Short Measures (vi): Ivor Gurney and George Herbert

Out of my sorrow have I made these songs,

   Out of my sorrow;

Though somewhat of the making’s eager pain

From Joy did borrow.

Some day, I trust, God’s purpose of Pain for me

   Shall be complete,

And then—to enter in the House of Joy . . . .

   Prepare, my feet.

This eight-line poem is called ‘Song and Pain’. Ivor Gurney wrote it sometime during the battle of the Somme. He records that he wrote it at Crucifix Corner. He had been involved in the early fighting, and his mood had swung between extremes:

  But, in the name of the Pleiades what has a neurasthenic musician to do with all this? ….

   O cuss it all though. I am glad to have been through it all, and will keenly enjoy telling others about it after.

   And O the Somme – the valley of the Somme round Amiens! A delight of rolling country, of a lovely river, and trees, trees, trees …. 

(Letter to Marion Scott, 5^th July 1916)

He always counted himself a musician first, though poetry became more and more important to him when army life made composition difficult. He composed only four songs while in France and Flanders, carrying some muddy sheets of manuscript paper in his pocket, just in case. But once he’d been gassed and sent back to Blighty, in 1917, he began composing again. In ‘Upstairs Piano’ he vents his frustration:

O dull confounded Thing,

You will not sing

Though I distress your keys

With thumps ….

He blames himself for having allowed his musical gifts to lapse. It must break the hearts of ‘Chopin or dear Mozart’, he thinks, to hear him ruin their music: his ‘wandering fingers know / Not surely where to go’:

And yet, and yet, men pale

(Late under Passchendaele

Or some such blot on earth)

Feel once again the birth

Of joy in them, and know

That Beauty’s not a show

Of lovely things long past.

This idea of joy rediscovered – not just remembered – offers a commentary on ‘Song and Pain’. Despite the de profundis repetition of ‘Out of my sorrow’, distress has prompted something creative —‘these songs’. The next line, ‘Though somewhat of the making’s eager pain’, is characteristic Gurney. That flat, but not in the least flat-footed, ‘somewhat’ is a good example of the poet’s powerful reticence. (Cf. the ending of his poem ‘To His Love’: ‘that red wet / Thing I must somehow forget.’) The possessive gerund ‘making’s’ echoes the old Scots name for a poet, ‘Makar’: it’s a reminder that poems, like all art, call for effort in their construction, but that there’s something more than pleasure – Gurney calls it joy - to be found in this effort: hence the almost oxymoronic ‘eager pain’ (‘eager’ here double-edged, as in ‘keen’).

Nevertheless, the closing word of the first stanza suggests that even so small an element of joy must be paid for some time. ‘Borrow’ here tolls as well as rhymes with ‘sorrow … sorrow’, and so the stanza ends with a hint of something deeper than resignation. One thinks of Job: ‘Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward’.

The correspondence between the Old Testament Book of Job and this poem is not one I’ve discovered for myself. I found it in the artist’s notes accompanying another Gurney-inspired window by Tom Denny, about whose new Gloucester Cathedral memorial to Ivor Gurney I wrote recently. This one is in St. Paul’s Church, Shurdington, a village outside Cheltenham. It depicts a view looking down across the Vale of Gloucester towards the distant Malvern Hills. The link that Tom Denny has seen here between poet and prophet is not just allusive, it is specific:  ‘Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth,’ says Job, ‘…  for thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.’ The patience of Job, and his confidence that God is working his purpose out, are implicit both in this 2013 Gurney window (where the stones and the beasts of the field duly appear) and in the opening of Gurney’s second stanza:

Some day, I trust, God’s purpose of Pain for me

   Shall be complete …

Gurney’s confidence, too, (‘I trust’) is enough to banish the sorrow of the previous stanza, and there’s a note of stuttering anticipation (‘And then—’) in what follows. The ‘House of Joy’ perhaps echoes the ‘house of the Lord’ from Ps. 23, the one psalm all First World War soldiers knew by heart: ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death ….’ Perhaps, too, it recovers a childhood memory of the story ‘The Prince of the Nine Sorrows’ in Laurence Housman’s  book, The House of Joy (1895). But the poet this second stanza surely evokes is George Herbert.

I wish I could say with certainty that Gurney read and enjoyed Herbert’s poetry. Herbert, too, had a gift for finding solace at the end of poems full of dismay: ‘Sorrow was all my soul’ he says in ‘Affliction (i). It’s Herbert’s poem ‘Love (iii)’ I’d like to think Gurney had in mind when saying he longed ‘to enter in’ the House of Joy. This is not just a finicky phrase meeting Gurney’s need for an extra syllable to complete the iambic line. Mightn’t it be an echo of Herbert’s ‘my first entrance in’?

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,

   Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

   From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me ….

And doesn’t ‘Prepare, my feet’ echo Herbert’s instructions to self in ‘Easter’: ‘Rise, heart’ and ‘Awake, my lute’? Both these poems had by 1911 already been set to music by Gurney’s friend, Ralph Vaughan Williams, for his Five Mystical Songs.  I can’t believe Gurney didn’t know them. I can’t believe, anyway, that Ivor Gurney didn’t love George Herbert’s poetry. I think ‘Song and Pain’ proves it.

Adrian Barlow

‘Song and Pain’ is published in Severn and Somme (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1917)

‘Upstairs Piano’ is published in War’s Embers (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1919)

The letter to Marion Scott is published in Ivor Gurney: War Letters, edited by Kelsey Thornton (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984)

[illustration: window (2013) by Tom Denny in St. Paul’s Church, Shurdington, Diocese of Gloucester.

Short Measures is a very occasional series in which I discuss a short poem (no more than 12 lines). For copyright reasons, it’s unlikely I can discuss poems published during the twentieth century. Here are my previous posts in this series:

Short Measures (i): William Blake and Eternity’s Sunrise

Short Measures (ii): Time and Thomas Hardy

Short Measures (iii): Wordsworth’s Rainbow

Short Measures (iv): Crashaw’s Nativity Hymn

Short Measures (v): Herrick’s Old Wives

Tom Denny and Ivor Gurney in Gloucester Cathedral

It was Aunt Mary who introduced me to Tom Denny. ‘Here,’ she said, thrusting the Yorkshire Post into my hand almost as soon as we were through her front door, ‘you’re interested in stained glass. What do you think of this new Millennium window in Bolton Percy Church? We could go and have a look at it while you’re up here.’ I took the paper from her, and read the piece. The name Denny meant nothing to me then; fourteen years later, it means a great deal.  I now believe Tom Denny’s stained glass to be the most exciting achievement in recent ecclesiastical art in Britain, and I'll always be grateful to Aunt Mary for alerting me to it.

‘Stained-glass’, Denny has written, ‘is a medium ... where at first one can be strongly aware of colour

 and light as a kind of musical language, a ‘humming’ of colour, a riverine movement of light. And then there is room for the development of whole worlds of narrative and detail.’* Today you can see his work in cathedrals, colleges, abbeys, parish churches and tiny chapels. His largest, perhaps most spectacular window, is in Durham. Often his windows come in pairs, as at Gloucester, Tewkesbury and Malvern. Don’t expect to see saints and biblical scenes in them, though, at least not as such scenes traditionally appear. Denny’s windows mix the abstract with the allegorical, and his figures sometimes seem to be disappearing into a landscape, rather than emerging out of it.

Landscape indeed is one of his hallmarks, and the scale of these vistas may be wide-angle (as at St. Christopher’s Warden Hill) or miniature. Hereford Cathedral has a pair of small two-light windows, in the Audley Chapel, celebrating Thomas Traherne, the 17^th century visionary and poet, born in the city. Here Denny’s sense of the importance of place is focused both on the cathedral itself, with swifts wheeling ecstatically around its tower, and on the local countryside through which Traherne walked as an act of joyous communion with the created world. These are windows to be enjoyed up close and at eye level: the patination of the surface, the varying thicknesses of the glass, even the character of the leadwork, invite us to engage with the materiality of stained glass in a way rarely possible elsewhere.

And later this month there is a new Denny window to be dedicated, again in celebration of a local writer – though, as with Traherne, another writer who is by no means to be pigeon-holed by his local identity: Ivor Gurney. Gurney already has one memorial in Gloucester Cathedral, a discreet plaque describing him as ‘composer and poet’ and ‘chorister of this cathedral church’. His new memorial is equally discreet. In a chantry on the north side of Gloucester’s Lady Chapel, Tom Denny has part-filled two Perpendicular windows, each of which has four narrow lights, and each divided by a transom: the upper halves now contain the eight panels making up the whole. In the top section of each are fragments of 14^th and 15^th century glass, and Denny has designed his own glass to complement these fragments, even using lead-work to signal the continuity between old and new.

Physically the chapel housing this Gurney memorial is dominated by the C17^th effigy of Bishop Godfrey Goldsborough; and, for the time being at least, one has to look at the glass through the mullions of a stone screen separating the chantry from the Lady Chapel. This is not inappropriate. It reminds us that for the last fifteen years of his life Gurney was himself partially hidden from view, housed in a mental hospital far away from the Cotswold countryside he had longed for as a soldier in France, and which he constantly evoked in his music and poetry. The title of his first volume of poetry was Severn and Somme.

What Denny has done is to reflect across the eight panels aspects of Gurney’s life and art. Each panel echoes one or more of Gurney’s poems. In the first light of the left-hand window, for instance, a man walks away from us over a curiously pitted, ancient landscape (there appears to be a Neolithic hand-axe lying on the ground at the foot of scene). He strides towards distant May Hill, ‘that Gloster dwellers / ’Gainst every sunset see’. (I have written about May Hill’s significance before: see In Gloucestershire.) But in the last light of this window, the same man gazes plaintively from behind a hedge at the leafless willows lining the Severn in winter:

And who loves joy as he

   That dwells in shadows?

Do not forget me quite,

   O Severn meadows.

‘There are strange Hells ….’ It would be impossible for a window memorialising Ivor Gurney not to reflect his life as a soldier, but this Tom Denny does in a wholly unexpected way. In the first panel of the right-hand window, abandoned boots and helmets strew the ground in front of a flooded shell hole. Look carefully and you will see the ghoulish faces of drowned and drowning soldiers in the water. A hand and perhaps other limbs break the surface of this Stygian pool: it is a vision of hell. And then on the crater’s far bank a spectral army stands: Gloucester soldiers with their backs turned away from the nightmare of No Man’s Land – turned away, too, from the Gloucester tailor’s son who had fought alongside them:

There was not one of all that Battalion

Loved his comrades as well as I – but kept shy.

Or said in verse, what his voice would not rehearse.

War memorial windows from the 1920s onwards have occasionally depicted the battlefields of France and Flanders. I have never seen another that represents such a scene of horror and overwhelming loss as Denny has created here. I don’t know which specific poem or poems prompted this landscape of despair, but the lines that come to my mind are from ‘Farewell’, a poem Gurney wrote in 1924 in Dartford asylum and which marks him out as one of the most remarkable of all the war poets: a man who hoped that comradeship and the physical effort of soldiering would save him, and yet who drowned in the end, not in a flooded shell hole but in his own mental distress:

Dear Battalion, the dead of you would not have let

Your comrade be so long—prey for the unquiet

Black evil of the unspoken and concealed pit.

The Ivor Gurney memorial window will be dedicated at Evensong in Gloucester Cathedral on Saturday 30th April.

Adrian Barlow

[See also my succeeding post: Short Measures (vi): Ivor Gurney and George Herbert]

* Tom Denny, ‘A note on the window’ in Wisdom’s Call: a new stained-glass window at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge (published by the College, 2012)

[Quotations from poems: the description of May Hill appears in ‘The Fire Kindled’, and ‘Only the wanderer knows’ comes from ‘Song’; both poems first published in Severn and Somme (1917).  ‘There are strange Hells’ are the opening words of the poem ‘Strange Hells’, and the lines addressed to his ‘Dear Battalion’ come from ‘Farewell’. Both poems are quoted here from Oxford University Press’s new anthology, Poetry of the First World War, edited by Tim Kendall .

[illustrations: (i) the newly installed Gurney memorial windows by Tom Denny in the north chantry of Gloucester Cathedral’s Lady Chapel; (ii) and (iii) details from the Traherne windows in Hereford Cathedral: Traherne running, and swifts around the tower ; (iv) and  (v)  details from the Ivor Gurney windows. All photographs (c) Adrian Barlow