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Changing Englishness in First World War Poetry

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Changing Englishness in First World War Poetry View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarBank@NUS CHANGING ENGLISHNESS IN FIRST WORLD WAR POETRY KHOR KUAN MIN (B.A. (Hons), NUS) A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2012 DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis is my original work and it has been written by me in its entirety. I have duly acknowledged all sources of information which have been used in the thesis. This thesis has also not been submitted for any degree in any university previously. _________________________ Khor Kuan Min 20 July 2012 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Professor John Richardson for supervising me throughout the period of writing this thesis, and providing invaluable feedback and advice. I would also like to thank Professor Jane Nardin for reading certain parts of the thesis and providing suggestions for improvement. ii CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 The Georgians and English History ................................................................... 10 Changing Englishness (Chapters 3–5) Chapter 3 Place ................................................................................................................. 22 3.1 Transplanting England .................................................................... 28 3.2 An (Ironically) Ideal England ........................................................... 40 Chapter 4 People .............................................................................................................. 46 4.1 Dilution of International Boundaries ............................................... 48 4.2 Dilution of Class ............................................................................. 56 4.3 The English Remnant ..................................................................... 62 Chapter 5 Conservatism .................................................................................................... 69 5.1 Class ............................................................................................... 69 5.2 Language and Form ........................................................................ 79 ~ iii Chapter 6 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 93 List of Works Cited ....................................................................................... 102 iv SUMMARY This thesis examines, via close analysis of relevant poems, how the first-hand experience of the First World War changed the prominent war poets’ collective vision of England. The England of the pre-war poetic consciousness, as represented by the Georgian poets, was transformed by the unique experience of fighting in the biggest and most destructive war at that point in time. Two key aspects of this new vision of England are examined – ‘Place’ and ‘People’. England as a place is depicted as vividly as the war poets’ immediate environment of trenches and battlefields, despite their physical isolation from their home country. This England, like that of the Georgians, is predominantly rural, but is also depicted with more realism and detail. This view of England sprang from the war poets’ heightened sensitivities created by the war experience, their nostalgia, and their desire to end the war by contrasting its realities with ideal English landscapes. Yet in their isolation, the war poets also came to conceive of a new, more egalitarian England overseas, defined primarily in terms of their fellow soldiers. Traditional divisions of nationality and class were attenuated, replaced by the soldier-civilian divide. The old England, viewed in terms of its civilians who are mostly ignorant of the war’s realities and hence exist in a world apart, was viewed as inadequate and morally inferior. Nevertheless, the war poets’ vision was still fundamentally conservative as it remained rooted in tradition, a tradition most apparent in their treatments of class and language. Despite the dilution of class boundaries, the traditional class system was still carried over to the trenches, and is most visible in the war poets’ simplistic depictions of soldiers from the lower classes. Their use of traditional language and forms, for instance the sonnet, also aligned them with the past, unlike their Modernist contemporaries. Their vision of England is a distinctive but limited one, despite the shaping influence of the war experience. v CITATIONS This thesis generally uses the MLA in-text citation method, with some modifications. For primary references, if the title of the poem quoted is already given in the text, only the relevant lines are cited in parentheses: The last poem in Gurney’s sequence, ‘England the Mother’, offers what seems to be a straightforward tribute to England in a manner similar to Brooke’s: ‘Death impotent, by boys bemocked at, who / Will leave unblotted in the soldier-soul / Gold of the daffodil, the sunset streak, / The innocence and joy of England’s blue’ (11–4). If the poem title is not in the text, it is included in parentheses: England is no longer viewed through the indulgently patriotic lens of Brooke, who fails to comprehend, or at least glosses over entirely, the uglier side of war and his country’s complicity in it: ‘If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England. There shall be / In that rich earth a richer dust concealed’ (‘The Soldier’, 1–4). On occasion, if there is the possibility that poem citations are not immediately clear or could be confused with secondary-source citations, the prefix ‘l.’ or ‘ll.’ (for ‘line’/‘lines’) is included before the poem line(s): British history, even pre-1707, can arguably be defined by the many wars fought against various opponents, for instance the multiple conflicts with France and Spain, the American Revolutionary War, and, as in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’, the ‘savage wars of peace’ (l.18) fought in the name of imperial expansion and domination. For prose quotations from poets (e.g. letters), the title of the publication (shortened if the poet’s identity is clear) from which the quotation is taken is given, followed by the page no(s), e.g. (Collected Works 373). If the quotation is taken from a secondary source, due acknowledgement is made, e.g. (Cited in Egremont 144). vi For citations of secondary material, the standard form is ‘Surname-Page no(s)’ in parentheses, e.g. (Colley 6). If the author’s name is made clear in the text, only the page no(s) is/are given: As Martin Stephen observes, ‘[t]he Georgians were only prepared to write about what they knew and had experienced personally’ (29), and the poet’s lines certainly suggest he is writing from direct experience. However, if the author’s name is in the text but it is not entirely clear if the subsequent citation is attributed to him/her, the standard form will apply. If two or more publications by the same author are included in the List of Works Cited, the year of the relevant publication is also included, e.g. (Lucas 1986, 75). If the years are also the same, the title of the publication is used instead: As Jean Moorcroft Wilson elaborates, ‘[i]t is important to remember that Sorley was “helplessly angry”... about war from the start, for it shows greater maturity and discernment than most of his contemporaries. Very few soldier-poets realized the futility of war at such an early stage’ (Charles Hamilton Sorley: A Biography 157). vii Chapter 1 Introduction In 1917, Ivor Gurney published a five-sonnet sequence, ‘Sonnets 1917’, dedicated to the memory of Rupert Brooke and clearly inspired by Brooke’s own famous five- sonnet sequence entitled ‘1914’. The last poem in Gurney’s sequence, ‘England the Mother’, offers what seems to be a straightforward tribute to England in a manner similar to Brooke’s: ‘Death impotent, by boys bemocked at, who / Will leave unblotted in the soldier-soul / Gold of the daffodil, the sunset streak, / The innocence and joy of England’s blue’ (11–4). Yet this unequivocally patriotic conclusion and idealised depiction of England is at odds with the first part of the sonnet, which expresses a far more troubled and ambiguous view of England: ‘We have done our utmost, England, terrible / And dear taskmistress, darling Mother and stern’ (1–2). The poet describes how he and fellow soldiers ‘watch your [England’s] eyes that tell / To us all secrets, eyes sea-deep that burn / With love so long denied; with tears discern / The scars and haggard look of all that hell’ (5–8). Despite Gurney’s loyalty to England, his feelings for it have been complicated by his experience of fighting in the First World War in its name, resulting in a tortured and somewhat paradoxical and vacillating depiction of his country. England might be a ‘darling Mother’, but it is also a ‘stern’ and ‘terrible’ one that withholds its love yet, nevertheless, recognises and grieves the ‘scars and haggard look of all that hell’ inflicted on its children on its account. Gurney’s oxymoronic ‘dear taskmistress’ encapsulates his highly conflicted view of a country he loves but, unlike Brooke, can never see in simplistically patriotic or nationalistic terms due to his acute awareness of the suffering imposed and endured on its behalf. Gurney’s poem, and other similarly complex and conflicted poems by him (e.g.
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