Wednesday, 24 February 2021

Memory - poetry analysis by Meg Crane

 Memory


When I was young my heart and head were light,
And I was gay and feckless as a colt
Out in the fields, with morning in the may,
Wind on the grass, wings in the orchard bloom.
O thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free
And all the paths led on from hawthorn-time
Across the carolling meadows into June.

But now my heart is heavy-laden. I sit
Burning my dreams away beside the fire:
For death has made me wise and bitter and strong;
And I am rich in all that I have lost.
O starshine on the fields of long-ago,
Bring me the darkness and the nightingale;
Dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home,
and silence; and the faces of my friends.

Crai

In February 1918, with the Craiglockhart interlude behind him, Sassoon was back on ‘active service’ – but almost as far away from the fighting as it was possible to be and still remain in Europe. The First Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers had been ordered to Limerick, in the south-west of Ireland. In theory they were a garrison force: only twenty months had elapsed since the Easter Rising of 1916, and in less than another year the Irish War of Independence would break out – but in February 1918 everything seems to have been quiet and still. Sassoon, waiting to know where he would be sent next, used the time to compose and revise. Three poems, linked by theme and imagery, date from this period: 'Together', 'Idyll' and 'Memory'. 

'Together' is the concluding poem in Counterattack (1918); the other two appear in Picture Show (1919). ‘Together’ and ‘Idyll’ – both of them elegies for Sassoon’s hunting-field friend Gordon Harbord, killed in August 1917 during the Third Battle of Ypres – have been discussed previously in this blog (see https://sassoonfellowship.blogspot.com/2016/02/together.html/. Both poems embody the idea that the dead continue to live on, in some zone between actuality and imagination. This is a recurring theme with Sassoon, who in this way at various times brings back to life other loved figures - his brother Hamo, David Thomas, Marcus Goodall. These visitations are sometimes consoling ('Falling Asleep'), sometimes the opposite - in 'Sick Leave' the still-living dead come back to reproach him.

'Idyll' and 'Together' – in spite of the fact that they were published in different collections – form a diptych: 'Idyll' is a morning and summer poem; 'Together' an evening and autumn poem. 'Idyll' is entirely consolatory – the reunion with the dead one is assured, and will resolve all grief. 'Together' is more ambivalent: the narrator looks ahead to a return to his old life on the hunting field, and predicts that he will forget his friend during the daytime, but will remember him, and re-encounter him, as evening falls – and will then lose him again 'at the stable door'. As I was writing this, it occurred to me for the first time that SS may have been reciprocally influenced by Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', in which remembrance of the dead has been absorbed into the perpetual cycle of morning and evening, day and night. At Craiglockhart, Sassoon had given Owen generous and perceptive advice in the drafting of that poem, which deals, not with the physical return of the dead, but with their physical commemoration, which prolongs the sense of their physical existence.

All of these, and of some other characteristic Sassoon themes, play their part in 'Memory'. The imagery of birds, flowers and music recurs, as do the words 'dream' and 'morning'. However, in some ways 'Memory' is the reverse of 'Idyll'. One striking difference is the way in which the narrator of 'Memory' perceives and presents himself. In 'Idyll' and 'Together', the narrator seems to be a young man, prematurely cut off from his friends and companions, but sure that he will find them again in some form. In 'Memory' he seems to be presenting himself as an old man, a survivor with no future, only a past. He begs that past to return, but the poem brings no certainty that it will do so.

When I first encountered this poem, I assumed it had been written many years after the end of the war, so it is startling to discover that it dates only from February 1918, when Sassoon was still no more than thirty-one. The narrator begins with 'When I was young …', but counters this in the second stanza with 'But now …', implying that old age has set in. The remembered young man of stanza 1 is associated with morning, springtime and open spaces – 'meadows' and (another of Sassoon's favourite words) 'weald'. The season here is spring passing into summer, and the narrator is completely at one with his natural surroundings. The past is relentlessly romanticised: by contrast, in the early poem 'Before Day' (1908) the very young Sassoon had used the same landscape to convey a distinct sense of melancholy and solitude. The only possible note of melancholy in stanza 1 of 'Memory', however, is the transition from 'may' (the blossom as well as the month) in l.3 to 'hawthorn' in l.7. Hawthorn in country superstition has associations of grief – legend has it that Christ's cross was made of hawthorn wood, and Sassoon himself references this tradition in another, earlier poem, 'Morning Glory'. But the volta, or transition point, between the two stanzas is a line expressing joy and energy, and a sense of complete oneness with Nature – 'across the carolling meadows into June'. 

The second stanza begins with a shift of tone and time: 'But now…'.  In my January contribution to this blog I mentioned Sassoon's repeated use of the imagery of loads and burdens (including the burden of Christ's cross), and we find this image once again here: 'But now my heart is heavy-laden'. The sense of being weighed down is reinforced by the image of the once-active poet sitting in front of the fire, like an old man. At Limerick in the daytime, Sassoon hunted, and pursued an apparently cheerful social life, not unlike the horsey life he had led in Kent before the War. This is the other side of the picture: the solitary figure once the sun has gone down. A choice of words it is easy to overlook is found in l.2 of the second stanza. The narrator is not dreaming his dreams, or reliving his dreams, as an old man might be expected to do: he is 'burning [them] away' – which is the image that Hamlet's father uses for the purging of his sins. So the fire in Sassoon's poem is not comforting or sleep-inducing, but purgatorial. The narrator is proud, even possessive, of his sorrow - 'I am rich in all that I have lost'. He is also at least half-proud of the way in which he has shed his 'gay and feckless' young self: 'death has made me wise and bitter and strong'. Of those three adjectives, only 'bitter' is ambivalent – if the poet means what he says, then to have been made 'wise' and 'strong' is to have emerged wounded but victorious. If he is also 'bitter', then he is armed, but has lost something too.

So perhaps he only half-means it – or to be wise and bitter and strong is after all no compensation for 'all that I have lost'. The poem ends on a passionate, impossible wish: for the stars to return in their courses, bringing back 'the fields of long-ago', the birdsong, the lost 'wealds' … and, not music, as in 'Idyll', but 'silence; and the faces of my friends'. Hamlet has already reared his head here: perhaps Sassoon echoes Hamlet's self-epitaph: 'the rest is silence'. And yet, even after that wish for dignity and peace, comes the atavistic, 'hopeless longing to regain' what is lost – and this time we believe it is lost – 'the faces of my friends'.


Saturday, 13 February 2021

As seen on screen

Things are not getting any easier for literary societies in lockdown, but at least we are becoming wiser to the possibilities of electronic communication. We've simply had to.

    There is a lot to be said for making our activities available online. Many members, even those of an advanced age, have begun using tools like Zoom and Facebook in a way they would never have dreamed of attempting a year ago. Much as we may prefer the written word to a screen adaptation, the appetite for recorded and/or streamed content is increasing almost daily. Perhaps you, too, have found yourself unable to attend an interesting live seminar on your computer because you were already booked for another live seminar at the same time. With luck, you will have been able to access a recording of the one you missed.

    Many societies have been slow to adapt to "new technology" in the twenty or thirty years it's been available. I've come across many speakers at local meetings who prefer slide projectors to Powerpoint and I've even seen some, in recent years, struggling with OHP projectors, which - let's face it - were never very user-friendly even when there was no alternative. Sometimes this is just a practical matter: buying new electronic equipment costs money.

    It doesn't necessarily work, anyway. This blog, for example, has been in existence for about eight years, and in that time the readership has shrunk rather than grown. The same goes for our Facebook group - regularly used and contributed to by many people, but only around a quarter of those who are members of the group (many of whom are not actually members of the Sassoon Fellowship) ever actually look at the posts, and still fewer join in the discussions. Hence we have held back from attempting to expand into other areas such as Twitter and Instagram; it's not economical of effort.

    Nevertheless, the cancellation of so many live events has led to the societies I'm involved with having been obliged to hold AGMs and other events online, and most of us got off to a shaky start. Even joining a Zoom meeting requires a certain amount of skill, let alone hosting one, as I've been forced to do many times now. For me, however, the revelation has been YouTube. Not that I was unfamiliar with YouTube before last February. I've been using it for years to look for songs I couldn't remember, music I couldn't listen to because I don't have a working CD player in the house, ancient TV programmes that I thought I would never see again, and so on.

    The YouTube landscape has also changed in the past year, however, and for a while even the owners of YouTube could not cope with the sudden upturn in demand. Until the autumn, I didn't even know that you could livestream a Zoom meeting straight to YouTube to enable you to reach a bigger audience without having to pay extra for a Zoom upgrade; it was only when I saw an academic institution doing it that I realised. In September, thanks to my daughter who already know much (but not all) of this, I sat in a small bedroom surrounded by microphones and computers and hosted the AGM of the Barbara Pym Society, followed by a one hour "mini-conference", attended by delegates from all over Europe and the United States as well as the UK. (See my earlier post on this subject.) In doing so, I learned a lot about what NOT to do, as well as what worked well. 

    From there it was a short hop to participating in the "lockdown reading" of a classic novel, and this has spurred on the Sassoon Fellowship to attempt comparable feats, although we are a long way from fulfilling our ambitions yet. We have, however, uploaded two recorded interviews to our new YouTube "channel" (see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1wV-qorFfCLDaWhmIK6Adw/videos ) for the benefit of our members and others who are interested in Sassoon and his work. The Wilfred Owen Association has held live seminars on individual poems by Owen. Even the small local history society of which I'm a member has managed to hold regular monthly meetings on Zoom.

    One of the most interesting things about this trend is that we are attracting a whole new audience. Elderly and disabled people who always found it a chore to attend meetings in person are catching on quickly. Others who were unable to attend events because of transport difficulties, cost, or simply the time involved, are able to access us on the small screen and sometimes to participate actively.  Don't forget, when you are viewing or joining in, that there may be substantial effort involved in setting up these events and the organisers (although we often feel more like the "disorganised") may not be able to keep it up indefinitely. But for the time being, enjoy them, appreciate them, and - best of all - offer constructive feedback. At the time of writing, no one really knows what the future has in store.