1914 Poetry published in 1914

A list of poetry published in 1914. I plan to dip into some of these this year. Many of them can be found free online.

The Birds of Paradise and other poems by W H Davies

Satires of circumstance : lyrics and reveries with miscellaneous pieces Thomas Hardy

Des imagistes : an anthology edited by Ezra Pound

Responsibilities, and Other Poems by W B Yeats

The Congo and Other Poems by vachel Lindsay

Sword Blades and Poppy Seed by Amy Lowell

The two blind countries by Rose Macaulay

Children of Love, Harold Monro

Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Room Gertrude Stein

Tender buttons. Objects, food, rooms
Finished reading: 8 June 2012



This is exactly the kind of poetry that many people despise.

Trash.

When I am Old

When I am old and it is spring
And joy leaps dancing, wild and free
Clear out of every living thing,
While I command no ecstasy;
And to translate the songs of birds
Will be beyond my power in words:

When time serves notice on my Muse
To leave at last her lyric home
With no extension of her lease-
Then to the blackest pits I come,
To see by day the stars' cold light,
And in my coffin sleep at night.

For when these little songs shall fail,
Theses happy notes that to the world
Are puny mole-hills, nothing more,
That unto me are Alps of Gold-
That toads dark life must be my own
Buried alive inside a stone.

W H Davies

(This is the first poem from W H Davies collection The Bird of Paradise)

The Bird of Paradise: and other poems
"What is this life if, full of care
We have no time to stand and stare.
(opening lines from Leisure not included in this collection)

W H Davies certainly found plenty of time to stand around and stare and some might say he did little else. This collection of 47 of his poems was published in 1914 at a time when war was raging on the continent and although we do not know when Davies composed these poems, there is not a hint of the conflict in any of them. Davies seems to have been a poet who lived very much in his own world and he recorded what he saw and what he felt, nothing much troubles him outside of this world and his poems can reach the depths of banality.

His simple view of life finds plenty of expression in this collection and are typical of his output. He writes charmingly about nature, sometimes with a wistfulness that borders on melancholy, but usually his themes are full of simple delight in the world around him.

"How sweet this morning air in spring,
When tender is the grass, and wet
I see some little leaves have not
Outgrown their curly childhood yet ;
And cows no longer hurry home,
However sweet a voice cries " Come."

He writes about dumb nature, the innocence of childhood, about love, life passing, roaming the countryside and of life in the London Shelters where his roaming sometimes took him. He gently castigates people who live in the world of work and money and who deny themselves the simple pleasures of living freely.

He was a popular poet whose short poems often written with a simple rhyming scheme are not difficult to grasp. Unfortunately they are also full of clichés and rhymes that are all too obvious and although he keeps the form of his poems simple he can struggle with the syntax, producing moments of unlikely discord. There are no hidden meanings, hardly any ambiguity and one suspects they are true of his feelings because nothing much else occurred to him. Reading his poems can be like seeing the world through the eyes of a child; not always a bad thing, but too much of it can make the poems seem inconsequential.

However he can find images that hit the mark and a few of his poems are effective:

The Hawk

THOU dost not fly, thou art not perched,
The air is all around :
What is it that can keep thee set,
From falling to the ground ?
The concentration of thy mind
Supports thee in the air ;
As thou dost watch the small young birds,
With such a deadly care.

My mind has such a hawk as thou,
It is an evil mood ;
It comes when there's no cause for grief,
And on my joys doth brood.
Then do I see my life in parts ;
The earth receives my bones,
The common air absorbs my mind —
It knows not flowers from stones.

I rated all the poems from 1-5 and came up with an average of 2.5. which I think will serve as my rating for the collection as a whole.

>> published in 1914 at a time when war was raging on the continent and although we do not know when Davies composed these poems, there is not a hint of the conflict in any of them.

It is known that "The Hawk", included in The Bird of Paradise: and other poems was first printed in 'Nation' 30 August 1913.

I am sure that all poems could be traced, but that would be a lot of work.

It would be inadvert to conclude that a book published in 1914 must necessarily pay attention to the conflict. The Great War (WWI) broke out quite unexpectedly on 28 July 1914. This means that any book published during the first six months of 1914 would be quite as jolly good-old Edwardian as could be, as naturally no-one could foresee the coming of war.

Thoroughfares, W. W. Gibson
Wifred Wilson Gibson has been categorised as one of the Georgian Poets. Strictly speaking they were those poets that were featured in several anthologies of poetry published between 1911 and 1922 and Gibson featured in all five volumes. Reading through this collection it is easy to pick out the traits that are associated with the group. The poems are fairly simple and some might say intellectually naïve. They have a certain realism about them that can slide into sentimentality. Certainly they are romantic but avoid the great themes of the Romanic poets, they concentrate on natural images often anthropomorphising animals. They are very British, rejecting continental and new world influences.

Thoroughfares published in 1914; contains 25 poems and in the book that I read were twinned with Borderlands, which contains three dramatic dialogues. The dialogues in each case are between two men and the first two: "The Queens Crags" and "Bloodybush Edge" are set in wild natural settings. The meetings take place after some physical effort in getting to the spot and the men take their rest and the talk is about nature and women, but soon stray into more unearthly subjects. In his early career Gibson often used the macabre as subject matter and the talk here is of ghosts and apparitions.

The macabre features in many of the poems and Gibson manages at times to bring in a note of eeriness although he doesn't get really creepy. Ghosts and unexplained events feature and the poems reminded me of the subject matter you might find in the early editions of The Pan Book of Horror Stories: those edited by Herbert Van Thal. The first poem in the collection and one of the best is Solway Ford, this tells the story of a man whose cart overturns in the estuary crushing him and trapping him helplessly. He waits patiently for the tide to come in and drown him and imagines what it will feel like and how he will take his place among the dead.

......... and he lay down in his place
Among the dreamless legion of the drowned,
The calm of deeps unsounded on his face,
And calm within his heart; while all around
Upon the midmost ocean's crystal floor,
The naked bodies of dead seaman lay,
Dropped, sheer and clean from hubbub, brawl and roar,
To peace, too deep for any tide to sway.

Awakening from a dream or a nightmare is another common theme, which all adds to the strangeness of some of the poems. He can overdo the sentimentality and far too many of his poems are quite one dimensional, relying on a surprise twist or turn for their effect. However he is effective when using images from the natural world here is an example from "Gorse"; a man has escaped and is blundering exhausted across the moor trying to outrun his pursuers;

Then suddenly the sun-enkindled fire
Of gorse upon the moor-top caught his eye
And the gold glow held all his heart's desire,
As, like a witless flame-bewildered fly,
He blundered towards the league-wide yellow blaze,
And tumbled headlong on the spikes of bloom:

The poems are easy to read and even if you can see the denouement coming, some of them have an atmosphere or an image or two that lingers in the memory. Not great poetry but I enjoyed the eeriness and the realistic natural settings and I would rate the collection at 3 stars. I would be quite happy to read some more of Gibson's poetry but would not go out of my way to search for it. Luckily much of it is free on the internet.

>5 edwinbcn:
Good point Edwin. I also think that both W H Davies and W W Gibson were popular poets in the Georgian tradition and so did not write about the "big picture". However Gibson did go on to write poems about the war, although he was too short sighted to be called up for actual fighting.

Satires of Circumstance: lyrics and reveries with miscellaneous pieces by Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy is a name most readers associate with the Wessex novels, but he clamed that poetry was his first love and he was a prolific poet. Following the negative criticism he received for his novel Jude the Obscure: published in 1895, he vowed never to publish another and so for the last thirty or so years of his life he concentrated on his poetry. Nine collections of poems were published before his death in 1928. Satires of Circumstance was published in 1914 and it is not surprising to find that in some of the poems, there appears to be a novelist struggling to get out: it contains stories told in narrative verse form and some which have a distinct quality of folk tales and folklore.

Hardy would have wanted to be remembered for his poetry and this collection demonstrates that he was a very fine and accessible poet. His major themes of time passing, of transience, of trying to locate something of value in a world of flux will speak to many people. He was 74 when this collection was published and so there is no surprise that death features in much of what he was writing. Ghosts and spectres also feature heavily, not so much as in a spiritual sense but more in a typical Victorian fascination with the supernatural. I get the feeling that he loved a good ghost story and there are some lovely examples here. There are poems of memory and loss, particularly the loss of loved ones, but his very best poetry features landscape, particularly its influence and how it shapes people and events; they have an existential feel: man alone in an uncaring godless universe. His novels have a feel of tragedy unfolding and his poems have that same aspect, but are more personal. I hear the poets voice in many of these offerings and it is a voice that can really sing, because first and foremost Hardy was a rhyming poet.

The collection divides into a number of sections the first of which is Lyrics and Reveries and the very first poem entitled "In front of the Landscape" sets the tone, because what does Hardy see in front of the landscape? why, dead people of course or rather the ghosts of dead people: the speaker sees himself wading through a landscape of the dead who are "smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision, / Dreaded suspect". Over half of the poems in this section feature ghosts, spectres or the dead. There are some real gems her though particularly "Channel Firing" which must be one of the best war poems from 1914; it imagines that the big guns firing in the English channel awaken the dead who are at first convinced it is judgement day, but then reflect it is ever thus and men do not learn; that war is "red yet redder" and that they are insane to start up over again.

The next section is titled Satires of circumstance and the poet indulges in some black humour as he tells short witty stories, in verse, of every day events. The old lover invited round to tea while the new husband is unsuspecting. A young woman is easily tempted to spend her Aunts hard earned savings for her gravestone at a dance. A man smirks at seeing the graves of a buried couple, because he has been the woman's lover, a man confesses to a murder on his death bed, and in "A Nuptial Chamber" a bride tells her new husband some unpleasant truths. These are indeed satires, but told with a lightness of touch which is enhanced by the verse form.

The next section of 21 poems are the crowning glory of this collection. They are mainly elegies written by Hardy for his first wife Emma. In day to day situations dredged up from memory Hardy reveals aspects of their relationship, we learn that after a passionate early life together they had drifted apart and while the poet regrets this has happened he also comes to accept the fact, but still wishes he could right some wrongs. Many of the poems are steeped in the landscape, Emma was from Cornwall on the Atlantic coast and she gave up the countryside that she loved to go and live with Hardy and although they both loved walking, Hardy knows in his heart that there was something missing for Emma. The poems are poignant and sad, but above all honest and they do celebrate the life of Emma. I have many favourites in this section but "At Castle Boterel is magnificent: Hardy has travelled back to where Emma lived in Cornwall and remembers the moment when he fell in love on a walk up to Boterel Castle. It was sunny that day but on his return some 40 years later it is raining, but he looks behind him and sees his younger self with Emma on that road and in the final stanza says:

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall never traverse old love's domain
Never again.

Thomas Hardy's reputation as a poet suffered somewhat because he was seen as a Victorian poet looking backwards rather than a modern poet looking forward. There were seen to be problems even with his worth as a Victorian romanticist, because of his somewhat twisted diction. His sentence structure seems awkward at times; it has been described as knotty and he has a fondness to use a negative construction where other alternatives seem better. However he has been critically reassessed and his matter of fact realism his use of metre and rhyme, particularly his breaking with poetic rules has led him to be seen as a forerunner of modernism. I think this all points to an original voice there is no one quite like the poet Thomas Hardy.

This collection is a good example of his work and there is probably something here for everyone that likes poetry. Apart from some wonderfully moving poems there are folk tales, ghost stories, satires and black humour aplenty. The collection is free on the internet, dip in and you may be pleasantly surprised. I will be reading more of his poetry I have his collected poems sitting on the shelf. I rate this collection at 4.5 stars.

Channel Firing

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, "No;
It's gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

"All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christes sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

"That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them's a blessed thing,
For if it were they'd have to scour
Hell's floor for so much threatening . . .

"Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need)."

So down we lay again. "I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,"
Said one, "than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!"

And many a skeleton shook his head.
"Instead of preaching forty year,"
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
"I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Thomas Hardy

Thanks for the discussion of Hardy the poet, I was unaware and am intrigued especially at the prospect of some good ghost yarns.

Des Imagistes: an anthology edited by Ezra Pound.
This collection of 35 poems and short pieces of prose, published in 1914 was a delight from start to finish. It is stretching a point to call it an anthology as it would be more accurate to say it was a bunch of poems collected by Ezra Pound from friends and acquaintances on the literary scene, but, be that as it may, there are some gems here. Ezra worked hard to make this collection appear as a new movement in poetry; going in to print to define what it was to be an Imagiste.

Pound explains the tenets of imagism as the following:

"Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome."

Of course not all the poems have all or any of these things in common, although the overriding one is concentration on a single image. Most are written in free verse, most are fairly short, and many allude to the classics. I can also detect an underlying feeling of sensuality and even perhaps eroticism.

The first ten poems are by Richard Adlington and his use of classical allusions gives much of his work a feel of loss for a time now passed. (He would have been difficult to read for many people before the age of google, but now we can discover who or what those Greek Gods were at the touch of a button). There are some beautiful images in his poems that create an atmosphere, sometimes of sorrow, sometimes of death, sometimes of peace and tranquility, but underneath a sensual yearning for love or antiquity. His wife H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) who has seven poems uses the classical illusions for a more direct effect. Gods of the sea, Gods of fertility are at play in her poems, which are more adventurous in form. There are echoes, repetitions, short lines that sing most beautifully, she is particularly adept at catching the atmosphere of a shore line:

"Where sea-grass tangles with/shore-grass" are the final two lines of "Hermes of the Ways" which is one of my favourite poems in the collection.

Ezra Pound has included six of his own poems many of which reflect his interest in Japanese art and literature, they read like Haikus. Some are very fine indeed:

LIU CH'E
The Rustling of silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the courtyard,
There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

There are a couple of curiosities; "Postlude" an early poem by William Carlos Williams does not seem to fit and it is one of the most puzzling. However the inclusion of James Joyce's "I Hear an Army" is an inspired decision. This is from the first manuscript published by Joyce in 1907 entitled "Chamber Music", which was a collection of poems that Joyce felt could be set to music and so fits well with some of the other poems in the Imagists collection. It is a fine poem with a haunting last line that might bring a resolution to what has gone before. We cannot be at all certain that "I Hear an Army" published as early as 1907 was any sort of a reference to the coming great war, but "The Rose" by John Cournos a prose poem I think does, with it's reference to proud Prussians and ships that founder in the waste. This poem has a beautiful central image of a rose flung into the sea and washed into the shore.

There is much to enjoy in this collection, and I think it would appeal to many readers, especially as it is free to dip into on the internet. It has made me want to explore further the work of H.D. and Richard Aldington and so for that alone it was worthwhile. The imagistes produced some fine images and for me this was a four star read.

The fourth of August was the date that Britain entered the War against Germany in 2014

The Fourth Of August

Now in thy splendour go before us.
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed,
Enkindle this dear earth that bore us
In the hour of peril purified.

The cares we hugged drop out of vision,
Our hearts with deeper thought dilate,
We step from days of sour division
Into the grandeur of our fate.

For us the glorious dead have striven,
They battled that we might be free.
We to their living cause are given;
We arm for men that are to be.

Among the nations nobliest chartered,
England recalls her heritage.
In her is that which is not bartered,
Which force can neither quell nor cage.

For her immortal stars are burning
With her the hope that's never done,
The seed that's in the Spring's returning,
The very flower that seeks the sun.

She fights the force that feeds desire on
Dreams of a prey to seize and kill,
The barren creed of blood and iron,
Vampire of Europe's wasted will…

Endure, O Earth! and thou, awaken,
Purged by this dreadful winnowing—fan,
O wronged, untameable, unshaken
Soul of divinely suffering man.

Laurence Binyon

The Winnowing Fan: Poems on the Great War by Laurence Binyon

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Many of us in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada will be familiar with these words, which are still used at Remembrance Services. They come from Binyon's "For the Fallen" which makes up one of the poems in the short collection "Poems of the Great War." As a tribute and remembrance of the dead from the First world war, one imagines that it was written after the war, but this is not the case. It was published in The Times on the 21st September 1914 just a mere 7 weeks after the start of hostilities on August 4th. The British Expeditionary force had suffered losses on the continent and the poem aimed to catch the mood and provide inspiration for the fight ahead.

All the poems in this collection are about the war, many of them providing similar themes; praise for those that were willing to sacrifice their lives for their country, an insistence that they were fighting a noble cause, castigating the Germans for wanting to destroy our civilisation and the need to protect our heritage for future generations. The poems are not empty headed jingoism, they have a depth and sincerity to them that are meant to inspire people to embrace the war effort. They do not shy away from the horrors of war and although at that point Binyon had not seen action he was well aware of the destruction that modern warfare could bring. He is also at pains to praise our allies and in two poems "Louvain" and "At Rheims" he tells of atrocities carried out by the Germans against townspeople and in At Rheims how the French resisted taking revenge against captured German Soldiers. These are the last couple of stanzas from Louvain:

Without a cause, past pardon, fired and tore
The Towers of fame and beauty, while they shot
And butchered the defenceless in the door.
But History shall hang them high to rot

Unburied, in the face of times unborn,
Mankind's abomination and last scorn

Unsurprisingly considering Binyon's academic background I get the feeling that the destruction of fine architecture hurt Binyon as much as the killing of those people "butchered defenceless in the door" . No doubt he was keen to make the point that our very heritage was being destroyed, but perhaps this come over much more strongly than the killing of the townspeople.

From the very first poem "The Fourth Of August" it is clear that a craftsman poet steeped in tradition is at work here. Meticulous rhyming schemes, well worked out metre are everywhere present, but these poems contain a message and they were written to be understood. For example the third stanza of The "Fourth Of August"

For us the glorious dead have striven,
They battled that we might be free
We to their living cause are given;
We arm for men that are to be.

These poems written at the start of the war have not yet been influenced by the horrors of trench warfare and the realities of fighting for ordinary soldiers, but their message is one aimed to uplift the spirit, while recognising that sacrifices will be made. A four star collection.

Responsibilities and other poems by W B Yeats.
This collection opened my eyes to the poetry of W B Yeats. I was familiar with the more famous poems for example “An Irish Airman forces his death”, “Easter 1916” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “Leda and the Swan’, but previously when I had dipped into a collection of his early poems I was confused by the many references to Irish Myth and Folklore and soon found myself cast adrift. Therefore I approached this collection with some trepidation and the first two poems “The Grey Rock" and "The Two Kings" did not ease my fears as they are both steeped in old mystical Ireland, however in The Grey rock Yeats addresses his fellow poets with “Here is a story that I have remade” and so the reader has a handle on a story in verse of Kings, phantoms, the old gods, battles and love and it is a good yarn.

The fifth poem ‘September 1913” seemed to mark a sea change in the poets thoughts. The poet is disillusioned with the present situation in Ireland, but he is also questioning the romantic notions of the past, because he realises there is no going back to a golden age. A refrain closes the first three stanzas”

“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
Its with O’Leary in the grave”

While in the final stanza that speaks of the pain of the Irish heroes and exiles (Robert Emmet, Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone) the refrain that closes the poem pushes the disillusionment further into almost despair:

“But let them be they’re dead and gone,
They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

From here on in, the collection becomes more realist in thought, although there is still some imagery from a more mystical past. There soon follows a run of brilliant poems that demonstrate both fine feelings and a mastery of form and style. Yeats was hailed as a modernist poet because his themes tied in with the modernist movement, but he did not share the fashion for blank verse. In this collection of poems there is only one that is in blank verse all the rest have regular rhyming schemes, so much so that you know you are reading a poem. Yeats was not without a sense of humour and he could tell a good story, however apart from the first two poems there are no rambling mini epics, in fact many of the poems are quite short. There are still poems in this collection that are a puzzle, none more so than ‘Running to Paradise”, but the imagery and sound of the poem is so good that it is a puzzle that is a joy to read. There is a song quality to some of the poems and he will often use repeated couplets to enhance this feeling.

Yeats’ on/off love affair with his muse Maud Gone caused him much anguish and this comes spilling out in a small collection of poems originally published under the title: The Green Helmet. There were just eight poems in the original slim volume and here they are included with others written between 1909-1912, when Yeats was heavily involved in the Abbey theatre. There is passion, loss, reconciliation and finally an acceptance in the eight poem collection, but there is also references to ‘sweet death’ that becomes unsettling. The additional poems do not match the intensity of feeling but there is still plenty of enjoyment to be had from most of them.

The book also includes a short one act play “The Hour Glass” from 1912.

The collection Responsibilities was published in 1914, but the collection I read which includes the Green Helmet poems was published in 1916. I think there are poems in this collection that everyone could enjoy and some of them are great poems, poems that will stay in your head and poems that you will want to come back to. This is a five star collection (and it’s free on the net)