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Singing they go into the dark
Poetry magazine has just posted more female poets of the First World War than I have so far seen in one place together. They're not helpfully linked all together, but you can find them with their male compatriots—all English-language—here. I was especially struck by Katharine Tynan's "Joining the Colours," Mary Wedderburn Cannan's "August 1914," Florence Ripley Mastin's "At the Movies," Mary Borden's "The Song of the Mud," Ella Wheeler Wilcox's "War Mothers," and Jessie St. John's "A War Bride." They have Margaret Postgate Cole's "The Falling Leaves," but not "Afterwards," which I find more devastating. I wish they had more Borden: she ran field hospitals on the front lines of Belgium and France and "At the Somme" is worth reading entire. Charlotte Mew has the best author photograph. (Poetry correctly links "The Cenotaph," but I'm lingering over "Not for That City" and "Rooms," which are not war poems, just very good ones.) There are other women, too. And men, but I knew most of their names.
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You're very welcome. I was glad to have found it.
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I think you like the Charlotte Mew photo because she looks a little like Peter Cushing.
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I feel I should warn that none of these poems is cheerful, but I think all are good.
I think you like the Charlotte Mew photo because she looks a little like Peter Cushing.
Hah. She does have great mad scientist hair.
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I look round at the corpses of the larches
Whom they slew to make pit-props
For mining the coal for the great armies
That was so strong--and especially because--do you think it's meant this way, that the coal for the great armies is not coal, and the pit is not a mine pit, but rather, the pit is the trench, and the coal is the soldiers? Because that's how I read it.
And "Not for That City" reminds me of some theology of eternity that I've read, that talks about how the afterlife is sometimes visioned as, essentially, a place of eternal activity and other times as a place of rest--do you desire rest, or activity? And "everlasting glare" was something that was commented on in "Wide Sargasso Sea," how the blessing "and let perpetual light shine upon them" is fine in temperate climates, but in the tropics you crave shade, shade is what is gentle.
Anyway, I liked those last lines, and thought of you, plagued by sleeplessness...
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Oh, good. Often it doesn't matter to me, but then it does to other people, and I don't want them to feel unprepared.
--do you think it's meant this way, that the coal for the great armies is not coal, and the pit is not a mine pit, but rather, the pit is the trench, and the coal is the soldiers? Because that's how I read it.
I thought the minepits and the coal were real, and the larches cut down for pit-props real, but so are all the other associations that you read—and the narrator's lover, planted out onto the hill again under the larches up in Sheer, is dead and that too is real.
And "everlasting glare" was something that was commented on in "Wide Sargasso Sea," how the blessing "and let perpetual light shine upon them" is fine in temperate climates, but in the tropics you crave shade, shade is what is gentle.
Oh, nice. I have not read that book and I really should.
Anyway, I liked those last lines, and thought of you, plagued by sleeplessness...
It may be why those two poems spoke to me so strongly now.
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I don't know if "Enjoy!" is quite the right word for a selection of war poems, but—meaningful?
(They are great and I am glad their voices survive. Many didn't and I wish I could read them.)