3 - The Later Years

Summary

SONNET. SEPTEMBER 1922

Fierce indignation is best understood by those

Who have time or no fear, or a hope in its real good

One loses it with a filed soul or in sentimental mood

Anger is gone with sunset, or flows as flows

The water in easy mill-runs; the earth that ploughs

Forgets protestation in its turning, the rood

Prepares, considers, fulfils, and the poppy's blood

Makes old the old changing of the headlands brows.

But the toad under the harrow toadiness

Is known to forget, and even the butterfly

Has doubts of wisdom when that clanking thing goes by

And's not distressed. A twisted thing keeps still

That thing easier twisted than a grocers bill

And no history of November keeps the guy.

This remarkable sonnet must have been written at the moment when Gurney's erratic behaviour was causing great concern, especially to his newly married brother Ronald, into whose house Gurney moved uninvited in September 1922. While there, Michael Hurd tells us, he ‘would shut himself in the front room… and shout for them to keep away. He would sit with a cushion on his head to guard against electric waves coming from the wireless…. He sneered at his brother's orthodoxies: “Only fools go to work – why don't you get someone else to keep you.” … He threatened suicide and called at the police station to demand a revolver.’ Not surprisingly, Ronald couldn't cope. Gurney was moved first to a convalescent home near Bristol and then, after two doctors had certified him as insane, to Barnwood House, a private asylum near Gloucester, which he entered on 28 September. He made two attempts to escape from Barnwood House, although on both occasions he was quickly recaptured, the second time when he walked into a police station, perhaps to repeat his demand for a revolver. Finally, on 21 December 1922, he was transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital at Dartford, where he was to spend the rest of his life.

There is no point in denying that at this time Gurney was in a dreadfully disturbed state of mind, a danger to himself and damnably unpleasant to others. On the other hand, ‘Sonnet. September 1922’ cannot be explained away as the incoherent ravings of an incurably sick man.