To the War Poets

by John Greening

Overview

In a sequence of verse letters, John Greening sends dispatches across the decades, looking back over the century since the outbreak of the First World War. He addresses the war poets directly, making connections yet always aware of distance, and explores “Englishness,” but also—in his translations from Heym, Trakl, Stadler, and Stramm—provides an alternative perspective. From the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial just before the start of the Second World War to the security forces’ shut-down of Heathrow airport in 2006, the presence or threat of conflict underlies Greening’s precise, unsentimental address on the centenary of the Great War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781906188085
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	12/01/2013
Series:	Oxford Poets
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

John Greening has reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement since the 1990s and has published 12 poetry collections, as well as critical works such as Poetry Masterclass and studies of the First World War Poets, Yeats, Hardy, and Edward Thomas. He is the recipient of the Alexandria Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize.

Read an Excerpt

To the War Poets

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By John Greening

Carcanet Press Ltd

Copyright © 2013 John Greening
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-906188-18-4

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CHAPTER 1

    War

    Georg Heym (1887–1912)

    He's risen now, who slept so long,
    He's risen from deep vaults, among
    The day's remains. Huge and unknown
    He stands. His black hands crush the moon.

    Into the cities' evening crack
    A shadow-frost falls, alien dark.
    It makes the downtown bustle freeze.
    Go quiet. Glance round. No one sees.

    In side-streets, something grasps an arm.
    A question. Answerless. Stay calm.
    Far off, the bells are trembling thin
    And stubble stirs on each sharp chin.

    He's started. There, up on the fells
    He's dancing, shouting: Men! To kill!
    And when he shakes his dark head, chains
    Of skulls go rattling round his brain.

    A moving tower, he tramples out
    The last of light. The river clots
    As countless bodies staunch and dam
    Its reedy flow. The white birds swarm.

    He steeplechases through the night
    This red wild-shrieking hound, and out
    Of darkness spring night's secret shows,
    Footlit as if by lava flows.

    The fields are scattered with the pointed
    Caps of a thousand flames; the hunted
    Refugees below are thrust
    Into the forest fires to roast.

    From tree to tree, like yellow bats
    The flames spread as inferno eats
    Each forest. Rattling at the bars,
    The stoker prods it till it roars.

    A city sank into the reeking
    Yellow, hurled itself, unspeaking.
    But he stands vast above the glow
    And shakes his torch three times to show

    The storm-zagged clouds, the frigid wastes
    Of darkness, he has seared this place
    To ash; then brings to his dry lips
    His brimstone spit: apocalypse.


    On the Eastern Front

    Georg Trakl (1887–1914)

    The winter storm's mad organ playing
    is like the Volk's dark fury,
    the black-red tidal wave of onslaught,
    defoliated stars.

    Her features smashed, her arms silver,
    night calls to the dying men,
    beneath shadows of November's ash,
    ghost casualties heave.

    A spiky no-man's-land encloses the town.
    The moon hunts petrified women
    from their blood-spattered doorsteps.
    Grey wolves have forced the gates.


    Pleasure in Form

    Ernst Stadler (1883–1914)

    First, bolts had to be broken, moulds
    Be cracked before I let the world
    Come bursting through new pipes: with form
    Comes happiness and peace and warm
    Contentment, yet I always need
    To unplough what's been laid to seed.
    Form wants to stifle and confine,
    But I must sail beyond the line.
    Form is pitiless, hard and clear,
    Yet drives me to a stagnant mere.
    Without the lifeline's dull insistence,
    Life can sweep me out any distance.


    In Despair

    August Stramm (1874–1915)

    Overhead a stone's harsh warble
    Night grinds glass
    Times don't change
    Stone
    me.
    Your
    distant
    glaze!


    Langemark
    To August Stramm, George Trakl, Ernst Stadler,
    Georg Heym

    In der Dämmrung steht er, gross und unbekannt

    No chair in this no-frills hostel –
    designed for parties of schoolchildren
    studying the war. Four pallets
    on two bunk-beds, metal,
    functional. Bed-bugs? Perhaps.

    I had wondered, as we swiped
    our plastic on the steel door
    to get to sleep, what's underneath?
    Now I have some idea, for this
    is the German cemetery. A wreath,

    massive, bronze, discoloured,
    like a sea monster scalily
    curled in on itself. Graves are
    dark slabs, the memorials
    monolithic; there is concrete.

    Over forty thousand in this
    square of earth, taped
    as if for a crime-scene. Names
    wait in strict formation, stand
    to attention: have we reached

    yet nineteen thirty-three?
    Against the budding trees
    and gathering clouds
    are silhouetted four
    huge, dumbstruck shapes.


    The Train

    A name that pulls away effortfully
    into a blue tunnel: that screen of blue
    they use to graft the fantastic
    on to the everyday in Hollywood
    but here untouched

    nonscriptus

    puffing a life
    towards its woodland terminus
    where Horsted Keynes will come to mean
    more than the terrifying hiss of steam
    as parents insist you must go with them for the bluebells.

    * * *

    I turn the page and it is
    La Flèche d'Or:

    this golden arrow
    straight to the heart

    of France entrances me,
    a sleeper across

    the night seas
    of these short

    interminable years
    before I turn the page

    and there are words
    and flesh to adore.

    * * *

    Was it Burton Bradstock we were returning from,
    a long haul through flooded Dorset,
    delay after delay,

    when the train at last had ground to a halt
    somewhere outside Castle Cary
    and through a glass

    smoking with gloom and shadowy work,
    one cry – we ain't got no steam! –
    made us hoot?

    * * *

    As if it weren't exciting
    enough to be in a
    camping coach
    at Lyndhurst Station,

    the steam trains hurtling
    past us all night
    through the New Forest,
    through our dreams

    of lines that switch
    into a clearing
    where King William
    is assassinated –

    Oh, to be in England ...
    was the April
    headline as we woke
    to a whiteout,

    all the greenwood
    blank as the pages
    of a 1960s
    domesday book.

    * * *

    Past Cologne,
    past the Lorelei
    and the Mouse Tower

    we advance along
    my green and narrow
    sixteenth year

    towards a dark
    platform where the Sandmann
    family reach out

    and shake my hand
    and take me in the car
    blinking blinking

    over level crossings
    that have forgotten
    what once wept through

    and blindly salute.


    Dover

    To Isaac Rosenberg

    The white cliffs are like all the paper they could not have –
    the men who were not rich enough to be officers –
    and that steady grey horizon is a never-ending pencil lead.

    The channel is shifting with misty shapes of things that were
      said
    but never written, for lack of paper, for want of pencils,
    and beneath it currents and sands of what they really meant.


    The Island A to Z

    for Alan, Judy and Zaphod


    A

    The cliff edge fails,
    exposing the bare white
    narrative of a life
    that has lost immunity.
    The sun wheels round
    to point at St Catherine.

    You can play Tambourine Man
    with light untroubled fingers
    though you stumble over
    the undercliff, its dormant
    candlepower, Marconi's
    whistle, a distress call.

    There is cello music
    in clouds, on the waves,
    beating towards a refinery
    that outgrows ancient forest,
    playing a line of slow
    inevitable open notes.


    TO

    To live on the island is to accept the insignificance
    of the mainland; it is to face up to the circular nature
    of every bridleway, every road. It is to ally oneself

    with those who stay, not those who visit for a day
    and take the ferry back. It is to know where to go
    searching for a peregrine high in columbaria of limestone
    and confidently to follow the cinnabar moth down the
      ragwort
    trail of extinct railway to pose with red squirrels
    and a nut to crack. It is to speak with authority on Vectis

    and the inland port of Alverstone, lost with all hands.


    Z

    He watches the ferry leave.
    He has a reputation

    for failing obedience classes.
    They expelled him from the kennels.

    Once, he cocked his leg
    in an attempt to dowse the fires.

    Now he watches the ferry leave
    without a sound.

    But he can scent
    in its wake a sleeping

    sickness that drifts
    through oil and bilge and weed

    and is on the trail
    of a place only good

    for kindling, which people long
    to escape, yet burn

    to go home to:
    somewhere dog-forsaken.


    The Menin Gate
    To Wilfrid Gibson

    Though you didn't come to the trenches,
    you wrote like a man who had been out

    and were mighty popular for it. Best-seller.
    Now, there in the mud of obscurity,

    with your poor sight and your poor health and your
    handsome inheritance from Rupert Brooke,

    not to mention your reference from Robert Frost
    as the worst snob he ever met in England,

    sinking from decade to decade, you reach
    for my help. But what can one keeper do?

    It's twilight. The memory cards are not full
    but they will be soon – look how they flash

    and flash, like that lost beam from Flannan Isle.


    The Hope Valley Line

    When our electrician was killed and the elms made a guard
    of honour, saluting him, shoulders braided with green,
    crowns embroidered – elm hateth man and waiteth –

    it was just another in the long line of deaths in these
    last months: the one who skidded down the dawn's
    black ice and shivered into a fireball, the one

    who lost control and died on a bridleway, and those
    who did not perish but are paralysed from their youth down.
    They have grown up around us, these tragedies. We glance

    from what we are doing, moved, and feel relief
    that death has not touched us directly yet,
    but aware it is out there like some monstrous power

    station in a field one passes in the train, the rain
    weeping against the window but unable to trouble us.
    The names of the places are announced, a roll call, flashed

    on the visual display, but they mean no more than Hope
      meant
    as I stopped there on the way to see my father's body
    powerless, waiting for the arrival of the plywood coffin.


    11

    The young go down
    along with the old
    pushing November
    from the front of their mouths

    a childish rhyme
    that makes an armistice
    a cenotaph and marching
    two by two,

    fireworks all ground
    to mash, and only
    St Cecilia
    to come, soothing

    the day of Kennedy's
    assassination from
    her grassy knoll.
    They keep on falling

    revealing their black
    buds that burn on
    through the month
    of the unknown soldier.


    'Essex Farm', Yser Canal
    To John McCrae

    We stop at Flanders Fields
    and Owen's Coaches
    draw up in the same layby.
    Watery sun. A farmhouse
    opposite has gone nowhere
    since pneumonia blew you
    away from this hole in
    the canal side and it was
    nineteen-eighteen. A factory
    smoking silently through bare
    pollarded poplars on the
    far bank. Here, your poem.
    There, parked tankers. The coach
    driver is pacing, tie over
    beer belly. No larks,
    just the passing of traffic.
    And no chance of a poppy
    that isn't paper or plastic.
    The children among the graves
    are dressed as if they were
    themselves a floral tribute.


    France

    To Robert Nichols

    I wonder which of my great-
    grandparents or grandparents
    kept this cutting from The Times
    December 15th 1916?

    It's yellow, of course, and
    foxed across the words
    'glorious' and 'sacrifice',
    but complete. It's called

    'The Battery', by you, and
    'sketched in France, written
    in England' after your three-
    week spell in the line.

    Less famous for fighting
    Germans than hurling
    a mangel-wurzel at
    Lloyd George, for which

    you were sent down,
    though you were the 'King
    of Oxford poetry'
    with a blue pencil still

    and knew how to throw
    squibs, too: 'Peace is here.
    Where is Alfred Noyes?'
    You died in the war

    in nineteen forty-four.


    Feast Day, Melchbourne

    A yellow field for the cars to crawl into.
    Moonlight Serenade from the Ouse Valley Band.
    Tombola, bric-a-brac, a raffle, Pimm's
    and nine-pins, coconut shies and strawberries.

    We seem to have drifted back to the last war
    when Glenn Miller gave his final performance
    on this lawn in front of the manor house.
    And even as we scramble behind the tractor

    for a ride out of the grounds, the sounds of
    Perfidia and American Patrol
    accompany us into the oil-seed rape.
    The farmer's boy, who's clinging to his trailer,

    points through the bones of wych elm and thorn
    and escalating nightshade to a chain-link fence
    that flickers 'Danger Area' as we pass.
    That's Coppice Wood, where they stored the mustard gas

    for bombs. They tried to clear it in the fifties.
    Thirty people a week were carted off
    with burns. Abortions in cattle and sheep.
    The air was black. His tractor turns to face

    the slope where once the Knights Hospitaller
    had their preceptory, before it was flattened
    for baseball. When locals complained they were told
    no way, there isn't nothing in the woods.


    Ypres

    To Edmund Blunden

    Dear Blunden, here's a pastoral you'll appreciate,
    uncensored too, though I am running out of pencil
    and don't know what the Flemish is for sharpener.
    It's Brueghelesque. The Yser Canal. One angler
    with two rods and an (unnecessary) mud-brown brolly.
    A bell is tolling midday-and-beyond behind me
    and birdsong all around. One magpie. Two carrion crows.
    A far cry from the throng back in the Flanders Fields
      Museum.
    The tin helmet over the litter bin swings in the breeze
    beside my metal bench. There are cyclists. And a lady's
    terrier snaps and growls at someone's knapsack. It is all
    unimaginable. The great deceit of Spring. Shout, April
    Fool, Ypres is rubble, the dead unburied, the war's
    going on still ... I cough and cough. But not because there's
      gas.


    Reading John Clare on New Year's Eve

    If we'd had his Fen eyes, we'd have observed
    the mouldiwarp still tunnelling the paved
    enclosures: mareblobs, witchens, pinks and pooties
    beyond our striplit broadcasts. If we had noted
    his words under our engine's hum, the names
    that aren't from dead-leaf catalogues of dreams
    but rooted in a real place, we'd not be fooled
    by furred Celebrity, but know Fame's cold
    bleak teeth and face its keeper when he's hanging
    his catches on our Auld Lang Syne, singing
    of what cannot be changed, not what's on sale.
    When we had heard that distant New Year bell,
    we would be carrying his black truths by heart
    across our thresholds, not thumbing a remote.


    Causeway

    Imagine all those dark
    timbers revealed
    in the damp, dripping
    square of Flag Fen:

    the sinister causeway
    a family tree
    that endures beneath
    our flat screen lives,

    our futile speed-
    dating fertility
    quest, a huddle
    of lost responsibilities.

    We look back through
    the surface they believed
    was the way in
    to a better world –

    the sacrifices, broken
    implements, battlefield
    trophies, the lines
    of splintered promises,

    invisible and unable to
    survive once exposed.
    Slowly eaten by sugars,
    they will dry out

    and die under the glare
    of children powered by
    a new electricity
    generated where the

    causeway is pointed
    that charges their phones,
    their games, their pods
    as they drop into the darkness.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from To the War Poets by John Greening. Copyright © 2013 John Greening. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Epigraph,
War (Georg Heym),
On the Eastern Front (Georg Trakl),
Pleasure in Form (Ernst Stadler),
In Despair (August Stramm),
To August Stramm, Georg Trakl, Ernst Stadler, Georg Heym (Langemark),
The Train,
To Isaac Rosenberg (Dover),
The Island A to Z,
To Wilfrid Gibson (The Menin Gate),
The Hope Valley Line,
11,
To John McCrae Gibson (The Menin Gate),
To Robert Nichols (France),
Feast Day, Melchbourne,
To Edmund Blunden (Ypres),
Reading John Clare on New Year's Eve,
Causeway,
To Laurence Binyon (Sanctuary Wood),
So it Runs,
In Trafalgar Square,
To Siegfried Sassoon (Near Bapaume),
Yeats Dances,
Dropping Slow,
Odyssey,
To the Sun (After Akhenaten),
To Rupert Brooke (Grantchester),
Wadi Halfa,
Colonial,
To Rudyard Kipling (Tyne Cot),
Africa,
To Julian Grenfell (Sanctuary Wood),
Hounslow,
Heath Row,
Cycle, with Cytologist,
Middlesex,
To One Who Was With Me (St Julien),
To Edward Thomas (Agny),
Hiraeth,
Eglwys Llangwyfan,
Home Office,
To Vera Brittain (Louvencourt),
Piano,
Music Group,
Elgar,
New World (1937),
American Music,
Field,
The Mounds at Sutton Hoo,
Waldo Williams in Perry,
Aldermaston,
Summer (Ernst Stadler),
Bugles (Georg Trakl),
To Charles Sorley (Dunkerque),
To Robert Graves (Dover),
Grodek (Georg Trakl),
Forge House,
Kentish,
Awre,
Note on Akhenaten's Hymn to the Sun,
About the Author,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

Since the end of the 1970s, John Greening has steadily established himself a significant presence in contemporary English poetry.” —Glyn Pursglove, Acumen journal

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