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Edmund Charles Blunden

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Edmund Blunden by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1920

Edmund Charles Blunden (November 1, 1896 – January 20, 1974) was an English poet, author and critic. Although not one of the top trio of English World War I writers, his works exerted important influence.

Quotes

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In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there—and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags...
The charred stub outspeaks the living tree.
  • At Quincy's moat the squandering village ends,
    And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends
    Of all the village, two old dames that cling
    As close as any trueloves in the spring.
    • "Almswomen", st. 1. The Waggoner, and Other Poems (1920) p. 15
  • And nigh this toppling reed, still as the dead
    The great pike lies, the murderous patriarch,
    Watching the waterpit shelving and dark
    Where through the plash his lithe bright vassals thread....
    He on the sandbank lies,
    Sunning himself long hours
    With stony gorgon eyes:
    Westward the hot sun lowers.
    • "The Pike", sts. 4 and 6. The Waggoner, &c. (1920) pp. 19–20
  • Here they went with smock and crook,
       Toiled in the sun, lolled in the shade,
    Here they mudded out the brook
       And here their hatchet cleared the glade:
    Harvest-supper woke their wit,
    Huntsmen’s moon their wooings lit.
    • "Forefathers", st. 1. The Shepherd, and Other Poems of Peace and War (1922) p. 14
  • Like the bee that now is blown
       Honey-heavy on my hand,
    From the toppling tansy-throne
       In the green tempestuous land,—
    I’m in clover now, nor know
    Who made honey long ago.
    • "Forefathers", st. 6. The Shepherd, &c. (1922) p. 15
  • Old farm-houses with their white faces
    Fly, and their ghosts have taken their places;
       Even the signposts like grim liars
       Point to losing brakes and briars.
    • "Evening Mystery", st. 3. The Shepherd, &c. (1922) p. 29
  • Can she who shines so calm be fear?
    What poison pours she in slumber's ear?
    • "Evening Mystery", st. 6. The Shepherd, &c. (1922) p. 30
  • Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
    I sit in solitude and only hear
    Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
    The lost intensities of hope and fear;
    In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
    On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
    The very books I read are there—and I
    Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags
    Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
    Into green places here, that were my own;
    But now what once was mine is mine no more,
    I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
    With such strong gentleness and tireless will
    Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
    Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
    And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.
    • "Festubert, 1916", sts. 1 and 2. The Shepherd, &c. (1922) pp. 58-59
  • The hop-poles stand in cones,
       The icy pond lurks under,
    The pole-tops steeple to the thrones
       Of stars, sound gulfs of wonder;
    But not the tallest there, ’tis said,
    Could fathom to this pond’s black bed.
    • "The Midnight Skaters", st. 1. English Poems (1925) p. 28
  • Then is not Death at watch
       Within those secret waters?
    What wants he but to catch
       Earth’s heedless sons and daughters?
    With but a crystal parapet
    Between, he has his engines set.
    • "The Midnight Skaters", st. 2. English Poems (1925) p. 28
  • Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,
       Use him as though you love him;
    Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
    And let him hate you through the glass.
    • "The Midnight Skaters", st. 3. English Poems (1925) p. 29
  • Cricket to us, like you, was more than play,
    It was a worship in the summer sun.
    • "Pride of the Village", st. 2. English Poems (1925) p. 31
  • This was my country, and it may be yet,
    But something flew between me and the sun.
    • "The Resignation", st. 3. Retreat (1928) p. 36
  • The field and wood, all bone-fed loam,
    Set up a roaring harvest-home.
  • I saw the sunlit vale, and the pastoral fairy-tale;
    The sweet and bitter scent of the may drifted by;
    And never have I seen such a bright bewildering green.
      But it looked like a lie,
      Like a kindly meant lie.
    • "The Failure", st. 1; in The London Mercury (October 1929) p. 555
  • I have been young, and now am not too old;
    And I have seen the righteous forsaken,
    His health, his honour and his quality taken.
      This is not what we were formerly told.
    • "Report on Experience", st. 1. Near and Far (1929) p. 58
  • To-day's house makes to-morrow’s road;
      I knew these heaps of stone
    When they were walls of grace and might,
    The country’s honour, art’s delight
    That over fountain'd silence show'd
      Fame's final bastion.
    • "The Survival", st. 1. Poems (1930) p. 291
  • I am for the woods against the world,
      But are the woods for me?
    • "The Kiss", st. 1; in The New Statesman (28 February 1931) p. 17
  • Australia once produced poets who were English poets a little out of touch; now she has her own; and O'Reilly with ball in hand is quite the parallel of an Australian poet, territorially distinct in rhythm, passion, scheme and transition.
    • Cricket Country (1944) Ch. VII: "Card of the Match"

Quotes about Blunden

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  • It [Undertones of War] is beautifully written and rich in literary references. More significantly, it is a lament for the destruction of the French and Belgian countryside, and by implication, the threat to natural peace and beauty everywhere by the savage, impersonal menace of war. As Paul Fussell has perceptively written, for Blunden the countryside was not merely beautiful; it was as magical and as precious to him as English literature: "For it to be brutally torn up by shells is a scandal close to murder". It is essentially in this poignant sense of natural destruction and needless waste (including the loss of animals and old buildings as well as people) that Blunden could be construed as "anti-war". He had little sense of political causation or strategic factors, seeing the conflict rather in terms of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or the effects of a drastic climate change.
    • Brian Bond, Survivors of a Kind: Memoirs of the Western Front (2008), pp. 35-36
  • An extended pastoral elegy in prose is what Blunden's Undertones of War (1928) may be called. Whatever it is (G. S. Fraser once called it "the best war poem" and printed some of it as free verse in the London Magazine), no one disagrees that together with Sassoon's and Graves's "memoirs" it is one of the permanent works engendered by memoirs of the war. Its distinction derives in large part from the delicacy with which it deploys the properties of traditional English literary pastoral in the service of the gentlest (though not always the gentlest) kind of irony. If Spenser or Milton or Gray or Collins or Clare or the author of Thyrsis had fought in the Great War, any one of them could have used Blunden's final image to end a memoir of it. With a due sense of theatrical costume and an awareness of a young subaltern's loving responsibility for the flock under his care, Blunden brings Undertones of War to a close by calling himself "a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat" (314). That characterization is English to a fault, and beautiful.
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