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...

Late Poems

Hall Mill

Painting of Hall Mill, Long Melford, by Mark Miller

After his return from Hong Kong in 1964, Blunden wrote his final poems before ill health overtook him in 1970.

The Golden Head Press, Cambridge published Eleven Poems in 1965.

‘A Swan, A Man’ and ‘Ancre Sunshine’ are taken from this publication.

A Swan, A Man

Among the dead reeds, the single swan
Floats and explores the water-shallow under,
While the wet whistling wind blows on
And the path by the river is all alone,
And I at the old bridge wonder
If those are birds or leaves,
Small quick birds or withered leaves,
Astir on the grassy patch of green
Where the wind is not so rough and keen.
What happens to my thought-time,
To my desires, my deeds, this day?
The rainstorm beats the pitiful stream
With battle-pictures I had hoped to miss
But winter warfare could be worse than this;
Into the house, recall what dead friends say,
And like the Ancient Mariner learn to pray.

ANCRE SUNSHINE

In all his glory the sun was high and glowing
Over the farm world where we found great peace,
And clearest blue the winding river flowing
Seemed to be celebrating a release
From all that speed and music of its own
Which but for some few cows we heard alone.
Here half a century before might I,
Had something chanced, about this point have lain,
Looking with failing sense on such blue sky,
And then became a name with others slain.
But that thought vanished. Claire was wandering free
Miramont way in the golden tasselled lea.
The railway trains went by, and dreamily
I thought of them as planets in their course,
Thought bound perhaps for Arras, how would we
Have wondered once if through the furious force
Murdering our world one of these same had come,
Friendly and sensible – “the war’s over chum”.
And now it seemed Claire was afar, and I
Alone, and where she went perhaps the mill
That used to be had risen again and by
All that had fallen was in its old form still,
For her to witness, with no cold surprise,
In one of those moments when nothing dies.