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2.0
Most of Gurney’s poems are variations on the theme of the homesick soldier, ruminating on England’s green and pleasant land. Imagine Housman’s Shropshire lad (if, in this instance, the lad in question had been raised in Gloucestershire instead) dropped into the trenches and you would not go far wrong.
Through all his poems, there is a seam of trenchant English jingoism, albeit one limited to defending the hayricks of the Cotswold and the freedom to swim the Severn. Gurney has no Damascene conversion from wide-eyed patriot to chronicler of the horrors of war like you see in Sassoon’s oeuvre (although they are both, more or less, the same calibre of poet). Nor does Gurney’s verse come close to the best of the art produced by WW1 soldiers (it hardly seems fair to hold this volume up to, say, David Jones’ In Parenthesis).
If you want an idea of Gurney’s style, you could read just two poems in this volume: The Fire Kindled (‘But these are not my rivers/And these are useless dreams’) and To His Love (‘Hide that red wet/Thing I must somehow forget.’)
Falls short of the target more times than it hits. One for the WW1 poetry completionists.
Through all his poems, there is a seam of trenchant English jingoism, albeit one limited to defending the hayricks of the Cotswold and the freedom to swim the Severn. Gurney has no Damascene conversion from wide-eyed patriot to chronicler of the horrors of war like you see in Sassoon’s oeuvre (although they are both, more or less, the same calibre of poet). Nor does Gurney’s verse come close to the best of the art produced by WW1 soldiers (it hardly seems fair to hold this volume up to, say, David Jones’ In Parenthesis).
If you want an idea of Gurney’s style, you could read just two poems in this volume: The Fire Kindled (‘But these are not my rivers/And these are useless dreams’) and To His Love (‘Hide that red wet/Thing I must somehow forget.’)
Falls short of the target more times than it hits. One for the WW1 poetry completionists.
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