Ivor Gurney

[michaeldr]

With the notable exception of Chris, many of us will have had more time for the newspapers at the weekend, however in case you missed it, the following was found in the ‘WeekendFT’

IVOR GURNEY:

Collected Poems

edited by PJ. Kavanagh

Fyfield £14.95. 410 pages

Think of important poets of the first world war and Sassoon, Owen, Thomas and Rosenberg spring to mind. But in Andrew Motion’s recent anthology, First World War Poems (Faber 2003), there is one other name that seems, if we are to judge by the number of poems, to be of equal importance: Ivor Gurney.

Gurney died in a mental asylum in 1937, but it was not until 1982 that a large collection of his work appeared in print. Now his poetry and his music - he was a composer of songs and instrumental music, largely for the piano — have at last joined the canon.

Gurney was a tailor’s son, born in Gloucester in 1890. As a child he trained as a chorister at King’s School, Gloucester. In 1911 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. Then came war, and service with the Gloucester Regiment on the western front. Even before then, he was subject to mental instability: “neurasthenia”.

Gurney’s letters are eloquent and spirited, full of scribbled staves of music caught on the wing, snatches of poems and eager book-talk. Here is a man with a sense of mission. After he was demobbed, the horror of all that lie haçl lived through began to catch up with him. By 1922 he had to be admitted to an asylum, never to be freed again.

It is by a stroke of luck that his poetry survived at all. He used to post copies to his friend from the Royal College of Music, Marion Scott. Scott squirreled away every last line, and it is largely thanks to her that we now have an edition of his poems.

Gurney is an odd poet - spasmodic, fragmentary, abrupt and rather rough- edged. His verses seem sudden, snatched, precarious utterances that appear to begin and end without warning. His syntax can be oddish too - - he writes on the pelt, as if he barely has time to commit to paper what his feverish brain has conjured into being.

Although a poet of the sufferings of the Great War, Gurney never quite lived inside that war In the way that, for example, Wilfred Owen did. Gurney is often half in the war, suffering amid the miseries of foot rot and the howl of the whim- bangs, and half somewhere else altogether.

Where exactly? His native Gloucestershire, his paradise lost. He was so besotted by Its beauties that it would be easy to pigeonhole him as a Georgian poet of the rather sentimentalized pastoral gesture. But he 1su’t like that. The Gloucestershire he evokes is a very particular place — he knew It heartstoppingly well; he walked it obsessively, often through the night. He refers to very specific places, as in this letter of December 1915: “Cranham, Framilode, Minsterworth. Crickley, May Hill”. Such mellifluous names.

Stuck as he was in the trenches, Gurney raised his eyes to the clouds — and reimagined the cloudscapes of Gloucestershire. Few poets have written so eloquently, and so variously, about cloud formations as Gurney. He loved the serenity of clouds, their rapid shape- shiftings. He was also given to thanking the stars for their faithful companionship. If all this is poetic delirium, it is also a kind of self-saving sanity, the imagination’s fight-back against confusion.

Tragically, after 1922 Gurney never saw that countryside again, which meant that he yearned for it all the more. He asked, again and again, for death to embrace him, to release him from incarceration. In 1937, it obliged. Just before he died, an edition of Music and Letters was published in his honour. When told about it, be said: “Too late.”

Michael Glover

Regards

Michael D.R.

[MartinWills]

Michael Hurd has written an excellent biography of Gurney which well refelcts his difficult life. An awkward upbringing and wayward character, his experience of WW1 doubtless hastened the onset of mental illness of which the most famous example was the series of letters to the metropolitan police.

His poetry of the war shows great feeling and expresses well his experiences in the 2/5th Gloucesters. One of his fellows in the Gloucesters was F W Harvey, a more than able poet who spent much of the war as a POW and who lived out his life after the war as a Gloucestershire solicitor. Harvey's poetry is also well worth exploring and suffers from the fact that one of his poems (but only one) often features in the various "nations favourite poems" lists.

After the war Gurney's writing increasingly reflects his mental instability and although much of his work written either at Barnwood or Joyce Green "asylums" is fragmentary and idiosyncratic it is well worth exploring.

The review only touches lightly upon his musical output, but there is little doubt that he should have become a great composer. It is well worth exploring his output of songs, many of them settings of WW1 poetry both by himself and others. A good stating point is an anthology called War's Embers (Hyperion label) which includes song settings by a number of those who fought and, often, died.

Gurney, in his time at the Royal College of Music moved in the same circles as Vaughan-Williams; Howells etc. etc. and should be regarded as a prime player in the English school of Music of that period.

Information on Gurney, Harvey & other WW1 poets can be found on at

Counter Attack

Martin

[Paul Nixon]

Well I'll take the opportunity of this thread to reproduce one of Gurney's better known pieces for general appreciation.

Paul

To his Love

He's gone, and all our plans

Are useless indeed.

We'll walk no more on Cotswold

Where the sheep feed

Quietly and take no heed.

His body that was so quick

Is not as you

Knew it, on Severn river

Under the blue

Driving our small boat through.

You would not know him now...

But still he died

Nobly, so cover him over

With violets of pride

Purple from Severn side.

Cover him, cover him soon!

And with thick-set

Masses of memoried flowers-

Hide that red wet

Thing I must somehow forget.