Charles Hamilton Sorely. A footnote poet of the First World War

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 24^th 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 13^th as a temporary Captain in the 7^th 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. The literary biographer’s habit of discussing the schoolboy’s ideas on literature is revealed to be as shallow and predictable as the schoolboy’s ideas. 

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 19^th 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.               

The Paths of Survival, by Josephine Balmer.

Continuing the experiment;  celebrations of books I enjoy or admire as I read them. This one is very good, very enjoyable, and very worth reading. Clicking on the link below will take you to my web site and an extended bout of enthusing about the book....

http://www.liamguilar.com/blog, 

Jonathan Culler, Colin Simms, and celebrating poets.

In his 'Theory of the Lyric' (2015), a book which deserves adjectives like 'monumental' or 'magisterial',  Jonathan Culler drifts across an unexpected argument. Without explicitly saying so, he suggests that the minority status of poetry might well be the result of academic approaches to it. This is perhaps ironic coming from the academic critic who many years ago defined a competent reader as someone who had been trained to read literature as literature and to produce academically respectable, critical responses to poetry. He suggests it might be better for the health of poetry, if instead of always assuming a poem is something that HAS to be interpreted, we might consider a poem as something to be used, the way we use songs.

Pace Mr. Culler, whose book, incidentally, is well worth reading,  there are people who do 'use' poems the way they use songs: memorise them, quote from them, use them to say things more eloquently than they would manage in their own words. I do it on a daily basis without any kind of shame or angst.  However, it's not an approach that has ever been seen to have any kind of critical validity. We learn to read poems and 'read' and 'analyse' or 'read' and 'interpret' are treated as synonyms. We also learn to read in a critical culture where negativity, and suspicion are the dominant norms and finding fault the default, rewarded manoeuvre. The idiotic and deliberately offensive trashing of Anhaga in text is a fine example of a wannabe critic trying to be clever at the expense of a book he didn't bother to read. You can tick off all his appropriate attitudes as he flaunts them. But you won't learn anything about my book.

So as an experiment, I'm going to post on the website blog, http://www.liamguilar.com/blog,  celebrations of books I enjoy or admire as I read them. They won't be formal reviews.

Poets need patrons and publishers and partisans so there's a value in celebrating other writer works, if only the value of acknowledge the pleasure their writing provides. At some stage I'll tidy up and transfer some of the enthusiasms from this blog too.

The First book I want to celebrate is Colin Simms' Goshawk poems.

http://www.liamguilar.com/blog/

Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/02/yevgeny-yevtushenko-obituary

I first heard his poetry, rather than read it, in the 1970s, on a crackling record.  He was reading with Allen Ginsberg and others. Ginsberg did a theatrical performance of 'The city of Yes and the City of No". I've forgotten the actress who read it,  but she gave an electric performance of 'Monologue of a Broadway Actress'. Which doesn't look much on the page:

Said an actress from Broadway
time had pillaged like Troy:
'There are simply no more roles.
No role to extract from me all my tears,
no role to turn me inside out.
From this life, really,
one must flee to the desert.
There are simply no roles any more!
Broadway blazes
like a hot computer
but, believe me, there’s no role-
not one role
amidst hundreds of parts.
Honestly, we are drowning in rolelessness...
Where are the great writers! Where?
The poor classics have broken out in sweat,
like a team of tumblers whose act is too long,
but what do they know
about Hiroshima,
about the murder of the Six Million,
about all our pain? !
Is it really all so inexpressible?
Not one role!
It’s like being without a compass.
You know how dreadful the world is
when it builds up inside you,
builds up and builds up,
and there’s absolutely no way out for it.
Oh yes,
there are road companies.
For that matter,
there are TV serials.
But the roles have been removed.
They put you off with bit parts.
I drink. Oh, I know it’s weak of me,
but what can you do, when there are no more people,
no more roles?
Somewhere a worker is drinking,
from a glass opaque with greasy fingerprints.
He has no role!
And a farmer is drinking,
bellowing like a mule because he’s impotent:
he has no role!
A sixteen-year old child
is stabbed with a switchblade by his friends
because they have nothing better to do...
There are no roles!
Without some sort of role, life
is simply slow rot.
In the womb, we are all geniuses.
But potential geniuses become idiots
without a role to play.
Without demanding anyone’s blood,
I do demand a role! '


1967
Translated by John Updike with Albert C. Todd 

One of the strangest and most enjoyable nights of my teaching career involved taking a group of high school students, none of whom spoke Russian, to see Yevtushenko give a reading in Brisbane, of all places. He was mesmeric. 

Roy Risher, who sadly died recently, described a Russian Poet performing in his poem Bureau de Change.  It evokes my memory of seeing Yevtushenko.

That done, the amiable man beside me, appearing
fatigued beyond ever standing upright again,
murmurs his thanks then rises without effort
into an altered state, discernibly magnified
in voice and in spirit, head thrown back,
calling out his poems in their own language and
filing the hall with the cry of a cantor, a triumphant pleading.

If those were English words the sounds we're hearing
would need to be a thousand years old. 
(Roy Fisher, Bureau De Change)

Tom Pickard's Winter Migrants. Carcanet (2016)

Tom Pickard’s Winter Migrants. Carcanet (2016)

This isn’t a review: I want to celebrate this book because it is the most enjoyable new poetry I’ve read in a long time.

My test of a slim poetry book (78 pages) by a single author is can I live with it for a week? Can I read and then reread and not feel the urge to read anything else. And then if I put it aside and come back to it, does it still hold my attention? Most modern single author collections of poetry fail this test, miserably.

I bought Winter Migrants as soon as it was published and I’ve been rereading it ever since. In terms of my test it’s an excellent book.

It’s split into three parts: two sequences: Lark and Merlin, and from Fiends Fell Journal and a third section made up of individual poems.

Pickard’s poetry has almost always been the record of one intelligence moving through time and recording what he encounters in precise language.

a wren

perched on a hawthorn

low enough to skip the scalping winds,

sang a scalpel song.    

This first poem from Lark and Merlin is a good example of an elegantly spare, stripped-down or stripped back poetic. It belongs to what Donald Davie once celebrated as ‘a poetry of right naming’. The poet works to find the best word to describe the world he lives through.

When Alice complained to Humpty Dumpty that he was making the words do too much work, he boasted that he paid them extra for their efforts when they turned up on a Saturday for their wages. Presumably there's a small queue at Pickard's on a Saturday and he is also paying them overtime.

While I was rereading Winter Migrants I was also reading Baker’s The Peregrine. Both books have the same detailed observation of movement and light, landscapes and their wild inhabitants. Ruskin would have approved of both writers’ honest attention to detail. However, while Baker’s prose overloads the reader, Pickard’s poems have the advantage that everything unnecessary has been left out. What I envy most is his ability to capture the effects wind has and describe its movement over a landscape. In this he’s as good if not better than Ruskin at his best, though he also has the added advantage of brevity. 

Sometimes minimalism doesn’t leave much for the reader to do except admire the poet’s skill. The Sequence solves this problem. Lark and Merlin might be a record of a relationship. There’s a she/you and an I. But the subject is absent. There’s no biographical context (factual or fictional) to distract from the poems. And I don’t understand how this works, but the absence of the subject creates the space which holds the sequence together.

It also allows for the complexities of shifting power within a relationship, the confusion as well as the celebrations:

She asked about my heart,

Its evasive flight;

but can I trust her with its secrets?

and does the merlin, in fast pursuit of its prey,

tell the fleeing lark it is enamoured of its song?

or the singing lark turn tail

and fly into the falcon’s talons?

Fiends Fell Journal mixes prose with poetry. The blurb describes it as a Haibun, but the alternation of Prose and Verse you find in medieval Welsh and Irish texts feels more appropriate to the wild landscape. It is the record of an intelligence moving through that landscape and taking careful note of everything seen, felt and heard. It might sound like a strange compliment, but it’s a very honest poetry and prose which doesn’t fudge itself by pretending to ‘poetic thoughts’. It would be easy to do the prose badly as poetic pose but he avoids this.

The final section of the book contains an assortment of poems on a range of subjects and in a range of styles, from the effective satire of ‘Whining while dining oot’ which puts the boot into a certain type of regional poet, to lamenting a death, ‘Squire’; to expressions of frustration with his contemporaries, the marvellous ‘To Goad My Friggin Peers’.

At the end the book returns to the sparser tone of its beginning with ‘At the Estuary’ and ‘Winter Migrants’ both short sequences.

Nothing I’ve just written does real justice to the pleasure of reading Winter Migrants. Which is really what makes Pickard stand out. He’s very very good, but he’s also entertaining and thought provoking, and enjoyable.

He reminds me what poetry was probably like before it was turned into a ‘pedant’s game’: it was worth reading.

(And as a PS. As someone who has often grumbled about the absurdity of blurbs on poetry books, the paragraph on the back of this one is a model of how a poetry book could be treated.)

 

Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and 'Goodbye to All That'

In the light of Graves' War Poetry (See previous blog post).

 George Simmers, in his excellent Great War Fiction Blog, discusses Siegfried Sassoon's running commentary on Goodbye to All That which Sassoon had drawn pasted and written in his own copy. Sassoon, to use English Understatement, was not that particular book's biggest fan. The link below takes you to the blog. There is also a link in his post to the TLS article Simmers is discussing.

https://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/sassoons-copy-of-goodbye-to-all-that/

Tom Pickard interviewed by Poetry London

http://poetrylondon.co.uk/no-need-for-permission-tom-pickard-talks-to-chris-mccabe-about-poetry-and-political-activism/

TP: All my creative life I’ve been cutting back to make the work as spare as that landscape. There’s a great pleasure in being able to create something from nothing, or apparently nothing. When snowed-up for six weeks at a time you learn a lot about yourself and your environment. I love that sense of emptiness, like when the tide’s out in an estuary, a world that contains everything and nothing at the same time. I’m happiest working on those very tight, short pieces – to pare back to almost nothing and still remain with something.