Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) saw action at both Ypres and the Somme and was awarded the Military Cross. A friend of Siegfried Sassoon, he became a fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1931 where he remained until 1944, returning to the city in 1968 as Professor of Poetry.
I found the following poem in The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry.
1916 seen from 1921
Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there – and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life dragsIts wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.I rise up at the singing of a bird
And scarcely knowing slink along the lane,
I dare not give a soul a look or word
Where all have homes and none’s at home in vain:
Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt,
The self-sown wheat around was like a flood,
In the hot path the lizard lolled time out,
The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood.Sweet Mary’s shrine between the sycamores!
There we would go, my friend of friends and I,
And snatch long moments from the grudging wars,
Whose dark made light intense to see them by.
Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots
Spun from the wrangling wire: then in warm swoon
The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots,
We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.
This is a beautiful poem, three lines of which struck me in particular:
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.
As part of my research for my OVADA residency I have been looking at the area of Oxford in which the OVADA gallery is situated (Gloucester Green) a place which following the Black Death was known as ‘Broken Hayes’. At this time (c.1348/49) many parts of the town – decimated by the plague – were empty, and Blunden’s lines seem to describe perfectly this sense of emptiness, reflection and loss.