'Winter Came in August Killing Fruit and Seed'

A sad and sorely final yet incomplete tagline found after a poem in the Winter 1986 issue of The American Scholar: 

“Edward Case’s work has appeared in various journals, including the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Modern Age. This poem was taken from a collection of recent work that he was preparing for publication at the time of his death last summer.”

 

It reads like the epitaph on a stone in a cemetery one will never again visit. Who is Case? Why have I never heard of him? How did he die? Here is the accompanying poem, “As Grammarians”:

 

“This life which is a sentence

Is also a declaration.

We make the sense of it

In our own terms.

As grammarians

We assert our meaning,

In what we decline,

In what we affirm,

In the conjugation of love,

In the predicates

And imperatives

And ambiguities

Of prosaic choice

We essay briefly

To define ourselves

Before the stop.”

 

A clever exercise in double-meanings. Not a syllable out of place. The author has taken pains to make it work. No filler and nothing to excess. It leaves me wanting to read more by this guy. Here is “1914,” one of four poems by Case published in the October 1985 issue of The New Criterion:

 

“The pearly throat of that peacock age was torn

In summer and its shriek yet grows, screaming

Unheard in all our days and deeds, like static

From a falling star, unseeming as the dust

Of space, yet crying murder as it bleeds.

So the voiceless moon imparting gravity

To frivolous tides roils the world unseen

But never hides its light nor ever slows.

 

“Slain then the nightingale and the steed,

The garden wall then fallen, the enchanted

Wood a tiring room for weary death

And summer’s lawn sown to widows’ weed.

For winter came in August killing fruit and seed.

In that broken season forever died the rose.”

 

“Winter came in August”: The Great War changed everything and we’re still dealing with its repercussions. Case’s poem reminds me of Ford Madox Ford, who enlisted in the Welch Regiment in 1915 at age forty-two. A year later, twelve days after the start of the battle, he was sent to the Somme in northeastern France in time for the bloodiest one-day engagement in English military history. Ford was blown into the air by the explosion of a German shell, suffered memory loss and for three weeks remained incapacitated.

 

Ford was hospitalized again with lung problems exacerbated by exposure to poison gas, and in March 1917 was sent home as an invalid. For the rest of the war he was stationed on the North Yorkshire coast, where he helped train troops. Ford was promoted to lieutenant and then to captain, and in 1918 held the temporary rank of brevet major. On Armistice Day, Ford was still in North Yorkshire. He was discharged in 1919. Ford went on to write the greatest of all Great War fiction, the tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28).

 

In a 1931 letter to T.R. Smith, Ford writes: “The world before the war is one thing and must be written down in one manner; the after-war world is quite another and calls for quite different treatment.”

 

Does anyone know anything about Edward Case?