To God and The Silent One

To God

Why have you made life so intolerable

And set me between four walls, where I am able

Not to escape meals without prayer, for that is possible

Only by annoying an attendant. And tonight a sensual

Hell has been put on me, so that all has deserted me

And I am merely crying and trembling in heart

For Death, and cannot get it. And gone out is part

Of sanity. And there is dreadful hell within me.

And nothing helps. Forced meals there have been and electricity

And weakening of sanity by influence

That's dreadful to endure. And there is Orders

And I am praying for death, death, death,

And dreadful is the indrawing or out-breathing of breath,

Because of the intolerable insults put on my whole soul,

Of the soul loathed, loathed, loathed of the soul.

Gone out every bright thing from my mind.

All lost that ever God himself designed.

Not half can be written of cruelty of man, on man.

Not often such evil guessed as between Man and Man.

The Silent One

Who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two–

Who for his hours of life had chattered through

Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent;

Yet faced unbroken wires; stepped over, and went,

A noble fool, faithful to his stripes – and ended.

But I weak, hungry, and willing only for the chance

Of line – to fight in the line, lay down under unbroken

Wires, and saw the flashes, and kept unshaken.

Till the politest voice – a finicking accent, said:

‘Do you think you might crawl through, there: there's a hole? In the afraid

Darkness, shot at; I smiled, as politely replied –

‘I'm afraid not, Sir.’ There was no hole way to be seen.

Nothing but chance of death, after tearing of clothes.

Kept flat, and watched the darkness, hearing bullets whizzing –

And thought of music – and swore deep heart's deep oaths.

(Polite to God) – and retreated and came on again.

Again retreated – and a second time faced the screen.

Ivor Gurney was born in Gloucester in 1890. He was a chorister at King's College Gloucester and studied music under Sir Charles Stanford at the Royal College of Music 1911–1914. His contemporaries included Vaughan Williams, He served in the First World War from 1915–1917, when he was gassed at Passchendaele, He was admitted to Barnwood House Gloucester in 1922 and later transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital, where he died in 1937. The two poems shown here were written between 1919 and 1925. © Carcanet Press Limited.