Charles
Hamilton Sorely. 1895-1915
So poor so
manifestly incomplete
And your
bright promise, withered long and sped
Is touched,
stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet.
And
blossoms and is you, when you are dead.
(Such, Such
is death).
Sorely is a
footnote poet for the saddest of reasons. He was killed in 1915 during the
Battle of Loos. He was 20 years old. A book of poems, Marlborough and other Poems (1916), and a collection of his letters (1919), were published posthumously, both seen
through the press by his parents. The letters are prefaced by a ‘biographical
chapter’ written by his mother.
In Goodbye
To All That, Robert Graves names Sorely as one of the three poets of importance
who were killed in the First World War, the other two being Rosenberg and Owen.
It’s a throwaway line rather than a considered judgement, but Graves’
enthusiasm was personal. In a letter to Edward Marsh (dated 24th
February 1917) he wrote:
‘I’ve just
discovered a brilliant young poet called Sorely whose poems have just appeared
in the Cambridge press Marlborough and
other Poems and who was killed near Loos on October 13th as a
temporary Captain in the 7th Suffolk regiment. It seems ridiculous
to fall in love with a dead man as I have found myself doing but he seems to
have been one so entirely after my own heart in his loves and hates, besides
having been just my own age and having spent the same years at Marlborough as I
spent at Charterhouse. He got a classical scholarship at University college
Oxford, the same year I was up, and I half remember meeting him’.
Sorely has not fared as well as other ‘Great War Poets’:
Rosenberg, Owen and Edward Thomas (not mentioned by Graves who either didn't know or wasn't interested) are all currently
available in the kind of scholarly edition that has 'Established Reputation’
flashing above it. Suggesting that Yeats was right about Wilfrid Owen can
bring the thought police to your door.
Sorely was
the subject of a biography by Jean Moorcroft Wilson (1985), who also edited a new
edition of his letters (leaving out Mrs. Sorely’s biographical chapter) (1990), and
his collected poems(1985). Although there are scattered poems on line, and the
original version of the letters is available to download as a free pdf, Wilson's books are hard to find, and currently
there’s only a thin glossy pamphlet type book of Sorely’s poems available, which looks like it
has been badly scanned. You can find second
hand copy of Marlborough and other Poems…..which I did….1917 reprint of the
1916 edition which adds a
short piece of prose, ‘Behind the lines’ and an additional poem, ‘There is such
change in all those fields’. The 1917 version is prefaced with an anonymous poem
which is a response to the verse letter ‘I have not brought my Odyssey’.
Rather than
argue the toss about the poems, the biography and Marlborough and other Poems raise interesting questions about literary reputations.
Biographies
begin with their end in sight. The early years are narrated to explain the achievements and
the character of the adult subject. Graves’ biographers read back from the end
of his long life to make much of his mother and his (miserable) years at Charterhouse
in order to trace, retrospectively, the origins and development of perceived traits
in the adult’s personality.
But Sorely’s
biography is painfully thin; just over two hundred pages, or ten pages per
year. In the absence of the next fifty or so years: the writer’s career, the
arguments, scandals, achievements, relationships, there are no criteria against which to
select what is important, no way of knowing if, for example, his relationship
with his landlady in Schwerin, was indicative of things to come. (‘Relationship’
here with no sexual connotations.) or if, after the war, he would have continued to write.
So instead
of biography we have chronicle. Events are narrated. People are introduced. Even
that milestone in the poet’s career, the first collection, is not part of the
biography.
Ironically,
this makes Sorely into a representational figure: he stands for all the
literate, affable young men who went from school to the Western Front and died
there. His character shines through his letters. Graves
would later say that Sorely died before he became disillusioned. But the
letters suggest that Sorely had no illusions about the war before he joined the
army. He liked Germany and the Germans when he stayed there as a student. He
had no faith in the righteousness of the Allied Cause and was unimpressed by
what he saw as Rupert Brooke’s patriotic posturing.
His parents
had suggested he publish, and he declined. He had sent poems home from the
front, but acknowledged they were unfinished. His most famous poem, ‘When you
see millions of the mouthless dead’ was found in his kit after he was killed
and it reads like something in draft. These are the poems of an intelligent,
well read, literate young man, but there’s no way of knowing if he would have
improved them had he prepared them for publication. Written in conditions that
would silence most people, by someone who knew his death, if not inevitable, was
probable, it feels awkward to assess them as consciously finished works of art.
If you do compare
Marlborough and other Poems, with Graves’
first book, Over the Brazier, also
published in 1916, two things seem obvious. They did have a great deal in common. Both
writers had admired Masefield and it shows. Both books contain poems written
while their authors were still schoolboys. Both play the trope of longing for
home. Both respond to the war in ways that are different to the more well-known
poems of Owen and Sassoon.
The big
difference is that Sorely’s book contains some memorable poems. What Graves’
reputation would be if he had died when he was reported dead in 1916 is mere
speculation. But it’s difficult to believe anyone would have bothered to remember
him. Over the Brazier gains its significance because of the poems
that followed. It shows the beginnings of features that became characteristics
of Graves’ later verse.
Sorely’s
school poems lack Graves’ enthusiastic chummy diction and late 19th
century aesthetic posturing. Unlike Graves he enjoyed school. He had also been
reading Hardy and Hardy is good for poets of all ages. His evocation of
landscape is far more specific and local than Graves’. England for Sorely was the Downs. He has more
in common with Ivor Gurney in this respect, whose Severn And Somme was published in
1917. For both of them, England is not a vague idea but a specific place.
If you
placed those three books together, Severn
and Somme, Marlborough and other
Poems, Over the Brazier, as
individual books regardless of their writer’s subsequent reputations, they
probably belong in that order. Gurney’s diction and syntax are more interesting
than either of the others, and his poems feel less like literary exercises.
Graves as
critic was often wayward. In the letter I quoted, he links Sorely’s poems to ‘Rupert’s
method’. But in his poems he tended towards a better, what he might have called 'poetic' judgement. In the same month he wrote that letter to Marsh he wrote ‘Sorely’s Weather’.
It’s only
twenty lines, so the whole thing:
When
outside the icy rain
Comes leaping helter-skelter,
Shall I tie
my restive brain
Snugly under shelter?
Shall I
make a gentle song
Here in my firelit study,
When
outside the winds blow strong
And the lanes are muddy?
With old
wine and drowsy meats
Am I to fill my belly?
Shall I
glutton here with Keats?
Shall I drink with Shelley?
Tobacco’s
pleasant, firelight’s good:
Poetry makes both better.
Clay is wet
and so is mud,
Winter rains are wetter.
Yet rest
there, Shelley, on the sill,
For though the winds come frorely,
I’m away to
the rain-blown hill
And the ghost of Sorley.
