The “Country Life” Anthology of Verse

by Algernon Blackwood

Here is a little book of joy, of comfort, too⁠—qualities of primary importance at a time like this. It is a book of songs, of singing. I should like to send a copy to every trench; they would be well thumbed, well loved copies before a week was over. “You might send a few books, too,” wrote a soldier recently, “and don’t forget a bit of poetry, mind. Only⁠—it must be good, simple stuff⁠—the real article, something the men can understand. They read poetry now⁠—when they can get it. They love it.” Well, here is the very book to send. It has happiness and beauty in it on every page, it has depth as well, above all there is courage, hope and tenderness: it holds the essential English spirit. With hardly an exception, the poems have sprung from hearts touched into fire by emotion⁠—true songs, that is to say, and, while technique may vary, the authentic singing is almost always there. It is what the soldier called “the real article.” I am sending copies out to the trenches; I hope others who read these words will do the same.

All the poems have appeared at one time or another in Country Life⁠—certainly, the colour and fragrance of English country life rise from the very ink and paper. Open the little volume, and you hear the mavis sing; the murmur of woodland streams among the beeches haunts the ear; the poplars rustle; you see the stars above the Sussex downs. The selection obviously has been a work of love, but the fine taste that made it has done so with the heart as well as with the head. In my travels, with luggage reduced to a minimum, six books has been my rule. I must now take seven. “Experience shows,” writes the editor in a word of introduction, “that in times of greatest stress what is real in poetry comes as a solace because it corresponds with the depth, tenderness, and emotional force evoked by stress and grief. Soldiers in the trenches have developed a hitherto latent taste for poetry, just as they have shown a resurgence of religious feeling.” In other words, the heart is open, and must be fed. And I would quote another passage, since it expresses better than I can precisely what I feel about this particular anthology: “There are poems to suit many tastes, but there are none given over to vague, ill defined emotion or any merely fanciful sentimentality. There are poems for today of ‘the lads who have gone to the war,’ and of those who will come back no more. The poems of loss and regret will appeal to the many who have heard the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death. And it is hoped that the beautiful poems of our countryside, of our grey seas and tumbling burns, will be read with joy by soldiers far from home and land where their hearts are. May they prove to be pictures as intimate to their hearts as the remembrance of dear familiar faces.”

In any brief notice of a book of poems that gives pleasure as this one does, it is difficult, and invidious, perhaps, to make quotations. Many poets of established fame have contributed to Country Life; others who have since attained to distinction sent to it their earliest verses; unknown writers made their appearance, too, in the postbag from all parts of the world. In the 200 pages there is something to suit all tastes. From the searching lines called “Territorials,” by Agnes Falconer, and a very poignant poem of Miss Friedlaender (“Passover”) at the beginning, down to the beauty and restrained sweetness of C. F. Keary’s “Valedictio” towards the close, there is a rich choice to be enjoyed. The deft arrangement of the contents makes it easy to find something for the dominant mood of the reader at the moment: “The Days of War,” “Desideria,” “Country Life,” “Love and Life,” “Poems of Places,” “Sea Magic,” “Lullabies,” and so forth. “I saw history in a poet’s song,” as John Drinkwater puts it, “and I saw the glory of all dead men in a shadow that went by the side of me.” This modest little book enshrines a moment of our history in its songs of the war; it records what our singers (and minor singers are just as authentic as the major singers!), have felt and thought. They interpret for the army of the inarticulate. Read the “Wykhamist” (Nora Griffiths) with its touch of fire at the close:

You⁠ ⁠… “died of wounds,” they told me,
.⁠ ⁠… Yet your feet
Pass with the others down the twilit street.

and Isabel Butchart’s “Separation” and Agnes Falconer’s “In vain, in vain and all in vain,” with its courageous note, “there is no sorrow⁠—save our own.” It is, as I say, difficult to quote with fairness from this delightful book. It holds many names well known to lovers of true poetry: Henley, Jane Barlow, Laurence Binyon, Walter de la Mar, Margaret Sackville, Laurence Housman, Violet Jacobs, the Laureate himself, with William H. Davies, Henry Newbolt, James Elroy Flecker, Fiona Macleod and many, many others. Mrs. Gurney and A. Hepple Dickinson are well loved by the readers of Country Life, and are exquisitely represented here. I hope by Christmas there will be many of our fighting men in the trenches who will taste the joy and comfort that these poems hold. They will realise, at any rate, that all over England there are singers who think of them with gratitude and love. It is a book to slip into your next parcel!