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Okay, let's let's make a start.

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Thank you very much, everyone, for coming.

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I hope you're not here to see John Garth,

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who unfortunately was meant
to be presenting today, but.

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And couldn't because he was,
as I mentioned last week, he was tracked

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as part of the hurricane in Florida and
was dealing with all the fallout of that.

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So, I've stepped in, to offer a talk on

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token and GB Smith, and I've entitled it
to Forgotten War Poets.

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And this is, this is cutting edge research
because

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a lot of what I'm going to talk about,
particularly with token,

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has only been available
for about five weeks.

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So this is this is pretty new.

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I'll come onto all that in a second.

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But I thought I might start just,
with this quote.

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It's quite a well-trodden
quote from the preface

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to the Lord of the rings that came out
in the second edition in 1965.

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It seems now often forgotten that to be
caught in use by 1914 was no less hideous

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an experience to to be involved in 1939
and the following years.

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By 1918,
all but one of my close friends were dead.

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Now it's interesting why Tolkien chose
to write that and put it in,

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possibly as a
reaction to some of the misinterpretations

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of the Lord of the rings that had happened
in the previous decade or so,

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possibly also 1965

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1964, the 50th anniversary
of the First World War.

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The country was awash with nostalgia,
with events surrounding it,

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and he just felt inspired
to talk about it.

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This talk, though,

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is not about how the First World
War influences the Lord of the rings.

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I will come on to that a bit,
but it really is about these

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these two men, these two young men,
two friends,

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GB Smith and J.R.R.

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Tolkien.

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And their poetical reaction to the war,
which for the first time

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we can now judge side by side.

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So I appreciate that people may not know
who who we're talking about here.

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Well, I assume you know, J.R.R.

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Tolkien is, but we'll go through that.

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So JB Smith, Geoffrey Bak Smith was born
in 1894, gives the plot away.

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He he dies in 1916.

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So we visit King Edward's
and he was a member of that.

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Really close knit groups of friends
Rob Gilson, Christopher Wiseman,

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Smith and Tolkien, the Tccb,
yes, the Tea Club

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and Peruvian society,
which they had at the school.

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Smith comes up to corpus in 1913.

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Is an exhibition there in history.

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And then he goes into the Lancashire
fusileers using the Ox and Bucks,

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but then goes into Lancashire
fusileers in April 1915.

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He sent to France November 1915,

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and he's there throughout
the battle of the Somme in 1916.

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But unfortunately he gets hit by shrapnel
and dies

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on the 3rd of December 1960.

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Token, on the other hand,

53
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Matt Smith at school were great friends,

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and when Smith comes up to college here,
they become even closer.

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Token.

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By that time, it's
been a year in extra college

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where he's studying classics
and then moves to English.

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This is all hopefully
well familiar to you,

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but token eventually becomes
commissioned in the Lancashire Fusileers.

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He desperately wanted to go
in the same battalion as Smith, but

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they just didn't, agree to that.

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And token doesn't get out to France
to 5 or 6 months later than Smith.

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So he's out there in June.

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Not a good time to go out to the Western
Front, June, because a few days

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later, at the beginning of July,
the battle of the Somme starts,

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tokens actually on in
and out of the Somme, I will say.

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Then he contracted trench fever and spends
the rest of the war

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pretty much in England, moving around
various army camps and so on.

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So that's the biography.

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But now I just wanted to say a bit of
some comparison between the two of them.

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Some. Well,

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things that are the same,
but things are different.

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So first of all, let us consider Smith.

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So his collection of poetry, entitled
The Spring Harvest, was edited

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by Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman,
one of the other members of the.

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And it came out in 1918.

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So it was posthumous to Smith's death.

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The book is divided into three sections
entitled

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Two Legends, First Poems,
Last Poems and Burial of Sophocles.

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And you can see it. It's online.

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It's, there's the bell have,
facsimile editions of it and so on.

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In the introductory note,
which Tolkien himself wrote,

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he stated that the collection was made up
of poems written at various times, but

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importantly, the third part contains poems
written after the outbreak of the war.

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This is really helpful
because it doesn't really state that

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poems in the earlier part were written
after August 1914, and this indeed

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proves to be the case when we start
to look at some of the poetry in ash.

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I'll call it ash.

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Just for abbreviation,
we can find many poems that were written

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clearly after the outbreak of the war, but
or in the first two parts,

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in fact,
the book opens with an untitled poem.

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But the first line is
if there be one among the muses, nine

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which I which has these lines.

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Even so,

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my verses be composite of memories
and half hearted dreams welded together.

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Songs do ordnance
which might have been far others,

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but more scattered
and harried them with his ruthless flail.

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Mars being obviously the god of war.

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So we can assume this is a poem
from after the war,

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but we don't have access
to the manuscripts themselves.

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They're no really long,

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no longer available,
really, apart from a table of contents.

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So we have very little to go on
as to why Tolkien and Wiseman themselves,

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between them, struggled over
the chronology.

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We'll never know
what it may have been to conclude

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which what poems were in and what ground
in terms of that third section.

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But in summary about Smith's poetry,
we have a printed edition.

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We have final versions.

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We have no manuscripts, the dates,
we don't have any dates,

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but we have to sort of
go on what clues we can get.

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But most importantly, these have been
available for over 100 years.

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They've been in print.

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People have been reading them
for about 140 years.

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Same cannot be said for Tolkien.

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Some of his poetry, of course,
has been readily available to us.

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So in things
like his biography of middle earth

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and this the poems in the Lord
of the Rings and The Hobbit themselves,

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which we've read, and his, publication,
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil,

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which brings together
a few of the lighter pieces of verse.

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But it really wasn't until

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six weeks ago

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that we received the three volumes
of this, The Collected Poems of J.R.R.

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Tolkien.

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So finally, for the first time, we can see
many of these poems and read them.

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Hitherto we didn't have access to them.

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And if I'm going to be referring
to this, the first volume, 1910 to 1919,

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there are 63 poems in this volume alone.

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I would say probably about half of them
we've never really seen before.

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Unlike Smith, Tolkien's

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poetry, as we see it in these,
as this book now is much more fluid.

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Many have several titles and variants.

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So I'm going to give you an example.
I appreciate the project tourism.

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Great here. But let me just show you this.

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This is a poem called From Iffley,
which you can see there.

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And then you'll see that
he changes the title valedictory.

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It's written in 1915

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and sorry, 1911, but then he revisits it,

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probably in 1950, valedictory, possibly

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when he's graduating from Oxford,
but also when he's going off to war.

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And also the also saying this is way
presented in this edition.

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There are multiple variants.

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So there's one very the and C.

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So it's very different from Smith.

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And if you pick up the complete poems

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you expect just to be presented with poem
poem poem.

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You're in for a bit of a shock.

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You've got to do quite a bit of work now,
I said in the title.

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Why forgotten?

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Because first and foremost,

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if we think about war poetry,
particularly British war poetry,

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we readily think of Sassoon and Graves
and Wilfred Owen up there.

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But Smith is rarely anthologized.

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There's only a few times
his poems appear or referenced,

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and more often than not, it's
because he knew J.R.R.

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Tolkien.

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Tolkien, of course, is completely unknown
because we just didn't

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really have access to his war poetry
until now.

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That's not to put them in a
in a small category.

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Most of the poetry of the First World
War has now been forgotten.

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Most of the famous poets of the
First World War have now been forgotten.

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The ones that we know
and celebrate became famous afterwards,

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in many cases decades afterwards,
because of they were writing

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about the way that we had built up
this modern perception of the war.

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And then

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just,
to finish, before we get into some poetry,

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what do I mean by war poet
or a war poet or war poetry?

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Well, there's a few questions there.

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Is it any poem that has war in its theme?

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Is it written during a war, 1914 to 1918?

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Is it only poetry
that was written by combatants?

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If so, what about people on the home
front, or has a direct reference

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to the war may be written much later
and then refers back to the war?

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Well, in my my view,
it's all of these and above,

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but these are important questions

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when we come to consider
Smith to a degree, but very much J.R.R.

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Tolkien, as we will see.

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So let me start with Smith.

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And looking at the poems

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presented in In Spring Harvest,
as noted at the outset,

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you tempted to
just look at that third part

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if we want to think about his war poetry.

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But as I've said, you know,
that's open to discussion.

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So you've really got to look at the whole
collection in, in the spring half.

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It doesn't take long.

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But, you know,
there's not that many poems in there.

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But what can we say if we take a step back
about him as a poet?

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And none of this,
I think, is, is, familiar

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if you know, poetry from the time.

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But would you say that, first of all, he

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he is a poet that sticks to standard
various forms.

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He's not a modernist poet.

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He's not a tumor
or a PhD or a Richard Aldington.

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Some of those British poets that were
playing around with modern forms,

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he was immersed in traditional poetry,
radiates

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Blake's, Keats, Sydney, so on.

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And in a similar vein to what we

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to Smith,

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we also know that Tolkien, for example,
was immersed in traditional poetry.

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He was inspired by the Catholic poet
Francis Thompson,

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but also William Morris,
Swinburne, Tennyson and so on.

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And there's been much, much study of that.

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Smith, also like
Tolkien, was well drilled in the classics.

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And it's worth noting in his poetry
we get a lot of classical imagery,

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which you often do get in First World
War poetry,

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about spears and chariots and so on.

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And but now also the number of poems
that each entitled with a Latin phrase

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cry out to Spiritus era perennials, angley

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over Lieder, etc., etc..

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Smith, when you read it,
is actually quite an accomplished poet.

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And this is probably heresy
to say it far better than Tolkien.

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It has to be said,
he understands these forms

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and he can really work with them
so he could move

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from a petroski and sonnet
to a Shakespearean sonnet.

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00:11:25,418 --> 00:11:27,553
So those are basically sonnets,
same structure,

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but different writing schemes, slightly
different structures, I should say.

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00:11:32,191 --> 00:11:32,692
And in some

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cases even plays
around with the two in there deliberately.

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He also understands meter quite well.

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He writes a poem.

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It's an early poem actually called legend,
which is quite topical

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for this, this type of, seminar series.

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It's about a monk who returns
from the land of Faerie and comes back.

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Is it's
that typical? I've ended up in Faerie.

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I've been there for hundreds of years,
and he comes back from that,

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and he moves from blank verse
when he's talking about the rather

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serious, somber mood.

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00:12:02,555 --> 00:12:06,525
But when the monk starts describing,
the land, the fairy moves to a

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to try meter, which is a kind of larger,
that singsong sort of meter.

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So he plays around with this very well,

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and we shouldn't be surprised by this
with, as I said, read a lot of the poets,

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one volume, which he was particularly

232
00:12:22,208 --> 00:12:26,011
he points, token to as well
is the Georgian poets as well.

233
00:12:26,879 --> 00:12:31,484
And this I believe there's this in that
scene, his book which is coming out.

234
00:12:31,650 --> 00:12:33,853
Smith
there's a chapter on the Georgian poetry.

235
00:12:34,920 --> 00:12:36,655
So I won't say too much

236
00:12:36,655 --> 00:12:40,559
about Georgians themselves,
but one thing we would say that

237
00:12:41,060 --> 00:12:45,831
probably you would say, well, Smith
isn't really a Georgian poet is because

238
00:12:45,831 --> 00:12:50,102
the Georgian poets were really about
simple semantics, simple syntax as well.

239
00:12:50,102 --> 00:12:52,438
Try to make poetry very, very clear.

240
00:12:52,438 --> 00:12:54,707
And that's not the case with Smith.

241
00:12:54,707 --> 00:12:57,810
If we look at some of the words
that you appear in and his poetry

242
00:12:57,810 --> 00:13:01,280
is littered with them,
things like rhyme, grammar,

243
00:13:01,413 --> 00:13:05,251
which is an archaic form for grammar
that has a sort of magical connotation.

244
00:13:05,251 --> 00:13:10,122
Threnody, a song of lament,
the tryst for chaplet or venison.

245
00:13:10,122 --> 00:13:12,892
They may not be words
that are immediately familiar to you,

246
00:13:12,892 --> 00:13:15,895
but he litters his poetry with them,

247
00:13:16,562 --> 00:13:18,731
and it has to be said, so does Tolkien.

248
00:13:18,731 --> 00:13:20,733
Now don't why I'm using that.

249
00:13:20,733 --> 00:13:21,834
That's that's not working.

250
00:13:21,834 --> 00:13:24,870
Now, I don't know
if you can read this here, but

251
00:13:24,870 --> 00:13:27,840
this is this appears
in the third volume of the book,

252
00:13:28,140 --> 00:13:32,812
where the editors, have discovered
some poetry notebooks by Tolkien

253
00:13:32,978 --> 00:13:36,782
where basically what he was doing
was going through and is it says here

254
00:13:37,416 --> 00:13:41,754
making a list of some magnificent
words and phrases, and they're authors.

255
00:13:41,987 --> 00:13:46,392
So he was reading poetry and writing down
the words which he particularly liked.

256
00:13:46,659 --> 00:13:50,029
This is talking, of course,
and you can see that the words on the left

257
00:13:50,296 --> 00:13:54,767
and poets such as Tennyson Thompson,
who I've mentioned, Sydney

258
00:13:55,301 --> 00:13:58,337
Shakespeare, Chaucer
and so on, and there's there's a few pages

259
00:13:58,337 --> 00:14:03,542
of these things, and then you find these
words which he then uses in his poetry.

260
00:14:05,044 --> 00:14:06,946
It's worth saying, just at this point,

261
00:14:06,946 --> 00:14:10,015
that Tolkien does this rather to excess.

262
00:14:11,183 --> 00:14:14,787
And Tolkien's
early poetry is quite hard to get through.

263
00:14:15,120 --> 00:14:19,592
And Smith, in his letters
to talking, points out these weaknesses.

264
00:14:19,825 --> 00:14:23,762
And he said, complaining, there are a lot
of different tropes and adjectives

265
00:14:23,762 --> 00:14:28,200
in about half a sentence, and concluded
it was damn difficult to make out.

266
00:14:28,434 --> 00:14:31,270
Christopher Wiseman,
one of the other members of the,

267
00:14:31,270 --> 00:14:33,372
also writes to Tolkien's and says

268
00:14:33,372 --> 00:14:36,442
and quotes examples and says,
I really think you should tone this down.

269
00:14:36,942 --> 00:14:40,346
These were great
because they were are one glimpse,

270
00:14:41,080 --> 00:14:44,083
for, for many years about what
some of these poems might contained.

271
00:14:44,350 --> 00:14:47,353
And albeit they were critical,

272
00:14:47,820 --> 00:14:49,755
returning to Georgian poetry,

273
00:14:49,755 --> 00:14:52,758
it's often labeled as quite buoyant
and etc..

274
00:14:53,125 --> 00:14:58,030
Smith is not necessarily like that
because, as we will see

275
00:14:58,564 --> 00:15:00,733
in his later poetry, towards

276
00:15:00,733 --> 00:15:04,503
the period towards when he's about to die,
there is a pessimism and despair that

277
00:15:05,571 --> 00:15:06,872
begins to invade this.

278
00:15:06,872 --> 00:15:09,041
And we will also see that
with Tolkien's poetry.

279
00:15:09,041 --> 00:15:11,510
When I come onto it

280
00:15:11,510 --> 00:15:13,646
now, despite modern

281
00:15:13,646 --> 00:15:16,649
conceptions
of the poetry of the First World War,

282
00:15:16,649 --> 00:15:19,952
don't chant decorum as Siegfried Sassoon,
as the general of like,

283
00:15:19,952 --> 00:15:21,587
all of that sort of stuff.

284
00:15:21,587 --> 00:15:24,423
Most of the poetry written in Britain,

285
00:15:24,423 --> 00:15:27,660
during the First World
War, was incredibly patriotic.

286
00:15:28,260 --> 00:15:31,130
And for that reason,
it's probably now been forgotten.

287
00:15:31,130 --> 00:15:32,665
We just don't want to read that stuff

288
00:15:32,665 --> 00:15:36,302
that doesn't adhere to our sort of image
of the First World War,

289
00:15:36,936 --> 00:15:40,472
and where it was not overtly patriotic,
it was at least

290
00:15:40,472 --> 00:15:44,410
trying to encourage resolve in the
in the people who were involved in the war

291
00:15:44,410 --> 00:15:47,413
or the nation
as a whole, to continue that fight

292
00:15:48,180 --> 00:15:52,651
or to provide consolation to families
who had lost loved ones during the war.

293
00:15:53,619 --> 00:15:54,386
Now, it would be

294
00:15:54,386 --> 00:15:57,623
wrong to say that
Smith is a patriotic poet.

295
00:15:57,656 --> 00:16:01,160
Certainly nothing like you might get
with Kipling or Harold Begbie

296
00:16:01,160 --> 00:16:04,563
or something like that,
but he does dabble with these sentiments.

297
00:16:04,563 --> 00:16:08,334
In in a few poems
he writes a poem angry of a leader

298
00:16:08,334 --> 00:16:11,337
and send it to
England is strong in old age.

299
00:16:11,537 --> 00:16:15,841
Subtitled On the Declaration of War,
writes another poem called awakening.

300
00:16:15,841 --> 00:16:18,811
This idea of waking up
to the outbreak of the war.

301
00:16:20,479 --> 00:16:22,314
But more more evidence,

302
00:16:22,314 --> 00:16:25,718
I don't know if you can see
this is a sonnet to the British Navy,

303
00:16:26,018 --> 00:16:29,221
which is riven with the celebration
of of the Senior service.

304
00:16:30,255 --> 00:16:34,059
Defiance is evident in this poem,
with the declaration on line

305
00:16:34,059 --> 00:16:37,463
for this isle was ne'er so tamed
and ne'er shallbe.

306
00:16:37,863 --> 00:16:41,000
And he likens
the strength of the navy line seven.

307
00:16:41,266 --> 00:16:44,770
And the vessels that they were setting out
to fight the war into his own

308
00:16:44,770 --> 00:16:47,673
fragile body. Going into danger.

309
00:16:47,673 --> 00:16:53,579
He talks about a small vessel of one
smith ill wrought compared with the Smith

310
00:16:53,579 --> 00:16:57,016
vessels, the forging of these
great warships that were going out.

311
00:16:57,850 --> 00:17:00,953
And if you can see,
he ends with a prayer to God for resolve.

312
00:17:02,821 --> 00:17:03,489
A bit like.

313
00:17:03,489 --> 00:17:07,126
No, there's many poems like that
which, do that from the war,

314
00:17:07,126 --> 00:17:10,129
like John Oxenham or something like that.

315
00:17:10,629 --> 00:17:14,133
Tonkin gets quite close to this
with his poem Ferrum.

316
00:17:14,133 --> 00:17:18,170
It sang with,
which was written in December 1914.

317
00:17:18,771 --> 00:17:22,174
It's an odd poem, ten lines
written in hexameter.

318
00:17:23,609 --> 00:17:24,977
Basically Iron and Blood.

319
00:17:24,977 --> 00:17:28,113
It's playing on sort of some,
some of the slogans that we used,

320
00:17:28,514 --> 00:17:31,517
particularly in Prussian militarism
and so on.

321
00:17:32,284 --> 00:17:35,287
But the war here is spread dark in a gloom

322
00:17:35,521 --> 00:17:38,190
line, in a great gloom for line one.

323
00:17:38,190 --> 00:17:40,692
And a frightful hand
has fouled the heavens.

324
00:17:40,692 --> 00:17:44,763
Line two and four, which, presumably he's
referring to Imperial Germany

325
00:17:45,364 --> 00:17:46,198
as Smith did.

326
00:17:46,198 --> 00:17:49,301
Tolkien ends with a despairing call
for help from the heavens.

327
00:17:49,701 --> 00:17:51,336
Have pity. Oh, God.

328
00:17:51,336 --> 00:17:56,642
And here it's a bit like, the Catholic
ritual de Tenebrae in the church.

329
00:17:56,642 --> 00:17:59,678
When the lights go out,
gradually the candles are put out and,

330
00:18:01,547 --> 00:18:03,749
there is a declaration for God to help,

331
00:18:03,749 --> 00:18:08,020
which would have been very obviously,
pertinent to Tolkien as a, as a Catholic.

332
00:18:08,520 --> 00:18:11,457
So he does pick up these ideas of resolve.

333
00:18:11,457 --> 00:18:14,460
And I'll come on to another poem in a bit.

334
00:18:15,594 --> 00:18:19,465
Several themes run throughout the poems
in a spring harvest, due to confinement.

335
00:18:19,465 --> 00:18:20,899
I'm just going to pick on one.

336
00:18:20,899 --> 00:18:24,269
And that is the idea of then
and now over here.

337
00:18:24,269 --> 00:18:28,140
And there are many First World
War poets concentrated on an analysis

338
00:18:28,440 --> 00:18:31,710
of the present,
the temporal and physical, and the past.

339
00:18:31,710 --> 00:18:35,814
You in this two using this to emphasize
their experience of the trauma of war.

340
00:18:36,715 --> 00:18:38,917
They were here on the Western Front.

341
00:18:38,917 --> 00:18:41,820
What's it like back there in England?

342
00:18:41,820 --> 00:18:44,189
What was it like in the past
then, compared with what

343
00:18:44,189 --> 00:18:45,724
they're living through now?

344
00:18:45,724 --> 00:18:48,727
A good example would be Ivor Gurney,
a famous poet

345
00:18:48,760 --> 00:18:51,363
who writes about the Severn and the Somme.

346
00:18:51,363 --> 00:18:54,533
The juxtaposition is
in the title, as you can see,

347
00:18:56,735 --> 00:18:59,238
Smith plays with similar ideas
in many poems.

348
00:18:59,238 --> 00:19:00,973
Dom read it poetic.

349
00:19:00,973 --> 00:19:03,575
The poet returns
home, where his memory strays

350
00:19:03,575 --> 00:19:07,212
to the undiminished treasury
of small delights of England.

351
00:19:07,946 --> 00:19:11,550
And there's a sense of nostalgia
in the poem as a as a longing for quiet

352
00:19:11,550 --> 00:19:15,320
and peace of his younger years
compared with what he's going through now.

353
00:19:16,021 --> 00:19:20,125
Similarly, in his poem Over the Hills
and Hollows Green, the first stanza paints

354
00:19:20,125 --> 00:19:23,362
an idyllic pastoral scene of Green Hills
Hollow's

355
00:19:24,062 --> 00:19:27,332
ubiquitous lark
that appears everywhere and flowers.

356
00:19:27,332 --> 00:19:30,335
But this is then compared
with the desolation of the shattered towns

357
00:19:30,569 --> 00:19:34,940
streets bereft of life,
that he was seen probably at the front.

358
00:19:35,874 --> 00:19:38,810
And there's a similarity
between that and C.S.

359
00:19:38,810 --> 00:19:39,144
Lewis.

360
00:19:39,144 --> 00:19:43,649
His poem French, not too emotionally
proof, with its description of the jewels

361
00:19:43,649 --> 00:19:48,153
of a sacked village, start and grim
out on the reach of swallowed up the some.

362
00:19:48,820 --> 00:19:51,256
And just as an aside, there's a

363
00:19:51,256 --> 00:19:55,761
there's a whole dissertation waiting for
someone to do the war poetry of C.S.

364
00:19:55,761 --> 00:19:57,095
Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

365
00:19:57,095 --> 00:19:59,031
Now, I leave that with you.

366
00:20:00,732 --> 00:20:01,567
A poem I'm going to

367
00:20:01,567 --> 00:20:04,570
just going to pick up on
is Halem farewell.

368
00:20:04,603 --> 00:20:08,407
That cravenly there's a poem in the Oxford
Magazine today which came out called

369
00:20:08,440 --> 00:20:09,341
Arviat Quickly.

370
00:20:09,341 --> 00:20:12,678
So it's that they're repeating the very,
very common title.

371
00:20:13,011 --> 00:20:16,014
This was first published
also in the Oxford Magazine.

372
00:20:16,381 --> 00:20:18,817
And it was described by John Goff
as a pean

373
00:20:18,817 --> 00:20:22,020
to the University town
and also to life itself.

374
00:20:22,421 --> 00:20:25,290
And it works in a similar way,

375
00:20:25,290 --> 00:20:29,394
in that there is a here and there,
they here Oxford they are war

376
00:20:29,394 --> 00:20:32,965
because this is probably written
before he goes out to the front.

377
00:20:34,499 --> 00:20:38,070
It is worth noting, by the way,
in First World Poetry, how often

378
00:20:38,070 --> 00:20:42,908
Oxford is used as a symbol of all
that is good with the country.

379
00:20:42,908 --> 00:20:47,346
I'm not in any way extolling the virtues
of the university, and probably

380
00:20:47,346 --> 00:20:50,382
that's partly down to the educational
background of many of the poets.

381
00:20:50,649 --> 00:20:54,152
But it also became a symbol of everything
the England stood

382
00:20:54,152 --> 00:20:57,289
for in terms of culture, education
and so on.

383
00:20:57,289 --> 00:21:00,459
Sir Lawrence Finian's, Oxford in Wartime,
Winifred Letts,

384
00:21:00,459 --> 00:21:03,895
The Spires of Oxford,
Cass Lewis's Oxford and so on.

385
00:21:04,863 --> 00:21:07,232
So in this poem,

386
00:21:07,232 --> 00:21:10,669
we can see Smith opening in Oxford
ever more the same.

387
00:21:10,669 --> 00:21:12,604
And to the uttermost verge of time.

388
00:21:12,604 --> 00:21:14,940
The grave does choke the sons of men.

389
00:21:14,940 --> 00:21:15,741
And it finishes.

390
00:21:15,741 --> 00:21:17,709
Oxford is ever more the same.

391
00:21:17,709 --> 00:21:19,911
Unto the uttermost verge of time.

392
00:21:19,911 --> 00:21:21,413
The grave doth choke the son of men.

393
00:21:21,413 --> 00:21:23,582
So he's he's repeating it there.

394
00:21:23,582 --> 00:21:26,652
But the idea here is consolation
can be derived

395
00:21:26,652 --> 00:21:29,655
from the fact
that Oxford will stay the same.

396
00:21:31,390 --> 00:21:34,326
So it's now quite interesting
to see one of Tolkiens

397
00:21:34,326 --> 00:21:38,063
poems, The Town of Dreams
in the City of Present Sorrow.

398
00:21:38,430 --> 00:21:41,099
And this is a poem
with a complicated history, as indeed

399
00:21:41,099 --> 00:21:44,102
you will come to realize most of his poems
have.

400
00:21:44,269 --> 00:21:48,273
It ultimately ends itself
as a poem called The Song of Ariel.

401
00:21:48,640 --> 00:21:54,079
In 1924, but in March 1916,
and he revises it in November 1916.

402
00:21:54,646 --> 00:21:57,716
The third draft directly compares
the Town of Dreams,

403
00:21:58,050 --> 00:22:02,821
which is Warwick, where Edith was,
with the City of Present Sorrow,

404
00:22:03,121 --> 00:22:06,291
which is Oxford,
and with the latter, Oxford.

405
00:22:06,291 --> 00:22:07,125
Tolkien begins

406
00:22:07,125 --> 00:22:10,862
with a pastoral description of the city,
with its many willows and fading brooks.

407
00:22:11,296 --> 00:22:14,299
But then he moves to a rather
ghostly description of a city

408
00:22:14,733 --> 00:22:19,538
of cloistered windows, where candles of
departed men burned a light in the window.

409
00:22:19,538 --> 00:22:22,474
A candle in the window
is a sign of grieving and mourning.

410
00:22:22,474 --> 00:22:24,343
As as we probably know.

411
00:22:24,343 --> 00:22:26,912
And it's almost
it is almost a dreamlike state.

412
00:22:26,912 --> 00:22:31,016
As he returns to the city,
old days come to life again in line

413
00:22:31,016 --> 00:22:34,886
66, but it is a city where men
no longer sing.

414
00:22:35,020 --> 00:22:38,623
Line 75, that is, shed many tears

415
00:22:38,957 --> 00:22:41,660
for all the sorrows of these evil years.

416
00:22:41,660 --> 00:22:43,395
Line 76 to 77.

417
00:22:44,396 --> 00:22:46,298
It's an odd poem.

418
00:22:46,298 --> 00:22:48,467
I mean, it's a good poem,
but it's an odd poem.

419
00:22:48,467 --> 00:22:50,535
15 line stanzas.

420
00:22:50,535 --> 00:22:53,372
I think it would be polite to say
irregular rhyme

421
00:22:53,372 --> 00:22:56,875
schemes in it is a nice way,
written in iambic pentameter.

422
00:22:56,875 --> 00:22:59,878
So again, traditional verse forms.

423
00:23:00,579 --> 00:23:02,614
Now to Smith, the past could be golden

424
00:23:02,614 --> 00:23:05,617
and present,
and the present bereft of hope.

425
00:23:05,617 --> 00:23:08,120
But the past could also be,

426
00:23:08,120 --> 00:23:11,123
a place
which we, we want to move away from.

427
00:23:11,523 --> 00:23:14,593
For example, in his poem
The New Age, in the Old, the old age will

428
00:23:14,593 --> 00:23:18,630
be swept away from the earth,
and the new age, presented optimistically,

429
00:23:18,630 --> 00:23:21,767
is seen as a gift from high God,
which seems slightly odd

430
00:23:22,033 --> 00:23:25,370
when these men are about to go into
one of the most horrendous experiences

431
00:23:25,704 --> 00:23:26,371
of their life.

432
00:23:27,339 --> 00:23:30,509
But there was a feeling in England
or in Britain at the time,

433
00:23:30,509 --> 00:23:34,546
and the condition of England,
it's often referred to that the war

434
00:23:34,546 --> 00:23:39,151
offered this chance to cleanse and
to remove all of this sort of moral decay

435
00:23:39,151 --> 00:23:42,821
that had happened, and elements of this
debate can actually be found in

436
00:23:43,088 --> 00:23:46,291
in the discussions of the two boys,
those four young men,

437
00:23:47,492 --> 00:23:51,196
in 1912, for example, Smith spoke
to a school debate in favor of the motion.

438
00:23:51,196 --> 00:23:53,598
The world has become over civilized.

439
00:23:53,598 --> 00:23:56,935
We're going to move into 1914,
16th November,

440
00:23:57,502 --> 00:23:59,971
told King in a letter to wise
men started to list

441
00:23:59,971 --> 00:24:02,941
what the beliefs of the Tccb might be,
noting

442
00:24:02,974 --> 00:24:04,209
the supreme importance

443
00:24:04,209 --> 00:24:08,013
should be attached to the promotion
of religion and matrimony, and the duty

444
00:24:08,013 --> 00:24:08,914
of patriotism.

445
00:24:09,915 --> 00:24:11,817
Smith, in a letter to Tulk in

446
00:24:11,817 --> 00:24:16,021
1915, spoke of the sheer
evil filth of immorality

447
00:24:16,021 --> 00:24:19,491
affecting England, and only a week earlier
wrote to Tolkien in his hope

448
00:24:19,825 --> 00:24:23,562
that after the war,
the Tccb could help to reestablish sanity,

449
00:24:23,962 --> 00:24:26,965
cleanliness
and the love of real and true beauty.

450
00:24:28,266 --> 00:24:31,636
There's one over an unavoidable theme
that Smith does focus on,

451
00:24:31,636 --> 00:24:33,138
and that is death,

452
00:24:33,138 --> 00:24:36,741
an understandable preoccupation, you might
think, for someone in his condition.

453
00:24:37,609 --> 00:24:39,878
And I liken this
what you're saying here to Charles

454
00:24:39,878 --> 00:24:42,881
Hamilton, soldier, a very famous poet
from the First World War

455
00:24:43,014 --> 00:24:46,952
who very early on was recognizing
just what this war might lead to.

456
00:24:47,219 --> 00:24:50,222
In his poem All the Hills and Bells Along,
a marching troop of soldiers

457
00:24:50,222 --> 00:24:55,126
is described as the singers of the chaps
who were going to die, perhaps, and Smith

458
00:24:55,126 --> 00:24:59,064
is similarly speculative mood in his poem
Langley, of a leader in cynic to day,

459
00:24:59,731 --> 00:25:02,734
where he wonders
whether his own road is almost done,

460
00:25:03,268 --> 00:25:06,571
and in other poems
God knows if it be ours to see again.

461
00:25:06,805 --> 00:25:08,039
Oxford, that is

462
00:25:10,008 --> 00:25:11,042
death in the past, I

463
00:25:11,042 --> 00:25:14,646
fuzed in his poem memories,
where Smith uses the images of ghosts

464
00:25:15,146 --> 00:25:18,116
reminiscent of a poem
by Robert Graves, Corporal Stair,

465
00:25:18,116 --> 00:25:21,052
who are pale
shades of friends who have been lost.

466
00:25:21,052 --> 00:25:22,888
Fellow soldiers.

467
00:25:22,888 --> 00:25:24,523
One is tall and supple.

468
00:25:24,523 --> 00:25:28,960
One had his heart as true as the open sea,
but there merely shapes in the mist,

469
00:25:28,960 --> 00:25:32,030
leaving the poet
to muse on the last of all battles.

470
00:25:32,030 --> 00:25:35,300
Where he hopes to go
and justify his lost companions.

471
00:25:35,700 --> 00:25:38,670
And in his letters
there's repeated references to death.

472
00:25:38,803 --> 00:25:42,841
He declares in 19 15th October
I'm fed up to extinction

473
00:25:42,841 --> 00:25:45,810
with this life of ours
and the 3rd of February 1916,

474
00:25:46,011 --> 00:25:49,014
he notes, death is so close to us now.

475
00:25:50,916 --> 00:25:52,484
Particularly important

476
00:25:52,484 --> 00:25:56,621
to all Tolkien
and Smith was the death of Rob Gilson,

477
00:25:56,621 --> 00:26:00,058
right at the beginning
of the battle of the Somme in his letter

478
00:26:00,058 --> 00:26:03,995
of 15th of August 1916,
about a month later to Tolkien,

479
00:26:03,995 --> 00:26:08,466
Smith remarks, there's no doubt Rob
Gilson is to be envied in some ways.

480
00:26:08,466 --> 00:26:11,102
After all, he's
out of the great struggle of life,

481
00:26:11,102 --> 00:26:13,638
and it often seems
the rest in peace are a great boon.

482
00:26:17,842 --> 00:26:20,845
Let's now look at Tolkien.

483
00:26:21,580 --> 00:26:24,382
Now, as I've already noted,
he was a close friend of Smith's.

484
00:26:24,382 --> 00:26:26,284
He edited his poem.

485
00:26:26,284 --> 00:26:30,121
But so far as I say, I don't think he's
ever really be considered as a war poet.

486
00:26:30,121 --> 00:26:32,724
So let's start to redress that now.

487
00:26:32,724 --> 00:26:35,527
Now, I've already mentioned
there are difficulties with Tolkien's

488
00:26:35,527 --> 00:26:38,597
poetry in terms of trying to assemble it,
but we now are in a much,

489
00:26:38,597 --> 00:26:39,764
much better state.

490
00:26:39,764 --> 00:26:43,034
There were about 40 poems
that he wrote between

491
00:26:43,034 --> 00:26:46,037
1914 and 1918.

492
00:26:46,204 --> 00:26:50,342
He wrote 130 after that gets
the number goes slightly bigger.

493
00:26:50,342 --> 00:26:54,946
If you think of poems he writes before
1914, but then still works on them a bit.

494
00:26:56,982 --> 00:26:59,284
Let's pick up
some of the themes that we can

495
00:26:59,284 --> 00:27:01,987
we can discern from Tolkien's poetry.

496
00:27:01,987 --> 00:27:04,889
So I mentioned resolve,

497
00:27:04,889 --> 00:27:08,326
with Smith's sonnets,
sonnet to the British Navy.

498
00:27:08,960 --> 00:27:12,731
Tolkien also considered
this issue in his poem The Two Riders,

499
00:27:12,998 --> 00:27:16,301
which was originally entitled
Courage Speaks to a Child of Earth,

500
00:27:17,002 --> 00:27:21,673
written, first of all in 1915,
but he's still working on it in 1925,

501
00:27:22,107 --> 00:27:25,110
and this focus is on
the individual's need for resolve,

502
00:27:25,210 --> 00:27:27,879
as opposed to
the nation's need to resolve.

503
00:27:27,879 --> 00:27:30,915
And he uses the images of two riders
galloping off

504
00:27:31,182 --> 00:27:34,185
into the unknown, into the darkness.

505
00:27:34,419 --> 00:27:37,722
One of them is clearly a young man
heading to uncertainty.

506
00:27:38,056 --> 00:27:41,726
The war, presumably, and the fear
of losing his resolve and courage.

507
00:27:41,960 --> 00:27:46,798
The Second Rider, who he implores to hold
hold by my side, lest he streaking,

508
00:27:47,499 --> 00:27:48,800
lest you strike in his stride.

509
00:27:48,800 --> 00:27:50,402
And the shadows go about me.

510
00:27:51,403 --> 00:27:52,303
It's very interesting.

511
00:27:52,303 --> 00:27:53,505
The first bearing this.

512
00:27:53,505 --> 00:27:58,677
It's dedicated from a, C,
B, c in to the t cps.

513
00:27:59,177 --> 00:28:03,048
This is his message to his friends
that we've got to keep our courage,

514
00:28:03,348 --> 00:28:07,485
and possibly also to his generation
as well, not to lose that resolve.

515
00:28:09,120 --> 00:28:11,456
A few months later, in 1915, Tolkien's

516
00:28:11,456 --> 00:28:14,626
working on a poem called,
which we now call Empty Chapel.

517
00:28:14,859 --> 00:28:18,730
It's a fragmentary poem,
but it places the poet a simple soldier

518
00:28:18,730 --> 00:28:23,334
in line 16, kneeling in an empty chapel,
while outside there is a tramping noise

519
00:28:23,668 --> 00:28:27,205
and sound of drums,
whilst the armies of Britain pass.

520
00:28:28,106 --> 00:28:31,810
The chapel seems to symbolize the loss
of Christian belief during the conflict.

521
00:28:31,810 --> 00:28:35,380
The soldiers outside are described
as war is in your nostrils,

522
00:28:35,613 --> 00:28:39,050
but also reprimanded for
you have nine forgotten God,

523
00:28:39,784 --> 00:28:43,121
and the soldier alone seems to be only one
that remembers his faith.

524
00:28:43,655 --> 00:28:44,689
The men who march away.

525
00:28:44,689 --> 00:28:47,192
I seem to be in state confusion.

526
00:28:47,192 --> 00:28:51,362
They they don't really think ill
of the enemy, but they doubt themselves.

527
00:28:51,362 --> 00:28:54,299
And the poet implores them
to return to the chapel.

528
00:28:54,299 --> 00:28:58,837
Maybe they can get resolved
from going back and refining their faith.

529
00:29:01,206 --> 00:29:04,342
The dominant theme, and I do apologize
for that picture of Edith.

530
00:29:04,342 --> 00:29:06,211
She looks much nicer on my screen here.

531
00:29:06,211 --> 00:29:11,149
The dominant theme of Tomkins war poetry
is a focus on loneliness and separation

532
00:29:11,816 --> 00:29:16,955
from his home, but most importantly,
from his wife as she became Edith.

533
00:29:17,589 --> 00:29:20,191
And this is understandable
if you think about the fact that they

534
00:29:20,191 --> 00:29:24,129
were forcefully separated
up to the age of 21,

535
00:29:24,963 --> 00:29:29,067
when he was allowed to go and speak
to her again, and immediately proposed.

536
00:29:29,300 --> 00:29:32,837
But then having thought
they had solve their problems,

537
00:29:33,104 --> 00:29:36,107
the war comes along
and they're forced to separate again.

538
00:29:37,308 --> 00:29:39,310
Even in 1917 1918,

539
00:29:39,310 --> 00:29:43,715
when Tolkien's back with recuperating
and trying to recover from trench fever,

540
00:29:43,948 --> 00:29:46,951
a combination of army and force
moves are Edith's requirements.

541
00:29:46,951 --> 00:29:48,987
When she was pregnant
and they were separated.

542
00:29:50,755 --> 00:29:53,191
So a very early poem on this is As to Fair

543
00:29:53,191 --> 00:29:56,194
Trees, which sets up the relationship
between them.

544
00:29:57,028 --> 00:29:58,596
That is young.

545
00:29:58,596 --> 00:30:02,767
They are young, of course,
but old and wise and deep rooted.

546
00:30:02,767 --> 00:30:05,770
The tree
roots are the roots of their love.

547
00:30:06,604 --> 00:30:09,941
And then in his poem The Swallow,
in The Traveler on the Plains,

548
00:30:10,175 --> 00:30:13,978
which was originally first entitled
Thoughts on Parade, it is indeed

549
00:30:13,978 --> 00:30:18,349
just that he is on parade as he's training
and he's musing about something.

550
00:30:18,716 --> 00:30:19,651
In this.

551
00:30:19,651 --> 00:30:22,420
He looks at a swallow
which is flying around

552
00:30:22,420 --> 00:30:25,223
and muses on the factor
how impervious it is.

553
00:30:25,223 --> 00:30:25,557
It must.

554
00:30:25,557 --> 00:30:29,828
What can it see about the scale
of the nature that that it can encounter?

555
00:30:30,195 --> 00:30:31,930
But he's also jealous of it.

556
00:30:31,930 --> 00:30:37,669
I mean, not only is that he cannot escape
his condition, he is on parade.

557
00:30:37,669 --> 00:30:38,703
He is in the army now.

558
00:30:38,703 --> 00:30:41,673
He cannot escape and go and find Edith.

559
00:30:41,906 --> 00:30:44,642
And it's a bit like if you know
Isaac Rosenberg's breakdown

560
00:30:44,642 --> 00:30:48,012
in the trenches where he talks about
he sees the rat or anything.

561
00:30:48,012 --> 00:30:50,615
So you're much in a better position
than I am stuck in this trench,

562
00:30:50,615 --> 00:30:53,117
because you can run back and forth across
no man's land.

563
00:30:53,117 --> 00:30:55,453
You're freer than me. The irony is, there.

564
00:30:56,821 --> 00:30:57,722
In Tolkien's

565
00:30:57,722 --> 00:31:03,194
poem, he considers his own situation
wailing and alone, and yearns for the long

566
00:31:03,194 --> 00:31:07,832
homing road which he would follow
if he could back home to her.

567
00:31:10,201 --> 00:31:13,338
The Lonely Isle is a poem which he works
on, as you can see

568
00:31:13,338 --> 00:31:16,875
for just over ten years, and it began life
directly linked with mythology

569
00:31:17,108 --> 00:31:21,145
to Sayer,
the mythical isle in his mythology.

570
00:31:21,279 --> 00:31:22,647
In the second and third variants,

571
00:31:22,647 --> 00:31:25,650
he changes the title to For England,
the Lonely Isle.

572
00:31:26,885 --> 00:31:29,821
And he writes on one of the manuscripts.

573
00:31:29,821 --> 00:31:32,290
It was written in the top part of Calais.

574
00:31:32,290 --> 00:31:33,524
June 1916.

575
00:31:33,524 --> 00:31:35,827
The great training camp
for the British Army.

576
00:31:35,827 --> 00:31:39,430
So the closing line of how lonely,
sparkling isle farewell becomes

577
00:31:39,430 --> 00:31:43,768
now an address to England
as he departs for France on his troopship.

578
00:31:45,303 --> 00:31:47,372
When he's at the front,

579
00:31:47,372 --> 00:31:51,109
he does not forget Edith,
of course, in his poem Mother,

580
00:31:51,242 --> 00:31:54,545
Lady Throne Beyond the Stars,
which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary,

581
00:31:54,913 --> 00:31:59,484
he asks Mary to comfort my quote,
my little one beside thy knee,

582
00:31:59,751 --> 00:32:03,254
and hear her whispered prayers,
and make her free from all unhappiness,

583
00:32:03,521 --> 00:32:04,555
from all her tears.

584
00:32:04,555 --> 00:32:08,393
My little one was a a
turn me often used for Edith.

585
00:32:08,726 --> 00:32:12,063
And even when he's back in Britain,
the theme of separation is still evident

586
00:32:12,497 --> 00:32:14,999
even after they've reunited.

587
00:32:14,999 --> 00:32:18,002
In his poem
The Gray Bridge of Tavira Bell,

588
00:32:18,069 --> 00:32:20,371
he writes with some poignancy.

589
00:32:20,371 --> 00:32:24,809
And there we kissed by evening
gray and our arms went soft around me.

590
00:32:25,443 --> 00:32:26,744
But the days of sunlight.

591
00:32:26,744 --> 00:32:30,315
Where are they
that she lonely, spent without me?

592
00:32:32,550 --> 00:32:34,953
Returning to the Western Front.

593
00:32:34,953 --> 00:32:38,456
This map, which you may not be able to
see, is an attempt to show you

594
00:32:38,456 --> 00:32:39,724
the battle of the Somme.

595
00:32:39,724 --> 00:32:40,892
In one graphic.

596
00:32:40,892 --> 00:32:44,963
But it's really where we're talking was
or where you concentrate

597
00:32:44,963 --> 00:32:47,966
was concentrated on,

598
00:32:48,066 --> 00:32:49,867
the first few days of the Somme
are happening.

599
00:32:49,867 --> 00:32:53,871
Tokens actually behind the line in the
thick of it is waiting to go in there.

600
00:32:54,172 --> 00:32:58,076
And he writes a poem called A Dream
of Coming Home, which he notes in

601
00:32:58,076 --> 00:33:01,879
a place called And Call, which is kind of
just off the map to the left there.

602
00:33:03,448 --> 00:33:05,583
Hopefully you can see up there
it's two things to note.

603
00:33:05,583 --> 00:33:08,152
It's a complicated poem.
I said, they are complicated.

604
00:33:08,152 --> 00:33:11,155
So a dream of coming home becomes,

605
00:33:13,157 --> 00:33:15,059
for my wife, a vision of great Haywood.

606
00:33:15,059 --> 00:33:16,060
Well, that's the dedication.

607
00:33:16,060 --> 00:33:18,363
It then becomes a memory of July
in England.

608
00:33:18,363 --> 00:33:23,401
And eventually in 1964, the editors
think it becomes a poem once upon a time.

609
00:33:23,601 --> 00:33:24,635
I'm not convinced by that.

610
00:33:24,635 --> 00:33:26,371
I think these are two different poems.

611
00:33:26,371 --> 00:33:28,773
I think it might have influenced it,
but it's not the same.

612
00:33:28,773 --> 00:33:31,576
And the other thing to note,
there is dream of coming home.

613
00:33:31,576 --> 00:33:33,578
Swerve on the harm come Camus.

614
00:33:33,578 --> 00:33:38,583
Tolkien often writes an Old English
alternative title for his poetry.

615
00:33:38,816 --> 00:33:42,453
Even then, his mind is flitting back
between the past

616
00:33:42,720 --> 00:33:44,822
and the present, mythical or ancestral,

617
00:33:45,990 --> 00:33:48,192
having
witnessed action in and around, over

618
00:33:48,192 --> 00:33:51,362
and then taken out the line for rest
and training, Telkom is back

619
00:33:51,362 --> 00:33:55,600
in the thick of it
and fighting around the airport.

620
00:33:56,701 --> 00:33:59,704
By now he'd received
news of the death of Rob Gilson

621
00:33:59,937 --> 00:34:03,875
and this reminder is what befalls him
in his next poem, The Thatch of Poppies.

622
00:34:05,009 --> 00:34:08,012
Written around 24 and 25th of August,

623
00:34:08,146 --> 00:34:11,149
possibly even under any enemy bombardment.

624
00:34:12,116 --> 00:34:15,153
Now he notes that
this is written in Azure, had a veil.

625
00:34:15,153 --> 00:34:19,891
Now it's taken a you sure can't see this,
which is to give you that's

626
00:34:20,558 --> 00:34:23,561
this is kind of the front line
around along here.

627
00:34:23,728 --> 00:34:25,830
This is the town of ours there.

628
00:34:25,830 --> 00:34:27,398
This is ashes.

629
00:34:27,398 --> 00:34:28,299
There's Heather.

630
00:34:28,299 --> 00:34:30,768
And then some.

631
00:34:30,768 --> 00:34:32,970
So this is between Albert and that.

632
00:34:32,970 --> 00:34:34,806
You look in about three miles.

633
00:34:34,806 --> 00:34:37,708
So he's really
right there at the front line.

634
00:34:39,677 --> 00:34:42,713
The poem opens with red falls.

635
00:34:42,713 --> 00:34:45,483
The sunlight on the broken roof
and still undaunted, rings

636
00:34:45,483 --> 00:34:48,653
a bell within the tower,
marking the passage of yet one man.

637
00:34:48,653 --> 00:34:51,856
Now, one more hour
that I have wandered here aloof.

638
00:34:52,924 --> 00:34:57,361
Now, you may or may not know this,
and I don't know if that picture shows it,

639
00:34:57,728 --> 00:35:00,731
but in Albert
it was a very famous cathedral,

640
00:35:01,265 --> 00:35:04,268
which had a red roof,
and it had a tower bell.

641
00:35:04,635 --> 00:35:08,940
And the Madonna at the top of the column
had wonderful

642
00:35:09,373 --> 00:35:13,878
bands on there, and there was a legend
that filled the alleys with loos.

643
00:35:13,878 --> 00:35:17,381
So the Germans are continually trying to
shoot at it and the allies are hoping it

644
00:35:17,882 --> 00:35:18,516
it stays up.

645
00:35:18,516 --> 00:35:21,519
It did fall down,
but they didn't lose the war, of course.

646
00:35:21,586 --> 00:35:24,589
So I think the opening line is a reference
to that.

647
00:35:24,789 --> 00:35:27,758
Aloof
here is means distance from separation.

648
00:35:28,793 --> 00:35:30,027
In the poem

649
00:35:30,027 --> 00:35:33,164
The Thatcher Poppies, the central figure
takes a walk away from the camp

650
00:35:33,631 --> 00:35:36,934
and comes across a building, around
the door of which is a thatch of poppies,

651
00:35:37,135 --> 00:35:39,203
which are now noticeably dead.

652
00:35:39,203 --> 00:35:43,608
The poet states I've been so lonely
in this multitude, presumably overcome

653
00:35:43,608 --> 00:35:47,912
with grief for his friend and other voices
now beyond the sea.

654
00:35:49,180 --> 00:35:53,718
It's not clear if this is a place
remembered, a place he visits, or simply

655
00:35:53,718 --> 00:35:57,121
a dreamlike state,
or even a place where the dead might go.

656
00:35:57,722 --> 00:36:00,124
Images of sleep and death
run through the poem,

657
00:36:00,124 --> 00:36:05,396
highlighted by the Thatcher poppies around
a doorway to read the line 922 though

658
00:36:05,396 --> 00:36:09,700
dead, they mingle with their opiate,
but is clear wherever it is.

659
00:36:09,967 --> 00:36:12,870
It provides some solace to him as a poet,

660
00:36:12,870 --> 00:36:15,840
because he leaves
war and weariness behind.

661
00:36:16,407 --> 00:36:19,443
It's a place also where the frustration
of the current situation

662
00:36:19,443 --> 00:36:22,446
can be put to one side,
and the poet can dream of what might be.

663
00:36:22,613 --> 00:36:27,151
When hopes delayed
or music's incomplete can be fulfilled.

664
00:36:28,386 --> 00:36:31,389
Almost contemporary with this,

665
00:36:31,989 --> 00:36:33,758
was The Forest Walker

666
00:36:33,758 --> 00:36:37,728
written again
pretty much around the same vicinity

667
00:36:37,728 --> 00:36:39,564
within within a day or so,

668
00:36:39,564 --> 00:36:40,665
which opens with the question,

669
00:36:40,665 --> 00:36:43,467
have you wandered in a woodland
and tells of a poet again,

670
00:36:43,467 --> 00:36:46,771
removing himself from the tents and noisy
lodges and men's voices?

671
00:36:47,338 --> 00:36:50,308
And again
we feel the poet isolating himself,

672
00:36:50,308 --> 00:36:54,011
so it gives him time to go away and grieve
for the heart.

673
00:36:54,045 --> 00:36:57,815
And indeed, in the early variants,
the line is for the hearts of those

674
00:36:58,082 --> 00:37:01,085
that grieve.

675
00:37:01,786 --> 00:37:05,523
I've already mentioned our mother,
a lady throned Beyond the Stars,

676
00:37:05,523 --> 00:37:09,160
which he writes in front,
which is kind of about here on a map.

677
00:37:09,160 --> 00:37:12,163
It's about
that is well away from the line within.

678
00:37:15,499 --> 00:37:19,670
When he comes back to Britain,
suffering, as I said, from trench fever,

679
00:37:21,105 --> 00:37:22,707
he has another death to contend with.

680
00:37:22,707 --> 00:37:25,743
And that is, of course, Smith,
who dies in December 1916.

681
00:37:26,043 --> 00:37:27,979
Within a few days of receiving the news,

682
00:37:27,979 --> 00:37:30,982
he tries to capture his feeling
in his poem GBS

683
00:37:32,016 --> 00:37:32,984
the First variant.

684
00:37:32,984 --> 00:37:36,020
Or will all variants establish
the basic structure of the final poem?

685
00:37:36,287 --> 00:37:38,723
It's an attempt to seek consolation.

686
00:37:38,723 --> 00:37:42,627
He he does this by imagining
that Smith is now in a place

687
00:37:42,627 --> 00:37:45,963
where all of those questions
they struggled with as young men.

688
00:37:45,963 --> 00:37:48,299
He now knows the answers to.

689
00:37:48,299 --> 00:37:50,701
But running
throughout the second part of the poem

690
00:37:50,701 --> 00:37:53,571
is absolute despair
at the loss of his friend.

691
00:37:53,571 --> 00:37:58,109
And I was struck when I got to see
the transcript of the first manuscript

692
00:37:58,109 --> 00:38:01,112
that this I won't go through,
but just know

693
00:38:01,212 --> 00:38:04,682
you can see all of the alterations
and deletions, etc.

694
00:38:04,682 --> 00:38:04,849
here.

695
00:38:04,849 --> 00:38:08,586
This seems to me
a man troubled, trying to desperately

696
00:38:08,586 --> 00:38:12,757
find the words to come to terms
with the loss of one of his great friends.

697
00:38:15,960 --> 00:38:18,963
The loss of both Gilson and

698
00:38:19,030 --> 00:38:23,167
Smith is is best represented
in his poem companions of the Rose.

699
00:38:23,701 --> 00:38:25,303
The earliest version bearing the.

700
00:38:25,303 --> 00:38:28,372
Some version of this appears around
August 1917.

701
00:38:28,873 --> 00:38:33,177
So to explain this Mendon Day
on the 1st of August was when Tomkins

702
00:38:33,177 --> 00:38:37,648
regiment celebrated a previous battle
glory from a couple of hundred years,

703
00:38:38,382 --> 00:38:41,952
but the poet from the outset states
that on that day he is not remembering

704
00:38:41,952 --> 00:38:46,590
the deeds long ago, but instead
his own comrades Smith and Gilson,

705
00:38:47,158 --> 00:38:50,961
who, loathing wars and all they mean
and bring, went forth in horror

706
00:38:51,195 --> 00:38:55,566
and charged the gates of hell
up their lines 14 to 15.

707
00:38:56,133 --> 00:38:57,134
And this is the poem we're told,

708
00:38:57,134 --> 00:39:00,237
can probably get to the closest
to explicitly writing about the war.

709
00:39:00,471 --> 00:39:02,673
He directly references Brazile and Wall

710
00:39:02,673 --> 00:39:05,876
and Co in line 19,
where Gilson and Smith die,

711
00:39:06,577 --> 00:39:10,181
and the manner of warfare is captured
when he compares the historical battle

712
00:39:10,181 --> 00:39:13,884
in mind and day, which for all its face
and stark, could not compare

713
00:39:14,151 --> 00:39:18,089
with what he and his generations
went through, and moreover,

714
00:39:18,522 --> 00:39:21,525
which is slightly odd for most war poetry.

715
00:39:21,826 --> 00:39:24,562
There's anger,
I believe, at the enemy in the poem,

716
00:39:24,562 --> 00:39:30,000
and he states in lines 27 to 29,
beyond forgiveness, slain by that

717
00:39:30,000 --> 00:39:34,638
most dusted, most dishonored foe, that
all the warfare of the world can show.

718
00:39:35,639 --> 00:39:36,774
Which is

719
00:39:36,774 --> 00:39:40,845
perhaps understandable as a very,
very angry reaction to what you've lost.

720
00:39:41,145 --> 00:39:44,582
But as I say, it is quite rare because
in most poetry from the First World War,

721
00:39:45,316 --> 00:39:48,986
people aren't having a go at the Germans
or the Austrians, etc.

722
00:39:49,220 --> 00:39:51,956
they think they're
in the same place. Them.

723
00:39:51,956 --> 00:39:55,292
In 1917,
when told Graham is based in Yorkshire

724
00:39:55,292 --> 00:39:58,295
with Edith about to give birth Cheltenham,
I think she was.

725
00:39:58,562 --> 00:40:01,766
The evidence suggests
the melancholy in despair, which was quite

726
00:40:02,433 --> 00:40:06,003
is quite a common trait in Tonkin,
no doubt brought about by the fact

727
00:40:06,003 --> 00:40:09,940
he was an orphan so young,
and particularly the death of his mother.

728
00:40:10,274 --> 00:40:11,776
It starts to show.

729
00:40:11,776 --> 00:40:14,779
In fact, when you look through his poetry,

730
00:40:14,912 --> 00:40:18,149
there are quite a few instances
of the theme of darkness.

731
00:40:18,149 --> 00:40:21,585
Even going to an early poem,
Copernicus and Ptolemy.

732
00:40:21,585 --> 00:40:23,454
Sorry, pictures over provided it.

733
00:40:23,454 --> 00:40:27,124
There is a poem that begins with the theme
the sun is gone

734
00:40:27,124 --> 00:40:28,592
and all the earth is dark.

735
00:40:28,592 --> 00:40:31,595
I've mentioned Ferrum
and sang with earlier,

736
00:40:31,695 --> 00:40:34,698
which the earth and all that dwell
thereon, and darker in the gloom,

737
00:40:34,932 --> 00:40:39,136
but most obviously writes a poem in 1915,
The Dark of the clouds about the North,

738
00:40:39,537 --> 00:40:42,573
which links the dark
not just to the storm clouds of war,

739
00:40:43,040 --> 00:40:46,343
but also to the darkness
of a separation from Edith.

740
00:40:47,311 --> 00:40:50,281
But returning to 1917,

741
00:40:50,414 --> 00:40:53,717
when Tolkien needed were both in England,
but subject to these repeated

742
00:40:53,717 --> 00:40:57,688
periods of separation, he writes this poem
I stood upon an empty shore,

743
00:40:58,189 --> 00:41:00,758
and he packs it with images of bleakness
empty,

744
00:41:00,758 --> 00:41:04,028
drear, lonely, cheerless, cold, etc.

745
00:41:04,662 --> 00:41:07,665
but throughout the poem she is referenced

746
00:41:07,865 --> 00:41:11,869
as being absent or a faint memory,
a hopeful future.

747
00:41:11,869 --> 00:41:15,306
And once again,
there is a dreamlike state to this poem.

748
00:41:16,340 --> 00:41:18,742
But the poem points to another concern.

749
00:41:18,742 --> 00:41:19,877
Soon comes the end.

750
00:41:19,877 --> 00:41:23,314
And then must we far from the island
where our love doth dwell.

751
00:41:23,714 --> 00:41:25,316
Go forth into the darkness.

752
00:41:25,316 --> 00:41:27,952
Go and say farewell.

753
00:41:27,952 --> 00:41:28,385
But what?

754
00:41:28,385 --> 00:41:31,388
So what is this next stage of separation?

755
00:41:31,555 --> 00:41:33,691
That could just be death?

756
00:41:33,691 --> 00:41:36,193
I don't know, but I suspect not.

757
00:41:36,193 --> 00:41:41,499
I think the answer comes in The Brothers
in Arms, which he writes in 1918.

758
00:41:41,899 --> 00:41:46,770
Now, if the dating on this is correct,
it's some from around early 1918

759
00:41:47,404 --> 00:41:50,908
and I suspect is probably
well coincided with the last great

760
00:41:50,908 --> 00:41:53,911
throw of the dice by the German army,
the Spring Offensive

761
00:41:54,411 --> 00:41:56,647
in, in, in 1918

762
00:41:56,647 --> 00:41:59,483
and the war, too
many people looked in the balance there.

763
00:41:59,483 --> 00:42:03,020
General Haig issued his famous backs
to the wall order of the day,

764
00:42:03,420 --> 00:42:06,991
and no doubt told consort not just as a
setback for the allies caused,

765
00:42:07,391 --> 00:42:09,793
but more importantly, an indication
the war was going to go on

766
00:42:09,793 --> 00:42:13,330
for much, much longer and that he would be
returning to fighting.

767
00:42:14,131 --> 00:42:16,667
So he writes
a poem called The Brothers in Arms,

768
00:42:17,668 --> 00:42:20,671
which takes this idea of,

769
00:42:21,105 --> 00:42:23,240
when someone dies, a warrior dies.

770
00:42:23,240 --> 00:42:27,678
They are buried on a promontory on a
on a mound, as in Beowulf and in medieval

771
00:42:27,745 --> 00:42:29,446
in poetry.

772
00:42:29,446 --> 00:42:33,117
The first variant says build me a grave
beside the sea.

773
00:42:33,551 --> 00:42:36,987
But when we get to the later variants,
he moves the singular

774
00:42:36,987 --> 00:42:39,990
me to a plural discussion of us.

775
00:42:40,257 --> 00:42:43,260
This is written actually after the war,
but it's pertinent.

776
00:42:43,360 --> 00:42:45,429
He fell alone. I heard him cry.

777
00:42:45,429 --> 00:42:48,432
I could not reach him
save to die, to laid beside him.

778
00:42:48,566 --> 00:42:50,034
Let us die.

779
00:42:50,034 --> 00:42:53,404
So the poems remove some personal despair
and fear.

780
00:42:53,404 --> 00:42:55,339
What might happen to him.

781
00:42:55,339 --> 00:42:56,073
He may die.

782
00:42:56,073 --> 00:42:59,076
He will be separate
then, of course, from Edith again.

783
00:42:59,109 --> 00:43:02,613
But in the later version
it moves to almost resignation,

784
00:43:02,880 --> 00:43:07,051
but most importantly to a fear
that many were having at that time,

785
00:43:07,318 --> 00:43:10,321
that everything they'd gone through
would be forgotten.

786
00:43:10,854 --> 00:43:14,024
What would people in the future know
or think about the suffering

787
00:43:14,024 --> 00:43:16,860
that these men and women went through?

788
00:43:16,860 --> 00:43:18,395
Nature will wipe it away.

789
00:43:18,395 --> 00:43:20,431
Lines 25 to 27.

790
00:43:20,431 --> 00:43:24,201
No token of the toil and death of men,
only a swelling of the grass.

791
00:43:24,201 --> 00:43:25,235
And what then?

792
00:43:25,235 --> 00:43:28,238
There is some consolation
in the fact that the earth will remember.

793
00:43:28,639 --> 00:43:30,007
But I don't think that's really there.

794
00:43:30,007 --> 00:43:35,112
And it reminded me of a poem by Carl
Sandburg called Grass Piled Bodies higher.

795
00:43:35,112 --> 00:43:37,982
Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel
among the rain. Let me work.

796
00:43:37,982 --> 00:43:38,682
I am the grass.

797
00:43:38,682 --> 00:43:41,552
I cover it all and talks about it.

798
00:43:41,552 --> 00:43:42,152
And Verdun.

799
00:43:43,320 --> 00:43:48,125
Now, in all this time, Tolkien
was not abandoning his mythology.

800
00:43:48,125 --> 00:43:53,030
There are lots of poems in in this period
where he is writing

801
00:43:53,030 --> 00:43:57,468
or talking about his mythology,
and some of it is just general myth.

802
00:43:57,801 --> 00:43:59,737
And I say
he probably takes his inspiration

803
00:43:59,737 --> 00:44:02,339
a bit from Thompson
there, that Catholic poet.

804
00:44:02,339 --> 00:44:05,976
But some of it is more importantly
about his own emerging myth.

805
00:44:06,710 --> 00:44:10,047
Now, I simply put them up
there as a list of the ones

806
00:44:10,047 --> 00:44:15,019
which I would identify as being part
of this growing corpus from that period.

807
00:44:16,320 --> 00:44:18,322
And as a young man, going into war

808
00:44:18,322 --> 00:44:22,026
or being in war,
wishing to escape to a land of myth,

809
00:44:22,026 --> 00:44:25,996
perhaps that is understandable,
particularly one as creative as Tolkien.

810
00:44:26,697 --> 00:44:30,434
But perhaps what we're also seeing here
is, is an attempt to explore

811
00:44:30,434 --> 00:44:34,838
the use of myth as a way of coming,
of encountering is confused

812
00:44:35,372 --> 00:44:38,976
attitude
to what he was encountering in the war.

813
00:44:39,510 --> 00:44:42,513
Running through many of these poems
is a sense of innocence,

814
00:44:43,047 --> 00:44:46,684
a desire for a pastoral life,
a love of fairy.

815
00:44:46,684 --> 00:44:49,386
But there's also melancholy
and transience.

816
00:44:49,386 --> 00:44:53,390
So a poem like The Pool of Forgetfulness
closes, for example, with the morning

817
00:44:53,390 --> 00:44:56,527
the air falls dead about the day,
and Eve grows deep.

818
00:44:56,760 --> 00:45:00,798
The shadow shapes are thick
and everyman beneath the stars,

819
00:45:00,798 --> 00:45:03,133
which was entitled
abandon Beneath the Stars,

820
00:45:03,133 --> 00:45:06,904
which is a mythical town in Valinor
in his mythology,

821
00:45:07,471 --> 00:45:10,674
suddenly becomes a different poem
when he talks about

822
00:45:10,674 --> 00:45:14,878
there is the sound of faint guitars
and distant echoes of a song for their men

823
00:45:14,878 --> 00:45:18,849
gather into rings round their red fires
when he references specifically

824
00:45:18,849 --> 00:45:20,517
being in an army training camp.

825
00:45:27,524 --> 00:45:30,527
Yeah. So.

826
00:45:31,361 --> 00:45:31,995
The other thing to

827
00:45:31,995 --> 00:45:34,998
say about Tolkien's war poetry,

828
00:45:35,065 --> 00:45:39,303
is that he
then attempts after the war, well,

829
00:45:39,503 --> 00:45:41,371
he starts during the war
because he's desperately trying

830
00:45:41,371 --> 00:45:44,742
to get his his poetry published,
but he is unsuccessful.

831
00:45:45,242 --> 00:45:46,477
But we have him now.

832
00:45:46,477 --> 00:45:50,013
The third volume, some tables of contents
which he was drafting together,

833
00:45:50,347 --> 00:45:53,317
which I think are pretty interesting.

834
00:45:53,317 --> 00:45:57,988
So in this version here,
although it's after the war, section four,

835
00:45:58,021 --> 00:46:02,259
there we have ten poems
written from 1914 to 1918.

836
00:46:03,360 --> 00:46:06,330
And actually you could make a case to say

837
00:46:06,330 --> 00:46:09,133
these are Tolkien's war poems.

838
00:46:09,133 --> 00:46:11,568
What's interesting also,
though, are the ones that he admits.

839
00:46:11,568 --> 00:46:13,203
So GBS is not.

840
00:46:13,203 --> 00:46:16,406
They're the companions of the roses, not
are not there.

841
00:46:16,874 --> 00:46:20,477
And I personally think that this is
because he felt they were to rule.

842
00:46:20,744 --> 00:46:23,213
They were too much
about what he himself felt.

843
00:46:24,481 --> 00:46:27,818
And this takes me on to sort of a
and show.

844
00:46:27,818 --> 00:46:29,853
By the way, he wasn't alone.

845
00:46:29,853 --> 00:46:31,889
Other poets

846
00:46:31,889 --> 00:46:35,859
do try to contain is
this is the last attempt by Wilfred

847
00:46:35,859 --> 00:46:39,329
Owen before he dies about trying
to put his table of contents together,

848
00:46:39,663 --> 00:46:43,066
or he's what he hoped
would be his book of war poetry.

849
00:46:45,302 --> 00:46:47,171
But Owen is actually an interesting point

850
00:46:47,171 --> 00:46:50,908
to pick up on before
we need to conclude in that

851
00:46:51,809 --> 00:46:55,312
Owen is obviously the poster boy
for Civil War poetry.

852
00:46:55,312 --> 00:46:58,315
My subject is war and the pity of war.

853
00:46:58,515 --> 00:47:01,285
Well, you could not say that about Tolkien

854
00:47:01,285 --> 00:47:04,121
or Smith to a degree.

855
00:47:04,121 --> 00:47:07,157
There really are no references
in Tolkien's war poetry

856
00:47:07,157 --> 00:47:10,894
to the Western Front,
to trenches, to his men, even.

857
00:47:10,894 --> 00:47:14,464
Even though we know he greatly cared
about them, what they were going through.

858
00:47:14,731 --> 00:47:18,001
He is now Owen Sassoon, graves, Rosenberg,
whatever you want to do.

859
00:47:18,302 --> 00:47:19,503
But why might this be so?

860
00:47:19,503 --> 00:47:21,338
Well, first of all,
it could just be thought,

861
00:47:21,338 --> 00:47:24,107
well, that sort of journalist poetry about

862
00:47:24,107 --> 00:47:27,411
the life in
the trenches is not fitting for poetry.

863
00:47:29,146 --> 00:47:32,616
As Yates once said, passive
suffering is not a theme for poetry.

864
00:47:32,616 --> 00:47:36,320
When he failed to include Wilfred
Owen in the Oxford Book of Poetry.

865
00:47:37,321 --> 00:47:40,858
But I think, perhaps more importantly,
it's because he chose another medium

866
00:47:40,891 --> 00:47:42,693
to explore these ideas.

867
00:47:42,693 --> 00:47:43,460
Tolkien, that is.

868
00:47:43,460 --> 00:47:46,196
And this is where I come to,

869
00:47:46,196 --> 00:47:48,465
his mythology.

870
00:47:48,465 --> 00:47:51,902
If you look at the other
two volumes of his poems,

871
00:47:52,502 --> 00:47:56,306
there is not a single reference
really to the war in them.

872
00:47:56,607 --> 00:47:57,941
Some people have argued his poem

873
00:47:57,941 --> 00:48:01,912
The Mule Ships is a is a
is a replaying of a French legend.

874
00:48:01,912 --> 00:48:04,915
But I have to say, I'm
very doubtful about that.

875
00:48:05,182 --> 00:48:08,352
But he is an Edmund Bond,
and he was still writing about the war

876
00:48:08,685 --> 00:48:10,854
in the 30s and 40s and so on.

877
00:48:10,854 --> 00:48:13,857
There's passing references to it
in his letters, but that's about it.

878
00:48:14,491 --> 00:48:17,327
So I think what we see is he chose

879
00:48:17,327 --> 00:48:20,731
his mythology and his novels
now to explore this.

880
00:48:20,931 --> 00:48:22,432
Now this is well-trodden ground.

881
00:48:22,432 --> 00:48:24,167
So I'm just going to skip through it.

882
00:48:24,167 --> 00:48:28,305
So for those of you who aren't aware,
I'll just give a few examples.

883
00:48:28,305 --> 00:48:31,775
So in The Silmarillion,
The Fall of Gondolin, the reference

884
00:48:31,775 --> 00:48:35,512
to the Iron Dragons,
without hollow bellies clanged.

885
00:48:35,812 --> 00:48:38,582
People think, oh, is this link to tanks

886
00:48:38,582 --> 00:48:41,618
which he possibly would have seen in?

887
00:48:41,618 --> 00:48:43,120
Is it just about overlaps?

888
00:48:43,120 --> 00:48:44,721
In 1916 with that?

889
00:48:45,789 --> 00:48:46,556
In The Hobbit The

890
00:48:46,556 --> 00:48:49,559
Battle of the Five Armies,
he writes about a battle

891
00:48:49,559 --> 00:48:52,562
as a person who is involved in it.

892
00:48:53,063 --> 00:48:56,066
It was a terrible battle,
the most dreadful battle of all Bilbo's

893
00:48:56,066 --> 00:48:57,234
experiences.

894
00:48:57,234 --> 00:49:00,003
But then was the one he was most proud of
and most fond of recalling

895
00:49:00,003 --> 00:49:00,671
long afterwards.

896
00:49:00,671 --> 00:49:03,874
And you can imagine the conversations
in regimental reunions go.

897
00:49:04,341 --> 00:49:05,676
Do you remember when we were there?

898
00:49:05,676 --> 00:49:08,979
And then they talk about, like the old war
tales between old soldiers

899
00:49:09,947 --> 00:49:12,215
and then in the Lord of the rings,
he himself said, The Dead

900
00:49:12,215 --> 00:49:14,851
Marshes and Miranda know something
to northern France

901
00:49:14,851 --> 00:49:18,121
after the battle of the Somme and
the descriptions of the hobbits crossing

902
00:49:18,455 --> 00:49:22,726
the Dead Marshes is very reminiscent
of descriptions that you get

903
00:49:22,726 --> 00:49:26,596
in that later stage of the battle
of the Somme and Passchendaele.

904
00:49:26,596 --> 00:49:28,298
Although he wasn't at Passchendaele.

905
00:49:29,299 --> 00:49:32,302
There is also,
I think, I think he nicely picks up the

906
00:49:32,402 --> 00:49:35,906
the poor bloody infantry,
the problem of the soldiers, he notes

907
00:49:36,440 --> 00:49:37,541
he wrote it rather famously.

908
00:49:37,541 --> 00:49:41,278
Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection
of the English soldier that sort of

909
00:49:41,611 --> 00:49:46,216
resilient, stout, small person
who just carried on, got through it.

910
00:49:46,516 --> 00:49:49,252
The Batman that looked after the officers.

911
00:49:49,252 --> 00:49:52,923
As we mentioned last week,
there is the whole concept of Frodo,

912
00:49:52,923 --> 00:49:55,926
the traumatized soldier returning home.

913
00:49:57,260 --> 00:49:58,862
Wounded with knife to sting.

914
00:49:58,862 --> 00:50:02,733
Is it says that the PTSD,
although it wasn't called that

915
00:50:02,733 --> 00:50:04,601
in Tolkien's day, of course.

916
00:50:04,601 --> 00:50:07,437
And then I think also there's
some really nice insight with the orcs

917
00:50:07,437 --> 00:50:10,540
about them just following orders
and having rounds between them.

918
00:50:10,540 --> 00:50:13,410
I go, no,
I'm not doing that, etcetera, etcetera.

919
00:50:13,410 --> 00:50:16,913
Which is, of course,
what every soldier gripes about.

920
00:50:17,280 --> 00:50:21,485
But the following orders then becomes
has a much more sinister connotation

921
00:50:21,485 --> 00:50:24,488
as we start to think of
what happened in the Second World War.

922
00:50:24,988 --> 00:50:28,825
But I also think in his mythology,
he does deal with separation, that the

923
00:50:28,892 --> 00:50:33,130
long running story of Aragon
and I went through it about the separation

924
00:50:33,130 --> 00:50:34,531
between the two of them.

925
00:50:34,531 --> 00:50:37,534
When Sam looks in the mirror of Galadriel,

926
00:50:37,534 --> 00:50:40,537
he immediately is reminded
of the separation

927
00:50:40,570 --> 00:50:44,174
from the Shire, imagining
what works for seeing

928
00:50:44,174 --> 00:50:45,709
what's going to happen
with the scouring the show.

929
00:50:45,709 --> 00:50:47,310
And that's where he wants to get back.

930
00:50:47,310 --> 00:50:49,813
And even this quote,
which is which is a little quote, almost.

931
00:50:49,813 --> 00:50:53,116
I wish now there was no war, for
we might have had some merry times.

932
00:50:53,116 --> 00:50:56,353
We might have journey to lost an arc
to my grandfather's house.

933
00:50:56,686 --> 00:50:58,288
It is good to be there in spring.

934
00:50:58,288 --> 00:51:00,991
The woods and fields are full of flowers.

935
00:51:00,991 --> 00:51:04,795
This is the little boy Burgo
talking to and Pippin

936
00:51:05,195 --> 00:51:08,331
while they're waiting for this,
the battle of Eleanor Fields.

937
00:51:08,331 --> 00:51:11,868
They're stuck in ministry,
and the small boy says, I'm here.

938
00:51:11,868 --> 00:51:14,871
I'm in the thick of this,
but I wish I was there.

939
00:51:15,272 --> 00:51:19,176
And then finally there is the theme
of death, which I mentioned about Smith,

940
00:51:19,176 --> 00:51:23,647
which Tolkien begins to return
or begins to focus on his later poetry.

941
00:51:24,481 --> 00:51:26,883
And I think he deals with death
expertly in this.

942
00:51:26,883 --> 00:51:30,887
This is just one example,
and we can imagine that Tolkien,

943
00:51:30,887 --> 00:51:34,024
Smith in the trenches,
coming across a dead German

944
00:51:34,958 --> 00:51:38,361
British soldier, let's say German,
and thinking exactly this.

945
00:51:38,361 --> 00:51:41,798
I wonder what led them to be here
in this position.

946
00:51:42,566 --> 00:51:45,902
And I'm not going to say more about that,
because that death and the key

947
00:51:45,936 --> 00:51:47,370
spring of the Lord of the rings, as he

948
00:51:47,370 --> 00:51:51,274
famously said, is the subject of my final
talk in this seminar series.

949
00:51:52,909 --> 00:51:53,443
So I would

950
00:51:53,443 --> 00:51:57,314
just conclude with this,
when he was writing a letter in 1941

951
00:51:57,314 --> 00:52:01,818
to his son Michael, I think he,
as a society, talks about sudden fear.

952
00:52:01,818 --> 00:52:05,689
And then he writes a little footnote
and he says this do I don't remember it.

953
00:52:06,256 --> 00:52:07,891
I never expected to survive.

954
00:52:07,891 --> 00:52:09,759
And the intense emotion of regret,

955
00:52:09,759 --> 00:52:13,396
the vivid, almost raw perception of the
young man who feels himself doomed to die

956
00:52:13,396 --> 00:52:18,301
before he has said these words is with me
still a cloud, a patch of sun, a star.

957
00:52:18,301 --> 00:52:20,937
We're often more than I could bear,
I said.

958
00:52:20,937 --> 00:52:22,739
Outside, I said, outside

959
00:52:22,739 --> 00:52:26,409
Litchfield Cathedral to a friend of my
youth, long since died of gas gangrene.

960
00:52:26,610 --> 00:52:28,545
God rest his soul. I grieve him still.

961
00:52:28,545 --> 00:52:30,514
Why is that cloud so beautifully said?

962
00:52:30,514 --> 00:52:33,083
Because you've begun to write poetry,
John. Ronald.

963
00:52:33,083 --> 00:52:34,351
He was wrong.

964
00:52:34,351 --> 00:52:39,289
It was because death was near and all
was intolerably fair, lost at, grasped.

965
00:52:39,723 --> 00:52:42,392
That was why I began to write poetry.

966
00:52:42,392 --> 00:52:44,694
The friend is, of course, Smith.

967
00:52:44,694 --> 00:52:45,362
It's interesting.

968
00:52:45,362 --> 00:52:49,099
25 years later,
Tolkien is still grieving him.

969
00:52:49,733 --> 00:52:53,803
But in his poem GBS 1952,
he wrote farewell, my brother,

970
00:52:54,271 --> 00:52:56,072
I will sing these songs.

971
00:52:56,072 --> 00:53:00,443
And he did this with the spring harvest,
of course, but I also think he did this

972
00:53:00,443 --> 00:53:04,948
for Smith, for Gilson, for Wiseman,
to a degree in his novels.

973
00:53:05,248 --> 00:53:05,815
When he was

974
00:53:07,017 --> 00:53:07,884
reliving or,

975
00:53:07,884 --> 00:53:12,489
sorry, forwarding or moving forward, the
the aspirations of those four young

976
00:53:12,489 --> 00:53:16,793
men of the CBS before they were so cruelly
taken away by war.

977
00:53:17,928 --> 00:53:19,162
Thank you, thank you.