His ‘Singularity’
…Hopkins himself
writes of the ‘mind[‘s]…cliffs of fall’, of the ‘heart in hiding’, and
of an ‘underthought, conveyed chiefly in…metaphors…[and] only half realized by
the poet.’4
Robert Martin talks
of the ‘chaos of [the]…unconscious within…an exigent verse form’;… puts much
stress on the telegraphic communications that made possible The Times’s
day-by-day on-the-spot reports of the disaster…The Wreck, declares Ong, is a ‘telegraphically conditioned poem’.7
1888…letter to
Bridges…”The effect of studying
masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to
some degree, on me to a marked degree.”
Then he reaffirms his “singularity.”1
…well after Hopkins’ death, Bridges writes the poet’s mother:
“Gerard had a notion of starting music, as everything else, on new lines.”2
On New Lines
…Indebtedness, imitation, influence - the terms may or may not be
interchangeable, and their relationship to originality is a troublesome
question that I hope I may be pardoned for setting aside, at least for now. If
we take influence, however, in its broadest sense, as a verb meaning generally
`to affect,' there can be little doubt
that Hopkins influenced or affected [Ivor] Gurney's
writing. Consider, for example, the following unpublished poem. It was
written late in 1922 in a private asylum to which Gurney was committed prior to
being transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital. Like many of his
asylum writings, the poem is an appeal for release from conditions that Gurney,
who prided himself on being a composer, a soldier, and a `war poet,' felt that
he did not deserve. It belongs to a group of poems that Moore
has likened to Hopkins's `terrible
sonnets' .
Much has he not
desired, and has courteous
Been to poor men; dug,
laved his body of mornings.
Run, leapt; noway
deserving these present scornings -
Will one not save? A
soldier who has faced death,
Cries for the justice
of freedom, and not thus
To wear his life in
pain - to waste his breath.
~from ‘influence of Hopkins
on Ivor Gurney’ article
‘A Boiler Factory in
Full Swing’
… sounding, he said, like "a boiler factory in full
swing because of the stone walls"… is second volume of poetry, War's
Embers, appeared in May 1919 to mixed reviews. He continued to compose,
producing a large number of songs, instrumental pieces, chamber music and two
works for orchestra, War Elegy (1920) and A Gloucestershire Rhapsody
(1919–1921). His music was being performed and published. However by 1922, his
condition had deteriorated to the point where his family had him declared
insane. He spent the last 15 years of his life in mental hospitals, first for a
short period at Barnwood House in Gloucester, and then at the City of London
Mental Hospital, Dartford, where he was diagnosed as suffering from
"delusional insanity (systematised)".[7] Gurney wrote prolifically
during the asylum years, producing some eight collections of verse. He also
continued to compose music, but to a far lesser degree. By the 1930s Gurney
wrote little of anything, although he was described by Scott as being "so
sane in his insanity"….
"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is
in the pity." ~Great War poet,
Wilfred Owen
In his poem, What’s in
Time, written when memory brought forth an unbroken flow of truthfulness
and clarity about his past, he describes
his “strange coming to personality”, “the mother leaving”, the
“insurrection and desire to be one’s own and free”, “The birth of creation in
the heart, the touch of poetry”, and
the “raining steel and furious red fire” of war.(Footnote *1)
These memories hint at only a fraction of the complex
circumstances, behavioral traits, hereditary factors and events that shaped
Gurney’s life and finally led him to waste away from an untreated, misdiagnosed
and misunderstood mental illness that slowly consumed his genius.”
[I am reminded here of the banner displayed above a California
freeway by a young student which read, “What if Emily Dickinson had been
prescribed and taken Prozac?”
There is so much we do not consider about the victims of
trauma and soul-wounds.]
_________________________________________
“Shell Shock”|| Ivor Gurney
The asylum
“Evil flowed black
like a tide of darkness over me”
Although his beloved friend Margaret Hunt died in March 1919
and his father in May, Gurney seems to have kept his usual cycle of depression
at bay that spring.(*39)
He was productive but still not anchored firmly in any one place, either
physically or emotionally. In October he complained of “nerves and an
inability to think or write at all clearly” but he managed to stay ahead of his
depression and by 1920 was enjoying the most productive and financially-secure
period of his life. However, it was not to last. He was restless,
his behavior became unpredictable and inappropriate, and he could not hold a
job.
He took to wandering between Gloucester
and London, often walking the
120-mile distance, sleeping in barns and earning a little money singing
folksongs in country inns. In London,
he slept on the embankment, and was picked up several times by the police, once
suspected of being a spy. His friends tried to help but Gurney was losing
control of his life and was heading for a severe breakdown.
By September 1922, “evil flowed black like a tide of
darkness” over Gurney. The emotional
storms that had swirled around him all his life intensified. He was
beginning to suffer from hallucinations and claimed he was being tormented by
“tricks of electricity”. He had become violent and suicidal. Ronald
Gurney, feeling he had no other choice, had his brother declared insane and
committed to an asylum in Gloucester.
Gurney’s initial response to his
imprisonment was to escape because he was afraid that he would go “quietly
mad”. He had already experienced the trauma of being in asylum-like
conditions when he was hospitalized at Lord Derby’s War Hospital in Warrington
for two months after his 1918 breakdown.(*40)
His first escape was dramatic. He hurled a clock through a window and scaled a
high wall, but he cut himself so badly on the glass that he had to give himself
up after only a few hours of freedom. That was in October. He
escaped again in November. By December, his doctors had decided it would
be best for Gurney to be moved away from Gloucester.
They called on Marion Scott to make the arrangements to have him transferred to
the City of London Mental Hospital at Dartford. As
he had done in Gloucester, he
escaped but was quickly recaptured. “I am treated like a lunatic,” he
complained to Scott.
The responsibility for Gurney’s care
ultimately fell to Marion Scott who became his legal guardian for the remainder
of his life. As time passed, Scott
found Gurney so “agonizingly sane in his insanity” that he felt “every thread
of the suffering all the time”, certainly an indication that he was lucid
and functional on most of the occasions when Marion went to visit him or took
him out on day trips.(*41)
Gurney’s behavior in the asylum was more delusional than it
had been on the outside and he complained of “a twisting of the inside” and pain in his head so bad that he felt he
would be better off dead. His actions were violent and
threatening, his words obscene and sexual.
He wrote dozens of letters to the police and others
appealing to them to rescue him. The letters were never posted. He
suffered from insomnia and was given medications to help him sleep. He
endured a bout of “scurvy”, which, if the diagnosis was correct, indicates that
his eating habits and nutrition remained poor despite the availability of
regular meals…"
Malaria
[In our time it is
known that quinine-based medicines can cause hallucinations and severe
sensory/mind disruptions.]
But worse than his
natural illnesses was a “treatment” thrust upon him without his consent and one
that made him very ill.
In July 1923, Marion Scott was informed that Ronald Gurney
had given hospital authorities permission to inoculate Ivor with a “mild form
of Malaria” in a misguided effort to quell his psychological symptoms. At
the time, Malarial treatments were experimental and were sometimes used on men
still suffering from the effects of war. However, injections of malaria
were more commonly used to treat syphilis. It was a dangerous and
barbaric treatment that produced potentially fatal fevers and
hallucinations. Individuals who experience high fevers can also suffer
brain damage. Gurney was already hallucinating enough without having more hallucinations
induced. According to his medical records, he was ill with malaria
for at least a month enduring “daily paroxysms of malaria fever” for part of
that time. By November 5, Gurney’s physical health was “much improved but
the malaria has had no beneficial effect mentally”.(*42)
Marion Scott believed that Dartford
was “the best place for him”, but it appears that Gurney was just another
patient to the doctors and attendants. While his medical records tell the
story of a man in decline, virtually no mention is made of how Gurney, the
artist, was filling his time. “...said to have been a capable
composer, and approved poet”, noted one doctor almost as an aside while another
reference reveals that Gurney “continues to write music”. “He...busies
himself with private matters,” observed another doctor.
What those “private matters” were seemed to have been of
little or no interest to his doctors or hospital authorities but for Gurney
they were his salvation — he had
continued to write both music and poetry. As he had done when he
was a child, he simply removed himself as best he could from the unpleasant
situation…
The
last years
“Gone out every bright thing from my mind”
Although he had more difficulty sustaining his musical
voice, Gurney had more to say in his poems and he said it with greater honesty,
conviction and freedom during his asylum years than at any other time. He laid himself bare.
Many of his asylum poems are autobiographical and reveal a depth of experience,
despair, anger, loss, disappointment and self-loathing that is absent from his
earlier work. However, some of these poems are also infused with
tenderness, longing, beauty, a richness of language and sparkling images that
suggest nothing about his life trapped “between four walls” of an asylum cell.
The year 1925 was a remarkably productive one
for Ivor Gurney. His medical notes reveal that he was suffering from
headaches and other physical complaints, depression and delusions and was “no
better mentally”, yet he managed to write at least nine collections of poetry
and compose some 50 songs and a few instrumental pieces. The music is
generally of no interest and meanders off into incoherence while the poetry is
uneven in quality. However, during this manic outburst and another
episode in 1926, Gurney wrote some of his finest poems: Epitaph on a Young
Child, The Silent One, The Coppice, Hell’s Prayer, The Love Song, The Poets of
My County, I Would Not Rest, The Sea Marge, The Dancers, December Evening.
Today, studies and analyses of Gurney’s complete poetic
achievement refer to the “impatience of his language”, “the queer contortions
and omissions which become part of his manner”, how he “telescoped his thoughts
so much that they are sometimes very difficult to unravel”, his “new,
idiosyncratic mode of expression”, his “imagined world” that “deals with
parallels and comparisons”, or how he “began many a poem [that] winds into
another, and possibly yet more...”
~Pamela Blevins, ‘New Perspectives on Ivor Gurney’s Mental Illness’,2000
“I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a stoat or a fieldmouse
peeping out of the withered grass---the creature hath a purpose and its eyes
are bright with it---‘(LJK, II, 80).29
But for Keats, both the deliberative man and the peeping fieldmouse have
a purpose that defines but does not adequately explain the ‘mystery’ of their
existence: ‘ I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying
along---to what?’ In spite of the
‘instinctive course’ of the ‘veriest human animal’ he nonetheless feels himself
to be ‘writing at random---straining at particles of light in the midst of a
great darkness.’ It is the extensive
sympathy of the human heart that can alone explain ‘the burden of the mystery’:
‘The Creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it. [remember
euphrasy…] But then as Wordsworth says, ‘we have all one human heart”’ (LJK,
II, 80).”
~ Porscha
Fermanis, ‘John Keats and the ideas of the Enlightenment’, p.132
…………………………….
Being:
it is not a thing to scatter here, there, and everywhere through all the world.
. .~Fr. Gerard Hopkins, SJ
