NEW

Keeping it in the family – new Blunden website

Audiences change, their moods and ways of looking at things do too. Edmund Blunden has been in the literary world for over a hundred years and many of his former readers and admirers are now sadly gone. Introducing a new website is a way of presenting his work and...

Painting Blunden’s Last Home

In 1964, after eleven years of living and teaching in Hong Kong, Edmund Blunden and his family moved back to England. Edmund’s eldest daughter by his first marriage, Clare, lived in the county of Suffolk, and she helped him to find the new family home, near to her in...

Taking another look

John Greening, poet, critic, playwright and editor of the latest edition of Undertones of War takes a look at Blunden’s literary legacy. ‘That’s where the difficulty is, over there’ From the years following the First World War up until the mid-1950s, although he was...

Words for Music by Diana McVeagh

In this blog post, Diana McVeagh, author and editor, describes the partnership between Blunden and Finzi, one the wordsmith and the other the composer. Her book, Gerald Finzi’s Letters, contains copies of their correspondence. We are delighted to offer readers her...

NEW

Keeping it in the family – new Blunden website

Audiences change, their moods and ways of looking at things do too. Edmund Blunden has been in the literary world for over a hundred years and many of his former readers and admirers are now sadly gone. Introducing a new website is a way of presenting his work and...

Painting Blunden’s Last Home

In 1964, after eleven years of living and teaching in Hong Kong, Edmund Blunden and his family moved back to England. Edmund’s eldest daughter by his first marriage, Clare, lived in the county of Suffolk, and she helped him to find the new family home, near to her in...

Taking another look

John Greening, poet, critic, playwright and editor of the latest edition of Undertones of War takes a look at Blunden’s literary legacy. ‘That’s where the difficulty is, over there’ From the years following the First World War up until the mid-1950s, although he was...

Words for Music by Diana McVeagh

In this blog post, Diana McVeagh, author and editor, describes the partnership between Blunden and Finzi, one the wordsmith and the other the composer. Her book, Gerald Finzi’s Letters, contains copies of their correspondence. We are delighted to offer readers her...

The Early Poems

Chanctonbury

Chanctonbury Hill

Blunden started writing poetry at school. His first poem was published in the school magazine The Blue in February 1913. By October 1914 he had 44 poems to his name and he took them to a private printer – Mr. Price of Horsham, Sussex. 100 copies were printed at sixpence each.

In March 1916 50 copies of his poem ‘The Barn’ were printed privately by J. Brooker of Uckfield, Sussex. We show a verse below.

‘The Barn’ can be found in Poems 1914-30 published by Cobden-Sanderson in 1930.

‘By Chanctonbury’ was published in Pastorals by Erskine Macdonald, London, in June 1916. It is included in Edmund Blunden Selected Poems edited by Robyn Marsack and published by Carcanet 2018.

BY CHANCTONBURY

We shuddered on the blotched and wrinkled down,
So gaunt and chilled with solitary breeze.
Sharp stubborn grass, black heather-trails, wild trees
Knotting their knarred wood like a thorny crown –
Huge funnelled dips to chalklands straked with brown,
White railway smoke-drifts dimming by degrees,
Slow ploughs afield, flood waters on the leas,
And red roofs of the small, ungainly town:
And blue fog over all, and saddening all –
Thus lay the landscape. Up from sea there loomed
A stately airship, clear and large awhile:
Then gliding grandly inland many a mile,
It left our Druid height that black groves plumed,
Vanishing fog-like in the foggy pall.

THE BARN

Rain-sunken roof, grown green and thin
For sparrows’ nests and starlings’ nests;
Dishevelled eaves; unwieldy doors,
Cracked rusty pump and oaken floors,
And idly-pencilled names and jests
Upon the posts within.
The light pales at the spider’s lust,
The wind tangs through the shattered pane:
An empty hop-poke spreads across
The gaping frame to mend the loss
And keeps out the sun as well as rain,
Mildewed with clammy dust.
The smell of apples stored in hay
And homely cattle-cake is there.
Use and disuse have come to terms,
The walls are hollowed out by worms,
But men’s feet keep the mid-floor bare
And free from worse decay.