Poem of the month

selected by David Underdown

To His Love
By Ivor Gurney

He’s gone, and all our plans
    Are useless indeed.
We’ll walk no more on Cotswold
    Where the sheep feed
    Quietly and take no heed.

His body that was so quick
    Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn river
    Under the blue
    Driving our small boat through.

You would not know him now …
    But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
    With violets of pride
    Purple from Severn side.

Cover him, cover him soon!
    And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers –
    Hide that red wet
    Thing I must somehow forget.

At first sight lyrical and pastoral, the bleakness of the final line break is visceral. Ivor Gurney was born in Gloucester in 1890, the second child of a tailor and a seamstress. He was musical and sang as a chorister. His teacher, who also taught Vaughan Williams, regarded him as ‘hugely talented but unteachable’. Enlisting as a private soldier in the Gloucesters in 1915, he was working on his first book of poetry when wounded on the Western Front in April 1917. That September he was gassed at St Quentin and this exacerbated an existing bipolar condition. He survived the war but spent the last 15 years of his life in mental hospitals.