Wilfred Owen and Jessie Pope: A Much Maligned Lady

 

More maligned than malignant

I've been writing a new book: a short, simple, light-hearted history of English poetry. And I've nearly finished. It ought to be out by Christmas and will probably be called Rhyme and Reason, although things are still to be finally decided.

While writing, I've found several things that won't fit in the book, but which, having done all the research I thought I'd put on record; and this neglected blog seems just the place to do that.

Today, for example, I've been chasing down something that I thought I knew about Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen. 

I remember being taught this poem at prep school, where Mr Wincott told the class that there was a lady poet in London who was writing verses telling people that it's "sweet and good to die for your country", or to use Horace's original Latin: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. 

Wilfred Owen's poem, we were told, was a brutal riposte from the actual soldiers - those who had fought and suffered - against the jingoistic women of London who were handing out white feathers and saying that war was lovely. 

I had a brief glance at Wikipedia, which told me that this was completely true, that the poet's name was Jessie Pope, and that the first draft of the poem was explicitly dedicated to her. The dedication was then changed to "a certain poetess", and finally dropped. 

So I thought that it would be jolly good for my book to print one of her poems next to his. Some of Jessie Pope's verses are available on the Internet, but they're all light-hearted rhymes and none of them fitted the bill. So I strolled over to the British Library this morning and got out Jessie Pope's War Poems (1915).

I've just finished reading the whole thing (it's not long) and there's absolutely nothing about it being sweet and good to die for your country. The rhymes are patriotic and encouraging: yes. They're very anti-German, but in a light-hearted sort of way, and there's actually one poem praising the a particularly honourable German naval captain called Karl Von Muller, in limerick form. 

But sweet and good to die for your country? Or anything like that? It's not there.

The last poem in the book is the most serious, and the closest I could find to anything like dulce etc. But it doesn't say that death is sweet. It simply mourns a soldier dead. Here it is [click to enlarge]:

Perhaps, I thought, it was another lady poet, and Wilfred Owen had got confused. So then I started trying to track the phrase in any poem from the relevant period. I found it. Twice. 

There are two poems praising dying for your country both titled Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori. And they both fit the bill perfectly.

The first is from 1916 and can be read here. 

The second is from 1917 and can be read here. 

But here's the thing. Both of those poems are by actual soldiers: Major Sydney Oswald and Corporal Harold John Jarvis. They're not by jingoistic women back home who Don't Understand War. They're by serving men who definitely do. 

What happened to the idea of the soldiers all being disgusted by Jessie Pope?

Jessie Pope's War Poems actually starts with a fan letter from a soldier reprinted in facsimile. Or it says it does. Here is the frontispiece:

The writing is pretty hard to decipher; but, after close inspection:

Dear Sir,

Some days ago I saw in your Continental edition some verses by Jessie Pope entitled "NO"

I would be very glad if you could send a marked copy of your English edition with those verses in it to 

Mrs Knight

3 Horsleigh Villa's

Star Lane 

Ash. Surrey

The verses were much admired by us all out here & I want you to send them to my wife for me, as they will be such a "buck up" for her, and bucking up means so much to those at home as well as for us. Really, they need it more, as after all, theirs is the most wearying suspense. 

I enclose you a couple of stamps I bought from home in payment, and at last find them useful. 

If you will do this for me I shall be very grateful

Yours faithfully

Syd G Knight [illegible]

I was immediately suspicious. It all looked too good for Jessie Pope. Was this just a sales ploy on the part of the publisher? Did a Syd G Knight of Surrey even exist? 

I decided to check up.

He did exist. And he made it to the rank of major. What's more he won the Military Cross. He survived the war and died in 1950. He was cremated in Woking (as mentioned in the Aldershot News). 

So what happens to the idea of Wilfred Owen speaking for all the Tommies against the women of London?

Well, he thought he was doing so. But he seems to have been entirely mistaken. The tommies liked Jessie Pope, and though there were poems claiming it was sweet and good to die for your country, they were written by soldiers. 

Why Wilfred Owen thought that about Jessie Pope, I don't know. But he was wrong.

My chapter on War Poetry just got a bit shorter, which is probably a good thing.

Here, by the way, is that poem that Sydney G Knight wanted his wife to read.

A Riddle for a King

 

I've a written a new book. It's a children's book and it's called A Riddle for a King. It's suitable for those aged between about eight and twelve, although it has been rigorously tested on children from six to thirteen (I test all my products on children and animals). The six-year-old had to have it read to him, but he loved it. 

The story is about a boy called Philo, who goes to a magical land filled with logical paradoxes because I've always loved paradoxes. For millennia philosophers have been inventing hypothetical situations in which logic would break down; I pocketed them all and put them in a story. 

A Riddle for a King was The Times Children's Book of the Week, and, though I say it myself but shouldn't, it's wonderfully wonderful.

There isn't much etymology in it. But there is one little titbit. 

Dictionaries and encyclopaedias often contain fake words and entries. This means that if somebody just copies your reference work wholesale, you can catch them at it. These traps are called Mountweazels, named after a famous fictitious entry in New Columbia Encyclopaedia of 1975. The entry described a lady photographer called Lillian Mountweazel who had died in an explosion while on an assignment for Combustibles magazine. 

One such Mountweazel was the word esquivalience, which was included in the New Oxford American Dictionary. They defined the word as "the wilful avoidance of one's official duties". 

Then they waited.

Beautifully, the word then turned up on dictionary.com and in Google Dictionary. 

So esquivalience was a fictional word. But there is no such thing as fiction, there are only facts that aren't true yet; which is why, at the climax of my novel, at the great moment of emotional redemption and revelation, there's the line:

From this day forth I shall do what I’m meant to do. I shall perform my kingly tasks. I shall stop shirking my duties. I shall stop my . . . esquivalience!’

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

So, buy the book instantly by following this link. It also appeals to childish adults.

I don't want to make you tense, but in the future this will be the perfect present.

The Gift of Thrift

 

Start with something simple. We've got the verb give, which we all know, and the thing that you give is a gift. They're quite obviously related. This is Not Interesting.

Then you've got people who use the word gift as a verb, as in "I gifted it to him." That's a bit odd because it's verb to noun to verb again. But it's still pretty obvious.

Then you have the verb drive. And when the wind drives the snow into a pile that is a snowdrift, because the thing you drive is a drift. And when the wind and the waves drive a ship from its course, that movement is called the drift.

And then the noun drift can get turned into a verb and the boat starts drifting. It is the gift that keeps gifting.

And then you've got the verb thrive, meaning to prosper, flourish and generally quomodocunquize. And from that you get the noun thrift, but only because thrift used to mean wealth. Then its meaning wandered until it meant savings, and then the foolish habit of saving money, which is thrifty.

(I should point out that I always save all my money for a rainy day, but I live in England, so my savings don't last long.)

But that's why we still have spendthrift meaning someone who spends all their fortune.

And then you have sieve and sift, which has also been re-verbed to mean exactly the same thing. And just as gift relates to given and drift to driven, so rift relates to riven (although the connection there is much further back in the Norse). And even swift is related to swivel. The verb in between was swive/swifan which just meant to move. But then it became the standard medieval term for to have sex with, as in:

'For John,' said he, 'als ever moot I thrive, 

If that I may, yon wenche will I swive.

Swive was a bit rude, even then, and has since vanished, but swift and swivel remain. 

It's a bit like how true relates to truth, just as rue relates to ruth. Ruth is the opposite of ruthless. But we don't use ruth anymore, largely because Milton used it in the line:

Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth

And that's so beautiful that nobody will ever better it; even though, to modern ears, it sounds like an invitation from a woman with a raclette*. 

That's it. That's what I was driving at, if you catch my drift.

A bit rude

*Ruth's cooking is very interesting, partially because she uses alien corn.

Today is Mayday

 

Today is the first of May, or that's what Shakespeare thought, as did all proper Englishmen. May, for him, ran from May 11th to June 10th. 

The reason for this is reasonably simple. 

Ancient folk noticed that there were 365 days in a year. This allowed for calendars etc. Life was simple.

Then Ancient Romans noticed that this wasn't quite right. In fact, there were 365 and a quarter days in a year. That's how long it takes for the earth to go round the sun once.

So Julius Caesar decreed that everyone should have a new calendar with an extra day every four years. This is pretty familiar stuff: it's February 29th, a leap year.

Because the calendar was decreed by Julius, it got called the Julian Calendar. Life was simple again for a millennium and a half.

Then Renaissance Italians noticed that, in fact, a year was 365 and just less than a quarter days. This upset them terribly. 

The reason they were so terribly upset was that religious festivals. Christmas is meant to happen on the exact anniversary of Christ's birth. The same went Epiphany and Assumption and Annunciation, not to mention all the Saints' Days. Th dating of Easter was also terribly complicated, but terribly important.

The Renaissance Italians realised that they had been celebrating everything on the Wrong Day. That's because the day-calendar had been slipping out of sync with the solar-calendar. Not by much, mind you. Only by one day every century and a half. But as this had been going on for a millennium and a half, it meant that everything was wrong by ten days. 

So Pope Gregory decreed a new calendar where a leap day is missed out every century or so. And he also decreed that we had to get everything back to it's proper anniversary. So on October the 4th 1582, he announced that tomorrow would be October the 15th.

Thus all of Catholic Europe moved forward ten days, and called the new system the Gregorian Calendar.

But England was Protestant, and we were very suspicious. We decided that all this looked very like a dastardly Catholic plot and that we weren't going to fall for it, and Brexit meant Brexit, and we were quite happy with the old system, thank you very much.

So you had the odd situation of a ten day gap between England and Europe. When, it was May 1st in Dover, it was May 11th in Calais, even though France is (alas) only 26 miles away. 

This had all sorts of odd effects. One is the belief that Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day. In a way they did. They both died on April 23rd 1616. It's just that that wasn't the same day. April 23rd was really May 3rd, or perhaps the other way around.

It does mean, though that Shakespeare's May was a lot merrier than ours. It skipped out early May, which is cold, and added in early June. If you are in England now, you'll notice that trees are much leafier than that they were ten days ago. So all his references to sun and flowers and darling buds of May, are a little bit off.

It also means that Chaucer's April was a lot more springlike that our is, and that December was a lot colder, because it contained what we'd call early January (which is when Christmas was).

This whole amusing situation lasted until 1752, when Britain finally capitulated and joined the Gregorian Catholics. That in turn really pissed off our colonists in North America, and caused the American revolution.

Well, not quite. But it was a small contributing factor. America was a lot more puritan and anti-catholic that Britain was. So if you were a Puritan farmer in Massachusetts, and you were already annoyed about being ruled by people thousands of miles away, forcing silly laws on you without so much as a 'by your leave', then it didn't help. And it was, for years, a contentious bone.

And the Russian Orthodox Church is still on the Julian calendar, which is why they have their Christmas in what we call January. This even caused some kerfuffle in Ukraine, with people undecided about whether to use the Western date or the Russian (boo!) one.

Midsummer Night's Dream actually takes place on the night of April 30/May 1st. When Theseus finds the young lovers he says:

No doubt they rose up early to observe

The rite of May, and hearing our intent,

Came here in grace of our solemnity.

And today is the day. Today is Mayday. And the distress call MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY! is just the French way of saying 'Help me!'

M'AIDEZ! M'AIDEZ! M'AIDEZ!

The Inky Fool responds to the fuel crisis.

P.S. Obviously this could all have been solved if we'd just used Stone Henge, which marks the solar year. So, really, the English were right all along.

The Illustrated Etymologicon

 

It is of immense importance to absolutely everyone that The Illustrated Etymologicon is now published, out, in the shops, for sale, and begging to be bought. 

It's the same text as the original Etymologicon, but now filled, on each and every page, with delicious illustrations. 

Is is therefore illustrious.

Illustrious and illustration both come from the Latin illustratus which meant lit up. In English the word illustration came first, and it meant to teach by means of examples, shedding light upon an abstract subject. 

The Illustrated Etymologicon is therefore both illuminating and illuminated, enlightening and enlightened. It is, if you like, an illuminated manuscript. 

The book is available in most English speaking territories, and in the lost former colony of the USA it can still be obtained by ordering it from The Book Depository.

Incidentally, the mini in miniature has nothing whatsoever to do with the mini in minute or minimum or miniskirt. In Medieval illuminated manuscripts there were little pictures painted by little monks. These pictures were often painted using red lead or minium. Because of that the verb for painting little pictures was miniare. And because of that the little pictures were called miniatures. The word then got applied to anything small. 

Anyhow, all your Christmas presents are going to be this:

Epistrophe

 I've done another little video essay with the splendid people at Little White Lies. It's about the rhetorical trope of epistrophe. 

And, just to end every blogpost with the same words, The Illustrated Etymologicon is coming out in November. 

Pancallistic

 

Pancallism is the belief that everything is beautiful, or at least everything that exists, which is quite a lot of things. 

The idea, occurred to some medieval scholastic philosophers. Their reasoning went roughly like this. 

God exists. 

Existence is one of the features of God. 

All the features of God are beautiful. 

Hence existence is a kind of beauty.

I exist. 

Therefore, I must be beautiful. 

This is the sort of positive thinking that makes Medieval philosophy such fun; I expect it's also an extremely effective argument to put on your internet dating profile. 

I came across the word pancallistic (the adjective) while reading Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages by Umberto Eco. The book's a little dry, but it's beautifully short. 

The etymology, by the way is Greek. Pan means everything, as in a pandemic which is a disease that has spread to all the people. The demic there is the same as democracy, which is government by the people. 

The callism bit comes from kalos, which meant beautiful and is the same root that you get when looking a pretty things in a kaleidoscope, or admiring somebody who is callipygian.

Since you ask, callipygian means possessing a beautiful bottom, and is also a very useful word to use on your internet dating profile, I expect.

The Inky Fool discussing Medieval aesthetics.

 P.S. Another thing that exists and is beautiful is The Illustrated Etymologicon, which will be released on November the fourth.