To God & Other Poems

By Ivor Gurney

Ivor Bertie Gurney was born in Gloucester on 28th August 1890. A chorister at Gloucester cathedral Ivor began to compose music at 14 before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy Of Music in 1911. Noted for his enormous potential he was equally thought by many to be un-teachable. His studies were interrupted by World War I and his enlistment with the Gloucestershire Regiment. He was wounded in April 1917 and gassed a few months later. After his release from hospital he was posted to Seaton Delaval, a mining village in Northumberland. His first volume of poetry, Severn and Somme, being published in November 1917, followed by War's Embers in 1919. Unfortunately his life was blighted by bi-polar disorder which had developed from his mid teens and culminated in his first major breakdown whilst still in uniform in 1918. The trigger was a failed relationship with Annie Drummond. After the war he seemed to thrive for a while but the bi-polar return with increasing severity in 1922 to the point where we was declared insane. Although he continued to write poems and a few pieces of music he was to spend the next fifteen years of his life until his death in various mental hospitals. Ivor Gurney died on 26th December 1937.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copyright Group
• Release date: Jan 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783949083

Book preview

To God & Other Poems by Ivor Gurney

Ivor Bertie Gurney was born in Gloucester on 28th August 1890.

A chorister at Gloucester cathedral Ivor began to compose music at 14 before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy Of Music in 1911.  Noted for his enormous potential he was equally thought by many to be un-teachable.  His studies were interrupted by World War I and his enlistment with the Gloucestershire Regiment. He was wounded in April 1917 and gassed a few months later. After his release from hospital he was posted to Seaton Delaval, a mining village in Northumberland. His first volume of poetry, Severn and Somme, being published in November 1917, followed by War's Embers in 1919. 

Unfortunately his life was blighted by bi-polar disorder which had developed from his mid teens and culminated in his first major breakdown whilst still in uniform in 1918.  The trigger was a failed relationship with Annie Drummond.  After the war he seemed to thrive for a while but the bi-polar return with increasing severity in 1922 to the point where we was declared insane.  Although he continued to write poems and a few pieces of music he was to spend the next fifteen years of his life until his death in various mental hospitals.

Ivor Gurney died on 26th December 1937.

Index Of Poems

To God

To The Poet Before Battle

When I Am Covered

To His Love

A Wish

Above Ashleworth

Larches

Afterwards

Walking Song

Apprentices

Bach And The Sentry

Ballad Of The Three Spectres

Pain

Beauty

April Gale

Ben Johnson

Billet

By Severn

Canadians

Common Things

There Is A Man

Crucifix Corner

To The Prussians Of England

Half Dead

The Bohemians

Cut Flowers

The Soaking

Tobacco

Of Cruelty

Daily

Darkness Has Cheating Swiftness

Defiance

Toussaints (ToJ.W.H.)

The Songs I Had

Drachms + Scruples

Encounters

Turmut-Hoeing

Equal Mistress

First Time In

Generations (The Ploughed Field And The Fallow Field)

Generations (There Are Mummers Yet On Cotswold)

Had I A Song

Hedger

Hedges

Up There

Kettle-Song

Kilns

The Comparison

La Gorgues

Laventie

Leckhampton Chimney Has Fallen Down

Water Colours

London Dawn

Longford Dawns

Lovely Playthings

Western Sky-Look

Midnight

Mist On Meadows

Moments

My Heart Makes Songs On Lonely Roads

Blighty

Brown Earth Look

Near Vermand

What Evil Coil

New Year's Eve

When From The Curve Of The Wood's Edge

Of Grandcourt

Old Thought

Old Times

On Somme

Personages

Photographs (To Two Scots Lads)

Rainy Midnight

Requiem

Robecq Again

Saturday's Comings

Smudgy Dawn

Snow

Soft Rain Beats Upon My Windows

Song

Song And Pain

Song of Pain and Beauty: To M.M.S

Sonnet. September 1922

Stars Sliding

Strange Hells

Strange Service

The Change

When March Blows

The Cloud

The Escape

The Garden

The High Hills Have A Bitterness

The Hoe Scrapes Earth

The Incense Bearers

The Love Song

The Miracles

The Road

The Silent One

The Square Thing

The Target

The Touchstone – Watching Malvern

The Valley

Thoughts of New England

Yesterday Lost

Time To Come

To Certain Comrades (E.S. and J.H.)

To England - A Note

When The Body Might Free

Poem For The End

To God

Why have you made life so intolerable

And set me between four walls, where I am able

Not to escape meals without prayer, for that is possible

Only by annoying an attendant. And tonight a sensual

Hell has been put on me, so that all has deserted me

And I am merely crying and trembling in heart

For Death, and cannot get it. And gone out is part

Of sanity. And there is dreadful Hell within me,

And nothing helps, forced meals there have been and electricity

And weakening of sanity by influence

Thats dreadful to endure, and there is orders

And I am praying for death, death, death

And dreadful is the indrawing or out-breathing of breath

Because of the intolerable insults put on my whole soul

Of the soul loathed, loathed, loathed of the soul.

Gone out every bright thing from my mind.

All lost that ever God himself designed.

Not half can be written of cruelty of man, on man,

Not often such evil guessed as between Man and Man. 

To The Poet Before Battle

Now, youth, the hour of thy dread passion comes;

Thy lovely things must all be laid away;

And thou, as others, must face the riven day

Unstirred by rattle of the rolling drums

Or bugles' strident cry. When mere noise numbs

The sense