Report on Experience by Edmund Blunden, with notes by Ira Maine Esq, Poetry Editor
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.
I have seen a green county, useful to the race,
Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,
Even the last rat and last kestrel banished―
God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.
I knew Seraphina ; Nature gave her hue,
Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.
I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden ;
She turned to harlotry ;― this I took to be new.
Say what you will, our God sees how then run.
These disillusions are his curious proving
That he loves humanity and will go on loving ;
Over them are faith, life, virtue in the sun.
Notes by Ira Maine Esq
Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)
Blunden was a poet and academic whose contemporaries included Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. He survived two years in the Ypres and Passchendale trenches and earned a Military Cross. Blunden held professorships in English at Oxford, Hong Kong and Tokyo. In his long and varied life he was hugely prolific and was criticized in his lifetime for producing too much material! Graves always argued that the practice of poetry cannot be and must not be, a part time profession; he believed in the ‘boots and all’ approach. Blunden, on the other hand, to confound this idea, on finding he could not support himself by poetry alone, took up positions at the institutions mentioned above. Graves ‘boots and all’ argument is called into doubt when we look at the modern and recently deceased poet, Seamus Heaney who held professorships at various times in Ireland, England and the US. Nobel Prize winner Heaney is rightfully regarded is as one of the finest poets of the 20th century.
Blunden begins his poem, ‘Report on Experience’ with:
‘…I have been young, and now am not too old;…’
He is older, more experienced, perhaps more cynical now. He was eighteen years old in 1914 and twenty two when he said goodbye to all that. But he is ‘not too old’, he tells us. Not too old? Not too old, I believe,to have forgotten the captains and the kings and their murderous, squalid ‘victories’, victories only achieved by uncounted thousands of deaths.
‘…I have seen the righteous forsaken, his health, his honour, his quality taken. This is not what we were formerly told….’
An entire culture of myth had been built in Britain around the Empire and the idea of glory and honour in war. Rule Britannia, The Buffs, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Rourkes Drift and ‘The Colours’ all contributed to persuading kids to join up with this apparently invincible moral army of both Empire and (dammit Sir!) civilization. There was honour and glory to be had! There was duty, loyalty to the Crown and the unshakeable certainty of the ‘Thin Red Line’. This was the propaganda; ‘…what we were formerly told…’ The reality was, of course, much less attractive. In the end the reality was the Great War and ‘…a country knocked silly with guns and mines… [Flanders Fields et al]…its villages vanished…even the last rat and kestrel banished…’
The Pax Britannica was in the end little different from the Pax Romana which it attempted to imitate. Julius Caesar, two thousand years earlier, had increased the size of the Roman Empire by pacifying the people who occupied the land we now call France. Nowadays historians refer to this ‘pacification’ as genocide, and note that at least a million people died in order to achieve the Roman ‘peace’.
‘…God bless us all, this was a peculiar grace…’ Peculiar indeed: a grace warped and twisted into an unrecognizable shape through the casual sacrifice of an entire generation.
The third verse talks of ‘…Seraphina…one from Eden…’ who. ‘… turned to harlotry;-‘
To the best of my knowledge, Seraphina was a Catholic saint (1238-1253) whose father died when she was very young. Soon after this she developed a medical condition which left her in constant pain and unable to move. She devoted what remained of her short life to the care of the sick and the poor, living a hermit-like existence at home and being carried about on a stretcher.
If I am correct here, then Seraphina in this poem represents the innocence of the young men who joined up in response to an al-encompassing, Gung-Ho, death or glory propaganda and who were cruelly disillusioned by the reality. On the battlefield, in the sodden muckholes of the trenches, the men are pinned down, unable to move, in physical and psychological pain, just like Seraphina, whilst the wounded and broken are carried off to field hospitals by stretcher. This is why Blunden saw Seraphina’s ‘…smile warp…her lyric deaden…’ Blunden sees the slaughter as innocence betrayed, and a whole generation used for ‘…harlotry…’ on the battlefield.
In the final verse Blunden acknowledges that ‘…our God…loves humanity and will go on loving…’
The poet feels that ‘…these disillusions…’ this journey out of innocence, this discovery of how the world really is, is God’s way of ‘… proving that He loves humanity…’.
But it is a ‘…curious proving…’. Indeed it is, because if we look at the last line; ‘…Over them are faith, life, virtue in the sun…’.
Interposed now, between mankind (or perhaps Blunden) and God, between ‘…faith, life, virtue in the sun…’, and the musing mind of man, is the traumatic, wartime butchery of the mind which unerringly breeds, in the wake of so much death, the obvious and heretical question; does God exist at all?
At least to the few who have both experienced and survived war, He cannot possibly exist, or if he does, His agenda must be very different to the one we have imagined.
END