Today’s Poem: First Time In

Singing in the dark

Walter J. Duncan, Cold Nights Coming On, c. 1918 (Wikimedia Commons)

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First Time In

by Ivor Gurney

After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line
Anything might have come to us; but the divine
Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony
Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory
Soft foreign things. Then we were taken in
To low huts candle-lit, shaded close by slitten
Oilsheets, and there but boys gave us kind welcome,
So that we looked out as from the edge of home,
Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions
To human hopeful things. And the next day’s guns
Nor any Line-pangs ever quite could blot out
That strangely beautiful entry to war’s rout;
Candles they gave us, precious and shared over-rations —
Ulysses found little more in his wanderings without doubt.
‘David of the White Rock,’ the ‘Slumber Song’ so soft, and that
Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys
Are sung — but never more beautiful than here under the guns’ noise.
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Ivor Gurney (1890–1937), a promising student of the English composer Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924) and friend of the composer Herbert Howells (1892–1983), considered music, not poetry, to be his primary vocation. It was in the trenches in World War I France, where he served as a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment, that his composer’s ear found a readily available instrument: the English language itself. Between charges and bombardments, he began work on what would eventually become his first book, Severn and Somme, published in 1917. In the same year, Gurney sustained a shoulder wound and survived being gassed.

We might say that he was one of the lucky ones in that tragic brotherhood of World War I poets. Unlike so many others, such as Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Rupert Brooke, Gurney lived to see England again. His already fragile mental health, however, never recovered, and he spent most of the rest of his life in a series of asylums. Throughout the 1920s, though institutionalized and diagnosed with “delusional insanity,” he continued to write poems and plays and to compose music, producing eight more books before 1930. From 1930 until his death from tuberculosis in the City of London Mental Hospital, Gurney remained, as a friend, the musicologist Marion Scott, put it, “sane in his insanity.” But he wrote nothing more.

Ivor Gurney Window, Gloucester Cathedral (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, marking the anniversary of the 1918 Armistice, and based on a front-lines experience which Gurney described in letters to friends, illuminates his instinct for music, as well as his poet’s intuition for ebbs and flows of sound and meaning in language. It’s a poem of seventeen lines, an odd number — which is indeed odd for a poem whose chief stanzaic structure is the accentual pentameter couplet. Many individual lines, including the opening, gain drama and a sense of compression by both beginning and ending on stressed syllables: “After the red tales and yarns of the line.” 

Again, the rhyme scheme is mostly couplets, but with a disturbance in that order. In lines 9 and 10, we might assume that “notions” is meant to rhyme with the next end-word, “guns” (as it more or less does), until we realize that the real, most complete, feminine rhyme for “notions” is “rations,” in line 13, dividing the rhymed end-words in lines 12 and 14 from each other. This reads as a disruption. But the real disruption, slipped into that earlier pair of lines, 9 and 10, is “guns.” Pointedly, that word rhymes, at least not precisely, with anything else in the poem. 

The poem’s speaker dreads the sheer cacophony of battle, but receives, unexpectedly, in the waiting trenches, a gift of songs. In pentameter couplets, the poem recounts the unit’s encounter with a “colony” of Welsh soldiers who share their rations, but who also sing “Welsh things.” The Welsh, of course, are famous for their hymnody, which remains its own national language. But it’s those haunting traditional songs, “David of the White Rock” and “The Slumber Song,” which are never again “more beautiful than here under the guns’ noise.” 

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