Andrea Walker
Finley/English 354/Fall Term 1997
Haverford College
In "Arcadian Resources," the seventh chapter in Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell asserts the predominance of the pastoral within the English literary tradition, along with the way it was used in literature of the Great War as a means of "fully gauging the calamities of the Great War" and as "a way of invoking a code to hint by antithesis at the indescribable" (235). Fussell goes on to cite Edmund Blunden as one of the chief writers whose works display such an ironic juxtaposition of the pastoral and the War. In two of Blunden's poems, "La Quinque Rue," and "The Midnight Skaters," Blunden reveals his awareness of the War's irreversible destruction of a pastoral innocence, and presents the question of how one is to continue in a life now dominated by this awareness.
The irony of innocence lost is perhaps the most common and resonant "theme" of World War I literature. It is the irony or innocence of experience, and it is also the irony of retrospective knowledge, or knowledge which can only be gained after the event. Like Northrop Frye's tragic hero who can't understand what freedom means until he steps off the cliff and the law of gravitation is shown to be his fate, like Yeats, who spent a lifetime seeking wisdom only to have that wisdom show him in his old age the unenlightened youth which he has lost, and for which wisdom is no compensation, Edmund Blunden cannot realize the true beauty of the pastoral until the war has shown it to be forever lost, or at least forever tainted. In his book entitled Edmund Blunden Thomas Mallon writes: "the war changed nature permanently for Blunden. The pastoral world forever after prompted his memories of its destruction" (54).
In "La Quinque Rue," the speaker of the poem realizes that he can no longer distinguish between a nighttime landscape that is malignant and one that is benign. The speaker is both "attracted and appalled" by a landscape that is both "foul-gorged," "cemeterial fen," and a place where "scarless houses undismayed / Glow in the lustrous mercy of sweet night, / And one may hear the flute or fiddle played." No longer can there be an unambiguous distinction between a war-torn landscape and a harmonious pastoral; the former will always taint the latter. The awareness of the destruction which is now permanently imbued in the pastoral comes mid-way through the poem, when war's markers are likened to "flints" that "flame out fire's tongue" and "shrivel" the speaker's thought. The speaker seems perplexed and startled to find the skeletons and iron hunks of war lurking in the landscape, asking why they are there, intruding on his thoughts, even though he has begun the poem by acknowledging a bleak landscape: "With forlorn effigies of farms besprawled, / With trees bitterly bare or snapped in two."
The speaker provokes a curious turn at the end of the poem by again invoking the road he apostrophized in the first line of the poem, and crediting it with the "art" of turning the landscape from scarless to wounded in the curious line: "I know your art of turning blood to glass;." "But," the speaker concludes, the deception has been self-induced. He is "told," that tonight the road (or the moon?) "safely shine[s] / To trim roofs and cropped fields; the error's mine." The act of seeing the landscape "truly" or as it really is, ravaged or peaceful, lies within the speaker or the observer, but the power and "art" attributed to that landscape suggests that no such thing as an objective picture of the scene will ever be possible.
Much the same thing is occurring in "The Midnight Skaters," in which what might have once been a charming, rural English ice-skating scene is now the occasion for a meditation on the proximity and consciousness of death to those pastoral skaters. Death is constantly "at watch" underneath the surface of life, and he is no longer a passive and "natural" force, he now has his "engines" set on the skaters, and he is actively trying to "catch" them in what is now a battle with only "a crystal parapet / Between." Here, I think Fussell is right to assert that the use of the word "parapet," along with the couching of the relationship between life and death in terms of a battle, makes this a distinct "War" poem.
What I think is interesting about the poem is that beyond this new construction of the life/death, pastoral/anti-pastoral relationship, Blunden seems to offer a commentary on what the implications of this new construction might be in the last stanza of the poem. If we admit the deficiencies of retrospective knowledge, that we can only know the pastoral in its fullest and truest sense at the moment of its destruction, we can also say that the awareness of that lost innocence and naiveté can provide the opportunity for a heightened experience of the good, even if it is a good now tainted, a good known only by the act of tainting. This seems to be what Blunden is enjoining the skaters to do at the end of his poem. If life is now a battle against death, they must fight it brilliantly and valiantly so that they can have a heightened experience of life, a heightened appreciation of the pastoral:
Then on, blood shouts, on, on
Twirl, wheel and whip above him,
Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,
Use him as though you love him;
Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
And let him hate you through the glass.
These final lines are disconcerting though. We must seduce death, and seduce the anti-pastoral as if he were a lover, only so that the act of turning him away is that much more meaningful. Like the thin line between truth and error for the observer of the landscape of "La Quinque Rue," and like that road's power of "turning blood to glass," Blunden makes the reader of his poem feel as if they ice on which the midnight skaters dance is precarious, and a bit too thin for comfort.
Works Cited
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.
Mallon, Thomas. Edmund Blunden. Boston: Twayne, 1983.