanted to say a bit of some comparison between the two of them. Some. Well, things that are the same, but things are different.
So first of all, let us consider Smith. So his collection of poetry, entitled The Spring Harvest, was edited by Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman, one of the other members of the. And it came out in 1918. So it was posthumous to Smith's death. The book is divided into three sections entitled Two Legends, First Poems, Last Poems and Burial of Sophocles. And you can see it. It's online. It's, there's the bell have, facsimile editions of it and so on.
In the introductory note, which Tolkien himself wrote, he stated that the collection was made up of poems written at various times, but importantly, the third part contains poems written after the outbreak of the war. This is really helpful because it doesn't really state that poems in the earlier part were written after August 1914, and this indeed proves to be the case when we start to look at some of the poetry in ash. I'll call it ash.
Just for abbreviation, we can find many poems that were written clearly after the outbreak of the war, but or in the first two parts, in fact, the book opens with an untitled poem. But the first line is if there be one among the muses, nine which I which has these lines. Even so, my verses be composite of memories and half hearted dreams welded together. Songs do ordnance which might have been far others, but more scattered and harried them with his ruthless flail.
Mars being obviously the god of war. So we can assume this is a poem from after the war, but we don't have access to the manuscripts themselves. They're no really long, no longer available, really, apart from a table of contents. So we have very little to go on as to why Tolkien and Wiseman themselves, between them, struggled over the chronology. We'll never know what it may have been to conclude which what poems were in and what ground in terms of that third section.
But in summary about Smith's poetry, we have a printed edition. We have final versions. We have no manuscripts, the dates, we don't have any dates, but we have to sort of go on what clues we can get. But most importantly, these have been available for over 100 years. They've been in print. People have been reading them for about 140 years. Same cannot be said for Tolkien. Some of his poetry, of course, has been readily available to us.
So in things like his biography of middle earth and this the poems in the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit themselves, which we've read, and his, publication, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, which brings together a few of the lighter pieces of verse. But it really wasn't until six weeks ago that we received the three volumes of this, The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. So finally, for the first time, we can see many of these poems and read them. Hitherto we didn't have access to them.
And if I'm going to be referring to this, the first volume, 1910 to 1919, there are 63 poems in this volume alone. I would say probably about half of them we've never really seen before. Unlike Smith, Tolkien's poetry, as we see it in these, as this book now is much more fluid. Many have several titles and variants. So I'm going to give you an example. I appreciate the project tourism. Great here. But let me just show you this. This is a poem called From Iffley, which you can see there.
And then you'll see that he changes the title valedictory. It's written in 1915 and sorry, 1911, but then he revisits it, probably in 1950, valedictory, possibly when he's graduating from Oxford, but also when he's going off to war. And also the also saying this is way presented in this edition. There are multiple variants. So there's one very the and C. So it's very different from Smith. And if you pick up the complete poems you expect just to be presented with poem poem poem.
You're in for a bit of a shock. You've got to do quite a bit of work now, I said in the title. Why forgotten? Because first and foremost, if we think about war poetry, particularly British war poetry, we readily think of Sassoon and Graves and Wilfred Owen up there. But Smith is rarely anthologized. There's only a few times his poems appear or referenced, and more often than not, it's because he knew J.R.R. Tolkien.
Tolkien, of course, is completely unknown because we just didn't really have access to his war poetry until now. That's not to put them in a in a small category. Most of the poetry of the First World War has now been forgotten. Most of the famous poets of the First World War have now been forgotten. The ones that we know and celebrate became famous afterwards, in many cases decades afterwards, because of they were writing about the way that we had built up this modern perception of the war.
And then just, to finish, before we get into some poetry, what do I mean by war poet or a war poet or war poetry? Well, there's a few questions there. Is it any poem that has war in its theme? Is it written during a war, 1914 to 1918? Is it only poetry that was written by combatants? If so, what about people on the home front, or has a direct reference to the war may be written much later and then refers back to the war?
Well, in my my view, it's all of these and above, but these are important questions when we come to consider Smith to a degree, but very much J.R.R. Tolkien, as we will see. So let me start with Smith. And looking at the poems presented in In Spring Harvest, as noted at the outset, you tempted to just look at that third part if we want to think about his war poetry. But as I've said, you know, that's open to discussion. So you've really got to look at the whole collection in, in the spring half.
It doesn't take long. But, you know, there's not that many poems in there. But what can we say if we take a step back about him as a poet? And none of this, I think, is, is, familiar if you know, poetry from the time. But would you say that, first of all, he he is a poet that sticks to standard various forms. He's not a modernist poet. He's not a tumor or a PhD or a Richard Aldington.
Some of those British poets that were playing around with modern forms, he was immersed in traditional poetry, radiates Blake's, Keats, Sydney, so on. And in a similar vein to what we to Smith, we also know that Tolkien, for example, was immersed in traditional poetry. He was inspired by the Catholic poet Francis Thompson, but also William Morris, Swinburne, Tennyson and so on. And there's been much, much study of that. Smith, also like Tolkien, was well drilled in the classics.
And it's worth noting in his poetry we get a lot of classical imagery, which you often do get in First World War poetry, about spears and chariots and so on. And but now also the number of poems that each entitled with a Latin phrase cry out to Spiritus era perennials, angley over Lieder, etc., etc.. Smith, when you read it, is actually quite an accomplished poet. And this is probably heresy to say it far better than Tolkien.
It has to be said, he understands these forms and he can really work with them so he could move from a petroski and sonnet to a Shakespearean sonnet. So those are basically sonnets, same structure, but different writing schemes, slightly different structures, I should say. And in some cases even plays around with the two in there deliberately. He also understands meter quite well. He writes a poem.
It's an early poem actually called legend, which is quite topical for this, this type of, seminar series. It's about a monk who returns from the land of Faerie and comes back. Is it's that typical? I've ended up in Faerie. I've been there for hundreds of years, and he comes back from that, and he moves from blank verse when he's talking about the rather serious, somber mood.
But when the monk starts describing, the land, the fairy moves to a to try meter, which is a kind of larger, that singsong sort of meter. So he plays around with this very well, and we shouldn't be surprised by this with, as I said, read a lot of the poets, one volume, which he was particularly he points, token to as well is the Georgian poets as well. And this I believe there's this in that scene, his book which is coming out. Smith there's a chapter on the Georgian poetry.
So I won't say too much about Georgians themselves, but one thing we would say that probably you would say, well, Smith isn't really a Georgian poet is because the Georgian poets were really about simple semantics, simple syntax as well. Try to make poetry very, very clear. And that's not the case with Smith.
If we look at some of the words that you appear in and his poetry is littered with them, things like rhyme, grammar, which is an archaic form for grammar that has a sort of magical connotation. Threnody, a song of lament, the tryst for chaplet or venison. They may not be words that are immediately familiar to you, but he litters his poetry with them, and it has to be said, so does Tolkien. Now don't why I'm using that. That's that's not working.
Now, I don't know if you can read this here, but this is this appears in the third volume of the book, where the editors, have discovered some poetry notebooks by Tolkien where basically what he was doing was going through and is it says here making a list of some magnificent words and phrases, and they're authors. So he was reading poetry and writing down the words which he particularly liked.
This is talking, of course, and you can see that the words on the left and poets such as Tennyson Thompson, who I've mentioned, Sydney Shakespeare, Chaucer and so on, and there's there's a few pages of these things, and then you find these words which he then uses in his poetry. It's worth saying, just at this point, that Tolkien does this rather to excess. And Tolkien's early poetry is quite hard to get through. And Smith, in his letters to talking, points out these weaknesses.
And he said, complaining, there are a lot of different tropes and adjectives in about half a sentence, and concluded it was damn difficult to make out. Christopher Wiseman, one of the other members of the, also writes to Tolkien's and says and quotes examples and says, I really think you should tone this down. These were great because they were are one glimpse, for, for many years about what some of these poems might contained.
And albeit they were critical, returning to Georgian poetry, it's often labeled as quite buoyant and etc.. Smith is not necessarily like that because, as we will see in his later poetry, towards the period towards when he's about to die, there is a pessimism and despair that begins to invade this. And we will also see that with Tolkien's poetry.
When I come onto it now, despite modern conceptions of the poetry of the First World War, don't chant decorum as Siegfried Sassoon, as the general of like, all of that sort of stuff. Most of the poetry written in Britain, during the First World War, was incredibly patriotic. And for that reason, it's probably now been forgotten.
We just don't want to read that stuff that doesn't adhere to our sort of image of the First World War, and where it was not overtly patriotic, it was at least trying to encourage resolve in the in the people who were involved in the war or the nation as a whole, to continue that fight or to provide consolation to families who had lost loved ones during the war. Now, it would be wrong to say that Smith is a patriotic poet.
Certainly nothing like you might get with Kipling or Harold Begbie or something like that, but he does dabble with these sentiments. In in a few poems he writes a poem angry of a leader and send it to England is strong in old age. Subtitled On the Declaration of War, writes another poem called awakening. This idea of waking up to the outbreak of the war.
But more more evidence, I don't know if you can see this is a sonnet to the British Navy, which is riven with the celebration of of the Senior service. Defiance is evident in this poem, with the declaration on line for this isle was ne'er so tamed and ne'er shallbe. And he likens the strength of the navy line seven. And the vessels that they were setting out to fight the war into his own fragile body. Going into danger.
He talks about a small vessel of one smith ill wrought compared with the Smith vessels, the forging of these great warships that were going out. And if you can see, he ends with a prayer to God for resolve. A bit like. No, there's many poems like that which, do that from the war, like John Oxenham or something like that. Tonkin gets quite close to this with his poem Ferrum. It sang with, which was written in December 1914. It's an odd poem, ten lines written in hexameter.
Basically Iron and Blood. It's playing on sort of some, some of the slogans that we used, particularly in Prussian militarism and so on. But the war here is spread dark in a gloom line, in a great gloom for line one. And a frightful hand has fouled the heavens. Line two and four, which, presumably he's referring to Imperial Germany as Smith did. Tolkien ends with a despairing call for help from the heavens.
Have pity. Oh, God. And here it's a bit like, the Catholic ritual de Tenebrae in the church. When the lights go out, gradually the candles are put out and, there is a declaration for God to help, which would have been very obviously, pertinent to Tolkien as a, as a Catholic. So he does pick up these ideas of resolve. And I'll come on to another poem in a bit. Several themes run throughout the poems in a spring harvest, due to confinement. I'm just going to pick on one.
And that is the idea of then and now over here. And there are many First World War poets concentrated on an analysis of the present, the temporal and physical, and the past. You in this two using this to emphasize their experience of the trauma of war. They were here on the Western Front. What's it like back there in England? What was it like in the past then, compared with what they're living through now?
A good example would be Ivor Gurney, a famous poet who writes about the Severn and the Somme. The juxtaposition is in the title, as you can see, Smith plays with similar ideas in many poems. Dom read it poetic. The poet returns home, where his memory strays to the undiminished treasury of small delights of England. And there's a sense of nostalgia in the poem as a as a longing for quiet and peace of his younger years compared with what he's going through now.
Similarly, in his poem Over the Hills and Hollows Green, the first stanza paints an idyllic pastoral scene of Green Hills Hollow's ubiquitous lark that appears everywhere and flowers. But this is then compared with the desolation of the shattered towns streets bereft of life, that he was seen probably at the front. And there's a similarity between that and C.S.
Lewis. His poem French, not too emotionally proof, with its description of the jewels of a sacked village, start and grim out on the reach of swallowed up the some. And just as an aside, there's a there's a whole dissertation waiting for someone to do the war poetry of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Now, I leave that with you. A poem I'm going to just going to pick up on is Halem farewell. That cravenly there's a poem in the Oxford Magazine today which came out called Arviat Quickly.
So it's that they're repeating the very, very common title. This was first published also in the Oxford Magazine. And it was described by John Goff as a pean to the University town and also to life itself. And it works in a similar way, in that there is a here and there, they here Oxford they are war because this is probably written before he goes out to the front. It is worth noting, by the way, in First World Poetry, how often Oxford is used as a symbol of all that is good with the country.
I'm not in any way extolling the virtues of the university, and probably that's partly down to the educational background of many of the poets. But it also became a symbol of everything the England stood for in terms of culture, education and so on. Sir Lawrence Finian's, Oxford in Wartime, Winifred Letts, The Spires of Oxford, Cass Lewis's Oxford and so on. So in this poem, we can see Smith opening in Oxford ever more the same. And to the uttermost verge of time.
The grave does choke the sons of men. And it finishes. Oxford is ever more the same. Unto the uttermost verge of time. The grave doth choke the son of men. So he's he's repeating it there. But the idea here is consolation can be derived from the fact that Oxford will stay the same. So it's now quite interesting to see one of Tolkiens poems, The Town of Dreams in the City of Present Sorrow. And this is a poem with a complicated history, as indeed you will come to realize most of his poems have.
It ultimately ends itself as a poem called The Song of Ariel. In 1924, but in March 1916, and he revises it in November 1916. The third draft directly compares the Town of Dreams, which is Warwick, where Edith was, with the City of Present Sorrow, which is Oxford, and with the latter, Oxford. Tolkien begins with a pastoral description of the city, with its many willows and fading brooks.
But then he moves to a rather ghostly description of a city of cloistered windows, where candles of departed men burned a light in the window. A candle in the window is a sign of grieving and mourning. As as we probably know. And it's almost it is almost a dreamlike state. As he returns to the city, old days come to life again in line 66, but it is a city where men no longer sing. Line 75, that is, shed many tears for all the sorrows of these evil years. Line 76 to 77. It's an odd poem.
I mean, it's a good poem, but it's an odd poem. 15 line stanzas. I think it would be polite to say irregular rhyme schemes in it is a nice way, written in iambic pentameter. So again, traditional verse forms. Now to Smith, the past could be golden and present, and the present bereft of hope. But the past could also be, a place which we, we want to move away from.
For example, in his poem The New Age, in the Old, the old age will be swept away from the earth, and the new age, presented optimistically, is seen as a gift from high God, which seems slightly odd when these men are about to go into one of the most horrendous experiences of their life.
But there was a feeling in England or in Britain at the time, and the condition of England, it's often referred to that the war offered this chance to cleanse and to remove all of this sort of moral decay that had happened, and elements of this debate can actually be found in in the discussions of the two boys, those four young men, in 1912, for example, Smith spoke to a school debate in favor of the motion. The world has become over civilized.
We're going to move into 1914, 16th November, told King in a letter to wise men started to list what the beliefs of the Tccb might be, noting the supreme importance should be attached to the promotion of religion and matrimony, and the duty of patriotism.
Smith, in a letter to Tulk in 1915, spoke of the sheer evil filth of immorality affecting England, and only a week earlier wrote to Tolkien in his hope that after the war, the Tccb could help to reestablish sanity, cleanliness and the love of real and true beauty. There's one over an unavoidable theme that Smith does focus on, and that is death, an understandable preoccupation, you might think, for someone in his condition.
And I liken this what you're saying here to Charles Hamilton, soldier, a very famous poet from the First World War who very early on was recognizing just what this war might lead to.
In his poem All the Hills and Bells Along, a marching troop of soldiers is described as the singers of the chaps who were going to die, perhaps, and Smith is similarly speculative mood in his poem Langley, of a leader in cynic to day, where he wonders whether his own road is almost done, and in other poems God knows if it be ours to see again.
Oxford, that is death in the past, I fuzed in his poem memories, where Smith uses the images of ghosts reminiscent of a poem by Robert Graves, Corporal Stair, who are pale shades of friends who have been lost. Fellow soldiers. One is tall and supple. One had his heart as true as the open sea, but there merely shapes in the mist, leaving the poet to muse on the last of all battles. Where he hopes to go and justify his lost companions. And in his letters there's repeated references to death.
He declares in 19 15th October I'm fed up to extinction with this life of ours and the 3rd of February 1916, he notes, death is so close to us now. Particularly important to all Tolkien and Smith was the death of Rob Gilson, right at the beginning of the battle of the Somme in his letter of 15th of August 1916, about a month later to Tolkien, Smith remarks, there's no doubt Rob Gilson is to be envied in some ways.
After all, he's out of the great struggle of life, and it often seems the rest in peace are a great boon. Let's now look at Tolkien. Now, as I've already noted, he was a close friend of Smith's. He edited his poem. But so far as I say, I don't think he's ever really be considered as a war poet. So let's start to redress that now. Now, I've already mentioned there are difficulties with Tolkien's poetry in terms of trying to assemble it, but we now are in a much, much better state.
There were about 40 poems that he wrote between 1914 and 1918. He wrote 130 after that gets the number goes slightly bigger. If you think of poems he writes before 1914, but then still works on them a bit. Let's pick up some of the themes that we can we can discern from Tolkien's poetry. So I mentioned resolve, with Smith's sonnets, sonnet to the British Navy.
Tolkien also considered this issue in his poem The Two Riders, which was originally entitled Courage Speaks to a Child of Earth, written, first of all in 1915, but he's still working on it in 1925, and this focus is on the individual's need for resolve, as opposed to the nation's need to resolve. And he uses the images of two riders galloping off into the unknown, into the darkness. One of them is clearly a young man heading to uncertainty.
The war, presumably, and the fear of losing his resolve and courage. The Second Rider, who he implores to hold hold by my side, lest he streaking, lest you strike in his stride. And the shadows go about me. It's very interesting. The first bearing this. It's dedicated from a, C, B, c in to the t cps. This is his message to his friends that we've got to keep our courage, and possibly also to his generation as well, not to lose that resolve.
A few months later, in 1915, Tolkien's working on a poem called, which we now call Empty Chapel. It's a fragmentary poem, but it places the poet a simple soldier in line 16, kneeling in an empty chapel, while outside there is a tramping noise and sound of drums, whilst the armies of Britain pass. The chapel seems to symbolize the loss of Christian belief during the conflict.
The soldiers outside are described as war is in your nostrils, but also reprimanded for you have nine forgotten God, and the soldier alone seems to be only one that remembers his faith. The men who march away. I seem to be in state confusion. They they don't really think ill of the enemy, but they doubt themselves. And the poet implores them to return to the chapel. Maybe they can get resolved from going back and refining their faith.
The dominant theme, and I do apologize for that picture of Edith. She looks much nicer on my screen here. The dominant theme of Tomkins war poetry is a focus on loneliness and separation from his home, but most importantly, from his wife as she became Edith. And this is understandable if you think about the fact that they were forcefully separated up to the age of 21, when he was allowed to go and speak to her again, and immediately proposed.
But then having thought they had solve their problems, the war comes along and they're forced to separate again. Even in 1917 1918, when Tolkien's back with recuperating and trying to recover from trench fever, a combination of army and force moves are Edith's requirements. When she was pregnant and they were separated. So a very early poem on this is As to Fair Trees, which sets up the relationship between them. That is young. They are young, of course, but old and wise and deep rooted.
The tree roots are the roots of their love. And then in his poem The Swallow, in The Traveler on the Plains, which was originally first entitled Thoughts on Parade, it is indeed just that he is on parade as he's training and he's musing about something. In this. He looks at a swallow which is flying around and muses on the factor how impervious it is. It must. What can it see about the scale of the nature that that it can encounter? But he's also jealous of it.
I mean, not only is that he cannot escape his condition, he is on parade. He is in the army now. He cannot escape and go and find Edith. And it's a bit like if you know Isaac Rosenberg's breakdown in the trenches where he talks about he sees the rat or anything. So you're much in a better position than I am stuck in this trench, because you can run back and forth across no man's land. You're freer than me. The irony is, there.
In Tolkien's poem, he considers his own situation wailing and alone, and yearns for the long homing road which he would follow if he could back home to her. The Lonely Isle is a poem which he works on, as you can see for just over ten years, and it began life directly linked with mythology to Sayer, the mythical isle in his mythology. In the second and third variants, he changes the title to For England, the Lonely Isle. And he writes on one of the manuscripts.
It was written in the top part of Calais. June 1916. The great training camp for the British Army. So the closing line of how lonely, sparkling isle farewell becomes now an address to England as he departs for France on his troopship.
When he's at the front, he does not forget Edith, of course, in his poem Mother, Lady Throne Beyond the Stars, which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, he asks Mary to comfort my quote, my little one beside thy knee, and hear her whispered prayers, and make her free from all unhappiness, from all her tears. My little one was a a turn me often used for Edith. And even when he's back in Britain, the theme of separation is still evident even after they've reunited.
In his poem The Gray Bridge of Tavira Bell, he writes with some poignancy. And there we kissed by evening gray and our arms went soft around me. But the days of sunlight. Where are they that she lonely, spent without me? Returning to the Western Front. This map, which you may not be able to see, is an attempt to show you the battle of the Somme. In one graphic. But it's really where we're talking was or where you concentrate was concentrated on, the first few days of the Somme are happening.
Tokens actually behind the line in the thick of it is waiting to go in there. And he writes a poem called A Dream of Coming Home, which he notes in a place called And Call, which is kind of just off the map to the left there. Hopefully you can see up there it's two things to note. It's a complicated poem. I said, they are complicated. So a dream of coming home becomes, for my wife, a vision of great Haywood. Well, that's the dedication. It then becomes a memory of July in England.
And eventually in 1964, the editors think it becomes a poem once upon a time. I'm not convinced by that. I think these are two different poems. I think it might have influenced it, but it's not the same. And the other thing to note, there is dream of coming home. Swerve on the harm come Camus. Tolkien often writes an Old English alternative title for his poetry.
Even then, his mind is flitting back between the past and the present, mythical or ancestral, having witnessed action in and around, over and then taken out the line for rest and training, Telkom is back in the thick of it and fighting around the airport. By now he'd received news of the death of Rob Gilson and this reminder is what befalls him in his next poem, The Thatch of Poppies. Written around 24 and 25th of August, possibly even under any enemy bombardment.
Now he notes that this is written in Azure, had a veil. Now it's taken a you sure can't see this, which is to give you that's this is kind of the front line around along here. This is the town of ours there. This is ashes. There's Heather. And then some. So this is between Albert and that. You look in about three miles. So he's really right there at the front line. The poem opens with red falls.
The sunlight on the broken roof and still undaunted, rings a bell within the tower, marking the passage of yet one man. Now, one more hour that I have wandered here aloof. Now, you may or may not know this, and I don't know if that picture shows it, but in Albert it was a very famous cathedral, which had a red roof, and it had a tower bell. And the Madonna at the top of the column had wonderful bands on there, and there was a legend that filled the alleys with loos.
So the Germans are continually trying to shoot at it and the allies are hoping it it stays up. It did fall down, but they didn't lose the war, of course. So I think the opening line is a reference to that. Aloof here is means distance from separation. In the poem The Thatcher Poppies, the central figure takes a walk away from the camp and comes across a building, around the door of which is a thatch of poppies, which are now noticeably dead.
The poet states I've been so lonely in this multitude, presumably overcome with grief for his friend and other voices now beyond the sea. It's not clear if this is a place remembered, a place he visits, or simply a dreamlike state, or even a place where the dead might go. Images of sleep and death run through the poem, highlighted by the Thatcher poppies around a doorway to read the line 922 though dead, they mingle with their opiate, but is clear wherever it is.
It provides some solace to him as a poet, because he leaves war and weariness behind. It's a place also where the frustration of the current situation can be put to one side, and the poet can dream of what might be. When hopes delayed or music's incomplete can be fulfilled.
Almost contemporary with this, was The Forest Walker written again pretty much around the same vicinity within within a day or so, which opens with the question, have you wandered in a woodland and tells of a poet again, removing himself from the tents and noisy lodges and men's voices? And again we feel the poet isolating himself, so it gives him time to go away and grieve for the heart. And indeed, in the early variants, the line is for the hearts of those that grieve.
I've already mentioned our mother, a lady throned Beyond the Stars, which he writes in front, which is kind of about here on a map. It's about that is well away from the line within. When he comes back to Britain, suffering, as I said, from trench fever, he has another death to contend with. And that is, of course, Smith, who dies in December 1916. Within a few days of receiving the news, he tries to capture his feeling in his poem GBS the First variant.
Or will all variants establish the basic structure of the final poem? It's an attempt to seek consolation. He he does this by imagining that Smith is now in a place where all of those questions they struggled with as young men. He now knows the answers to. But running throughout the second part of the poem is absolute despair at the loss of his friend.
And I was struck when I got to see the transcript of the first manuscript that this I won't go through, but just know you can see all of the alterations and deletions, etc. here. This seems to me a man troubled, trying to desperately find the words to come to terms with the loss of one of his great friends. The loss of both Gilson and Smith is is best represented in his poem companions of the Rose. The earliest version bearing the. Some version of this appears around August 1917.
So to explain this Mendon Day on the 1st of August was when Tomkins regiment celebrated a previous battle glory from a couple of hundred years, but the poet from the outset states that on that day he is not remembering the deeds long ago, but instead his own comrades Smith and Gilson, who, loathing wars and all they mean and bring, went forth in horror and charged the gates of hell up their lines 14 to 15.
And this is the poem we're told, can probably get to the closest to explicitly writing about the war. He directly references Brazile and Wall and Co in line 19, where Gilson and Smith die, and the manner of warfare is captured when he compares the historical battle in mind and day, which for all its face and stark, could not compare with what he and his generations went through, and moreover, which is slightly odd for most war poetry.
There's anger, I believe, at the enemy in the poem, and he states in lines 27 to 29, beyond forgiveness, slain by that most dusted, most dishonored foe, that all the warfare of the world can show. Which is perhaps understandable as a very, very angry reaction to what you've lost. But as I say, it is quite rare because in most poetry from the First World War, people aren't having a go at the Germans or the Austrians, etc. they think they're in the same place. Them.
In 1917, when told Graham is based in Yorkshire with Edith about to give birth Cheltenham, I think she was. The evidence suggests the melancholy in despair, which was quite is quite a common trait in Tonkin, no doubt brought about by the fact he was an orphan so young, and particularly the death of his mother. It starts to show. In fact, when you look through his poetry, there are quite a few instances of the theme of darkness. Even going to an early poem, Copernicus and Ptolemy.
Sorry, pictures over provided it. There is a poem that begins with the theme the sun is gone and all the earth is dark. I've mentioned Ferrum and sang with earlier, which the earth and all that dwell thereon, and darker in the gloom, but most obviously writes a poem in 1915, The Dark of the clouds about the North, which links the dark not just to the storm clouds of war, but also to the darkness of a separation from Edith.
But returning to 1917, when Tolkien needed were both in England, but subject to these repeated periods of separation, he writes this poem I stood upon an empty shore, and he packs it with images of bleakness empty, drear, lonely, cheerless, cold, etc. but throughout the poem she is referenced as being absent or a faint memory, a hopeful future. And once again, there is a dreamlike state to this poem. But the poem points to another concern. Soon comes the end.
And then must we far from the island where our love doth dwell. Go forth into the darkness. Go and say farewell. But what? So what is this next stage of separation? That could just be death? I don't know, but I suspect not. I think the answer comes in The Brothers in Arms, which he writes in 1918.
Now, if the dating on this is correct, it's some from around early 1918 and I suspect is probably well coincided with the last great throw of the dice by the German army, the Spring Offensive in, in, in 1918 and the war, too many people looked in the balance there.
General Haig issued his famous backs to the wall order of the day, and no doubt told consort not just as a setback for the allies caused, but more importantly, an indication the war was going to go on for much, much longer and that he would be returning to fighting. So he writes a poem called The Brothers in Arms, which takes this idea of, when someone dies, a warrior dies. They are buried on a promontory on a on a mound, as in Beowulf and in medieval in poetry.
The first variant says build me a grave beside the sea. But when we get to the later variants, he moves the singular me to a plural discussion of us. This is written actually after the war, but it's pertinent. He fell alone. I heard him cry. I could not reach him save to die, to laid beside him. Let us die. So the poems remove some personal despair and fear. What might happen to him. He may die. He will be separate then, of course, from Edith again.
But in the later version it moves to almost resignation, but most importantly to a fear that many were having at that time, that everything they'd gone through would be forgotten. What would people in the future know or think about the suffering that these men and women went through? Nature will wipe it away. Lines 25 to 27. No token of the toil and death of men, only a swelling of the grass. And what then? There is some consolation in the fact that the earth will remember.
But I don't think that's really there. And it reminded me of a poem by Carl Sandburg called Grass Piled Bodies higher. Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel among the rain. Let me work. I am the grass. I cover it all and talks about it. And Verdun. Now, in all this time, Tolkien was not abandoning his mythology. There are lots of poems in in this period where he is writing or talking about his mythology, and some of it is just general myth.
And I say he probably takes his inspiration a bit from Thompson there, that Catholic poet. But some of it is more importantly about his own emerging myth. Now, I simply put them up there as a list of the ones which I would identify as being part of this growing corpus from that period. And as a young man, going into war or being in war, wishing to escape to a land of myth, perhaps that is understandable, particularly one as creative as Tolkien.
But perhaps what we're also seeing here is, is an attempt to explore the use of myth as a way of coming, of encountering is confused attitude to what he was encountering in the war. Running through many of these poems is a sense of innocence, a desire for a pastoral life, a love of fairy. But there's also melancholy and transience. So a poem like The Pool of Forgetfulness closes, for example, with the morning the air falls dead about the day, and Eve grows deep.
The shadow shapes are thick and everyman beneath the stars, which was entitled abandon Beneath the Stars, which is a mythical town in Valinor in his mythology, suddenly becomes a different poem when he talks about there is the sound of faint guitars and distant echoes of a song for their men gather into rings round their red fires when he references specifically being in an army training camp.
Yeah. So. The other thing to say about Tolkien's war poetry, is that he then attempts after the war, well, he starts during the war because he's desperately trying to get his his poetry published, but he is unsuccessful. But we have him now. The third volume, some tables of contents which he was drafting together, which I think are pretty interesting. So in this version here, although it's after the war, section four, there we have ten poems written from 1914 to 1918.
And actually you could make a case to say these are Tolkien's war poems. What's interesting also, though, are the ones that he admits. So GBS is not. They're the companions of the roses, not are not there. And I personally think that this is because he felt they were to rule. They were too much about what he himself felt. And this takes me on to sort of a and show. By the way, he wasn't alone.
Other poets do try to contain is this is the last attempt by Wilfred Owen before he dies about trying to put his table of contents together, or he's what he hoped would be his book of war poetry. But Owen is actually an interesting point to pick up on before we need to conclude in that Owen is obviously the poster boy for Civil War poetry. My subject is war and the pity of war. Well, you could not say that about Tolkien or Smith to a degree.
There really are no references in Tolkien's war poetry to the Western Front, to trenches, to his men, even. Even though we know he greatly cared about them, what they were going through. He is now Owen Sassoon, graves, Rosenberg, whatever you want to do. But why might this be so? Well, first of all, it could just be thought, well, that sort of journalist poetry about the life in the trenches is not fitting for poetry. As Yates once said, passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.
When he failed to include Wilfred Owen in the Oxford Book of Poetry. But I think, perhaps more importantly, it's because he chose another medium to explore these ideas. Tolkien, that is. And this is where I come to, his mythology. If you look at the other two volumes of his poems, there is not a single reference really to the war in them. Some people have argued his poem The Mule Ships is a is a is a replaying of a French legend. But I have to say, I'm very doubtful about that.
But he is an Edmund Bond, and he was still writing about the war in the 30s and 40s and so on. There's passing references to it in his letters, but that's about it. So I think what we see is he chose his mythology and his novels now to explore this. Now this is well-trodden ground. So I'm just going to skip through it. So for those of you who aren't aware, I'll just give a few examples.
So in The Silmarillion, The Fall of Gondolin, the reference to the Iron Dragons, without hollow bellies clanged. People think, oh, is this link to tanks which he possibly would have seen in? Is it just about overlaps? In 1916 with that? In The Hobbit The Battle of the Five Armies, he writes about a battle as a person who is involved in it. It was a terrible battle, the most dreadful battle of all Bilbo's experiences.
But then was the one he was most proud of and most fond of recalling long afterwards. And you can imagine the conversations in regimental reunions go. Do you remember when we were there?
And then they talk about, like the old war tales between old soldiers and then in the Lord of the rings, he himself said, The Dead Marshes and Miranda know something to northern France after the battle of the Somme and the descriptions of the hobbits crossing the Dead Marshes is very reminiscent of descriptions that you get in that later stage of the battle of the Somme and Passchendaele. Although he wasn't at Passchendaele.
There is also, I think, I think he nicely picks up the the poor bloody infantry, the problem of the soldiers, he notes he wrote it rather famously. Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier that sort of resilient, stout, small person who just carried on, got through it. The Batman that looked after the officers. As we mentioned last week, there is the whole concept of Frodo, the traumatized soldier returning home. Wounded with knife to sting.
Is it says that the PTSD, although it wasn't called that in Tolkien's day, of course. And then I think also there's some really nice insight with the orcs about them just following orders and having rounds between them. I go, no, I'm not doing that, etcetera, etcetera. Which is, of course, what every soldier gripes about. But the following orders then becomes has a much more sinister connotation as we start to think of what happened in the Second World War.
But I also think in his mythology, he does deal with separation, that the long running story of Aragon and I went through it about the separation between the two of them. When Sam looks in the mirror of Galadriel, he immediately is reminded of the separation from the Shire, imagining what works for seeing what's going to happen with the scouring the show. And that's where he wants to get back. And even this quote, which is which is a little quote, almost.
I wish now there was no war, for we might have had some merry times. We might have journey to lost an arc to my grandfather's house. It is good to be there in spring. The woods and fields are full of flowers. This is the little boy Burgo talking to and Pippin while they're waiting for this, the battle of Eleanor Fields. They're stuck in ministry, and the small boy says, I'm here. I'm in the thick of this, but I wish I was there.
And then finally there is the theme of death, which I mentioned about Smith, which Tolkien begins to return or begins to focus on his later poetry. And I think he deals with death expertly in this. This is just one example, and we can imagine that Tolkien, Smith in the trenches, coming across a dead German British soldier, let's say German, and thinking exactly this. I wonder what led them to be here in this position.
And I'm not going to say more about that, because that death and the key spring of the Lord of the rings, as he famously said, is the subject of my final talk in this seminar series. So I would just conclude with this, when he was writing a letter in 1941 to his son Michael, I think he, as a society, talks about sudden fear. And then he writes a little footnote and he says this do I don't remember it. I never expected to survive.
And the intense emotion of regret, the vivid, almost raw perception of the young man who feels himself doomed to die before he has said these words is with me still a cloud, a patch of sun, a star. We're often more than I could bear, I said. Outside, I said, outside Litchfield Cathedral to a friend of my youth, long since died of gas gangrene. God rest his soul. I grieve him still. Why is that cloud so beautifully said? Because you've begun to write poetry, John. Ronald. He was wrong.
It was because death was near and all was intolerably fair, lost at, grasped. That was why I began to write poetry. The friend is, of course, Smith. It's interesting. 25 years later, Tolkien is still grieving him. But in his poem GBS 1952, he wrote farewell, my brother, I will sing these songs. And he did this with the spring harvest, of course, but I also think he did this for Smith, for Gilson, for Wiseman, to a degree in his novels.
When he was reliving or, sorry, forwarding or moving forward, the the aspirations of those four young men of the CBS before they were so cruelly taken away by war. Thank you, thank you.