Today’s Poem: Idyll

Siegfried Sassoon, after the horror

Mary Hiester Reid, Eastbury Manor Gardens, Comton, Surrey, 1910 (Wikimedia Commons)

---

Idyll

by Siegfried Sassoon

In the grey summer garden I shall find you
With day-break and the morning hills behind you.
There will be rain-wet roses; stir of wings;
And down the wood a thrush that wakes and sings.
Not from the past you’ll come, but from that deep
Where beauty murmurs to the soul asleep:
And I shall know the sense of life re-born
From dreams into the mystery of morn
Where gloom and brightness meet. And standing there
Till that calm song is done, at last we’ll share
The league-spread, quiring symphonies that are
Joy in the world, and peace, and dawn’s one star.
═══════════════════════

Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Rupert Brooke, to name three poets whose poems have appeared in this space, as well as Charles Sorley, Julian Grenfell, and Isaac Rosenberg, have in common the fact that they were English poets born sometime between 1875 and 1895 — and they all died between 1915 and 1918, mostly on the French battlefields of World War I. Brooke is a dropped stitch in this pattern, having died in Greece, of blood poisoning from an insect bite, and not in battle.

Still, he belongs, one of the lost World War I poets, a tragic club whose fame and pathos lie chiefly in its members’ unrealized potential. But in their truncated lifetimes, some of them were very good poets. Edward Thomas, for example, achieved a quiet greatness in his “Adlestrop,” possibly the most famous war poem to take peace as its subject. Of many others we might say that a golden age of English poetry lay dead in the trenches. Or it might not. We’ll never know how good they would have been.

But then there’s the other club of war poets: the ones who made it out alive. That list is longer than one might think. It includes the poet and composer Ivor Gurney, who came home but left his sanity in the trodden French mud. It includes Robert Graves, who went on to write the series of “I, Claudius” novels. It includes Edmund Blunden, later Professor of Poetry at Oxford (a post currently held by the American poet A.E. Stallings). It includes the French poet Joseph Seguin, whose war-themed haiku, written under the name Julien Vocance, we featured just last week in Alfred Nicol’s excellent translations. And it includes Siegfried Sassoon, whose 1919 poem “Idyll” appears here today.

Glyn Warren Philpot, Siegfried Sassoon, 1917 (Wikimedia Commons)

This poem, written in the first year after the cessation of horrors, reads like a sigh of relief. In six rhymed pentameter couplets, it sketches a scene of utter peace, Edenic in the unrealized light of a summer morning, before reaching its reason for being. Its speaker, stepping into this garden to await a lover, does so in the awareness that his life and future have been handed back to him.

This landscape signals, for him, in the wake of the cacophony of battle and the utter destruction of beauty that it wreaks, a restoration of order and quietness. In this landscape to which he has returned whole, he is reborn, brought back from death, alive to watch the inchoate day sharpen into focus and become what it will become. And if what that day became, for Sassoon the poet, was never quite the glorious dream our imaginations grant the fallen, still it’s something to have lived to see that day.

---

---