Ivor Gurney (1890–1937), a promising student of the English composer Charles Villiers Stanford, thought of music, not poetry, as his primary vocation. It was in the trenches in France during World War I, where he served as a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment, that his composer’s ear found, in the English language, a readily available instrument. Between charges and bombardments, he began work on what would eventually become his first book, “Severn and Somme,” published in 1917. In the same year, Gurney sustained a shoulder wound and survived being gassed.

We might say that he was one of the lucky ones, in that tragic brotherhood of World War I poets. Like Siegfried Sasson, whose post-war poem “Idyll” appeared as Poem of the Day, but unlike so many others, Gurney lived to see England again. His mental health, however, already fragile, never recovered, and he spent most of the rest of his life in a series of asylums. Throughout the 1920s, though institutionalized and diagnosed with “delusional insanity,” he continued to write poems and plays and to compose music, producing eight more books before 1930. From 1930 until his death from tuberculosis in the City of London Mental Hospital, Gurney remained, as his friend Marion Scott put it, “sane in his insanity.” But he wrote nothing more.

Today’s Poem of the Day, continuing our week-long observance of the silencing of the guns of the First World War, illuminates Gurney the musician. His poem’s speaker dreads the sheer cacophony of battle, but receives, unexpectedly, in the waiting trenches, a gift of songs. In pentameter couplets, the poem recounts the unit’s encounter with a “colony” of Welsh soldiers who share their rations, but who also sing “Welsh things.” The Welsh, of course, are famous for their hymnody, which remains its own national language. But it’s those haunting traditional songs, “David of the White Rock” and “The Slumber Song,” which are never again “more beautiful than here under the guns’ noise.” 

First Time In
by Ivor Gurney

After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line
Anything might have come to us; but the divine
Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony
Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory
Soft foreign things. Then we were taken in
To low huts candle-lit, shaded close by slitten
Oilsheets, and there but boys gave us kind welcome,
So that we looked out as from the edge of home,
Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions
To human hopeful things. And the next day’s guns
Nor any Line-pangs ever quite could blot out
That strangely beautiful entry to war’s rout;
Candles they gave us, precious and shared over-rations—
Ulysses found little more in his wanderings without doubt.
‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Slumber Song’ so soft, and that
Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys
Are sung—but never more beautiful than here under the guns’ noise.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.