'Your battle wounds are scars upon my heart,
Received when in that grand tragic and tragic 'show'
You played your part
Two years ago.
I have known of Scars Upon My Heart, a collection of women's poetry and verse of the First World War for years, but for some reason had never bought it. Last Sunday, with this week's spotlight on Women in War, it seemed like a good moment to invest, and I am very grateful to goldengrove books on Amazon who responded to my plea to send the book asap by sending it first class on Monday to arrive here on Tuesday. Thus I have had a few days, whilst my mind has been in the zone, to read the poetic perspective of the women of the Great War.
During my OU degree I had an inspiring tutor, utterly devoted to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who assured us all that the purpose of poetry per se was to teach, to console and to warn, and I have never forgotten the passion with which she delivered that idea or the lecture that followed it.
Nor have I forgotten, from that same degree, the preface of Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem 1935-1940...
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd indentified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
And suddenly poetry was like joined-up writing for me, and with it has come an understanding of its vital importance to bear witness, and to say the unsayable.
Scars Upon My Heart (and its companion Second World War volume which I don't have yet, Chaos of the Night) is a revelation, quieter, lesser-known voices given their moment to speak..
'We know of the male agony of the trenches from the poetry of soldiers like Sassoon and Owen. We know little of the poetry of what that agony and its millions of deaths meant to the millions of English women who had to endure them - to learn to survive survival... much more modestly yet still truly, these women poets speak for the women whose lives were often blighted by that miserable loss.'
These are poems about being left behind, about caring from afar, about remembering and feeling, about sorrow and loss and something irretrievable, about irrevocable change. Laments in the truest sense, a passionate expression of grief.
Some of the women I had heard of, but many more I had not, for example Aimee Byng Scott. That lecturer also urged us always to take note of the layout of the poem on the page, and I have represented that exactly here...
July 1st 1916
A soft grey mist
Poppies flamed brilliant where the woodlands bend
Or straggling in amongst the ripening corn,
Green grass grew dew kist;
While distantly a lark's pure notes ascend,
Greeting the morn.
A shuddering night;
Flames not of poppies, cleave the quivering air,
The corn is razed, the twisted trees are dead;
War in his might
Has passed; Nature lies prostrate there
Stunned by his tread.
and that poem by Vera Brittain in full, also writing of that fateful day in 1916, The Battle of the Somme...
To My Brother (In Memory of July 1st 1916)
Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart,
Received when in that grand and tragic 'show'
You played your part,
Two years ago,
And silver in the summer morning sun
I see the symbol of your courage glow --
That Cross you won
Two years ago.
Though now again you watch the shrapnel fly,
And hear the guns that daily louder grow,
As in July
Two years ago.
May you endure to lead the Last Advance
And with your men pursue the flying foe
As once in France
Two years ago.
Vera Brittain wrote this poem four days before the death of her brother Captain E.H.Brittain in the Austrian offensive on the Italian Front, June 15th, 1918.
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