On Thin Ice: Edmund Blunden's "The Midnight Skaters"

Susan Quigley (27 September 1999): Finley/English 354

(See peer comments by Andrew Kerr)

Edmund Blunden's The Midnight Skaters peacefully leads the uninitiated reader

into what seems to be a typical pastoral poem. His first stanza speaks of hop-poles, the icy

pond, and thrones of stars. It is not until we read of the pond's black bed that we wonder

if something may be amiss at this skating party.

Continuing, we suddenly come upon death "at watch within those secret waters."

Ice skating, once an idyllic pastime of country folk, is discovered to be fraught with deadly

danger. Lamentably, Blunden has recognized death to be only a parapet away, whether

that parapet be of ice or of sand bags. Of course, the parapet that Blunden was most

familiar with, that of sand bags, was literally the separation between the living and the

dead--or soon to be dead--of no man's land. With the War, the pastoral has become

obsolete, while the anti-pastoral lurks menacingly, like a wolf in sheep's clothing, in the

once glorious landscape.

The poet revels in the skaters' using death "as though you love him;/ Court him,

elude him, reel and pass," bringing to mind the exploits of Siegfried Sassoon and surely

others like him (but not, perhaps, like the shy and retiring Blunden). In fact, Blunden may

even be alluding to Sassoon's courting of death with his night time flirtations and his lust

to kill, as he crawled up to German trenches, hoping to avenge his dead friends.

In the mid-nineteenth century pastoral poetry was probably revived as a sort of

escape from the industrial age. Wordsworth believed that man could find solace in nature

and thus in the pastoral. With the Great War the countryside, once inviting and healing,

had become a deadly quagmire. Those in the trenches were mocked by

nature in the form of birds reeling and singing above them.

Blunden, being an educated man, was surely familiar with Ralph Waldo Emerson,

an acquaintance of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Coleridge. I believe that it is possible that

Blunden was influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, by Emerson's essay,

Prudence, in which he states "in skating on thin ice, our safety is in our speed." In

Blunden's poem, the skater's nimbleness in eluding death is what saves him, for the time

being anyway, from the fate awaiting him below the parapet of ice. This same nimbleness

was necessary for survival at the front.

Emerson's essay continues "entire self-possession may make a battle very little

more dangerous to life than a match at foils or at football." This statement would have been

found naïve and obsolete after the experiences of the War. Perhaps Blunden was able to

excuse him, though, as Emerson lived before the carnage of this debacle, and thus did not

know that almost every aspect of what had been considered civilized was to be annihilated

with the Great War.