Proud-pied April: Purple from Severn side

Another poem from World War I today, this time from Ivor Gurney, who was not quite 25 when he enlisted as a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment in 1915. He’d already had one mental breakdown (what we would now call bipolar disorder) and had been rejected from service due to poor eyesight, but by that time the British Army wasn’t being too picky about who enlisted.

Gurney was wounded in the shoulder in 1917, but returned to battle and gassed a few months later. Interestingly, at the time he rather dismissed those effects, “Being gassed (mildly) with the new gas is no worse than catarrh or a bad cold.” But in March 1918 he suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized, where he wrote songs and poetry.

After the war he was regarded as very promising, studied under Ralph Vaughn Williams at the Royal College of Music, but had problems sustaining the effort. He continued composing, but by 1922 his family had him declared insane. He spent his last years in various psychiatric hospitals, dying in 1937 of tuberculosis.

Gurney wrote and composed on a wide range of themes. His collection of poems about the war, Severn and Somme, includes “To his love”, which was written in 1917. His restraint in juxtaposing the violence of the manner of death against the bucolic loveliness of his dead friend’s home is extremely powerful.

“To his love”

He’s gone, and all our plans

Are useless indeed.

We’ll walk no more on Cotswolds

Where the sheep feed

Quietly and take no heed.

His body that was so quick

Is not as you

Knew it, on Severn River

Under the blue

Driving our small boat through.

You would not know him now…

But still he died

Nobly, so cover him over

With violets of pride

Purple from Severn side.

Cover him, cover him soon!

And with thick-set

Masses of memoried flowers-

Hide that red wet

Thing I must somehow forget.