'Although Too Many Readers Have Forgotten'

My education continues. Here is “Artillery” (Hazards, 1930) by the English poet Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, previously unknown to me: 

“All night I sat beside the bed

And watched that senseless moaning head

Backwards and forwards toss and toss,

When suddenly he sat upright

And fixed his eyes upon the light

With sightless glassy stare and said—

We filled the ditch up with the dead

To get the guns across.”

 

Gibson (1878-1962) was born in Northumberland, published his first poems in 1895 and first collection in 1902. He is usually pigeonholed among the Georgian poets. Once the Great War started, Gibson tried four times to enlist in the Army but was rejected because of poor eyesight. He had already befriended Rupert Brooke and was writing about the war from the home front. Gibson was finally permitted to enlist in 1917, in the Army Service Corps Motor Transport, and spent the rest of the war in London. He never saw combat but wrote dozens of poems about the war. Many are notably realistic and unsentimental. See “November 11^th,” also from Hazards:

 

“She wakened in the night to hear

Her son’s voice moaning in her ear—

I cannot rest, I cannot sleep . . .

Day after day I hear you weep,

And even in deepest slumber, yet

Your heart remembers. Oh, forget,

Forget your son, dear mother! I,

Till you forget me, cannot die,

I cannot wholly die, for still

About the battle-shattered hill

My ghost must wander restlessly

While anyone remembers me. . . .

Long since the living folk I knew

Have all forgotten, all but you;

And sore I long to rest, to die

Once and for ever, long to lie

At peace, and sleep and sleep . . . but I,

I cannot sleep till you forget.”

 

Folklore tells us the dead are not truly dead until the last person who remembers them has also died. It’s an attractive thought, encouraging us to build memorials, write elegies and requiems, and never forget. Out of the blue, R.L. Barth sent me this poem, with an epitaph for a title -- “Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962)”:

 

“Turned down four times when trying to enlist,

At last you were accepted—Service Corps,

Motor Transport—in 1917,

A private, thirty-nine and Blighty-bound,

Never to see the trenches nor face peril.

 

“But two years earlier, you published Battle

Based on shrewd reading and close listening

To soldiers’ tales and anecdotes with which,

Imaginatively, you fashioned poems

That realistically detailed the war.

 

“You were among the very first to do so;

The now more famous poets, Owen, Graves,

Gurney, Sassoon, all read and were influenced

By you, and your best work still rivals theirs,

Although too many readers have forgotten.”