At War

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962)

In elementary school, I could not get enough of Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's war poems. And I loved them for all the things that a young dreamer loves--their sentimentalism, mystery, agony, and romance. My tastes may have altered, but I'm loyal or nolstagic enough to return to Gibson each Veterans Day.

My first concept of modern war was, after all, shaped by "Breakfast," his ironic war poem:

We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead.
I bet a rasher to a loaf of bread
That Hull United would beat Halifax
When Jimmy Strainthorpe played full-back instead
Of Billy Bradford. Ginger raised his head
And cursed, and took the bet; and dropped back dead.
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead. 

Later, in secondary school, I became fascinated with those Gibson poems paying tribute to the houses he would chance upon (I'm American, after all; so I love a house). Two of Gibson's references to houses I named favorites because of their juxtaposition in my mind. The first was "Tenants," a poem which reminded me of a cottage we would visit as a family each summer:

Suddenly, out of dark and leafy ways,
We came upon the little house asleep
In cold blind stillness, shadowless and deep,
In the white magic of the full moon-blaze.
Strangers without the gate, we stood agaze,
Fearful to break that quiet, and to creep
Into the home that had been ours to keep
Through a long year of happy nights and days.

So unfamiliar in the white moon-gleam,
So old and ghostly like a house of dream
It seemed, that over us there stole the dread
That even as we watched it, side, by side,
The ghosts of lovers, who had lived and died
Within its walls, were sleeping in our bed. 

The second, "Reveille," recalled those first impressions that Gibson's war poetry made on me in elementary school:

Still bathed in its moonlight slumber, the little white house by the cedar
Stands silent against the red dawn;
And nothing I know of who sleeps there, to the travail of day yet unwakened,
Behind the blue curtains undrawn:

But I dream as we march down the roadway, ringing loud and white-rimmed in the moonlight,
Of a little dark house on a hill
Wherein when the battle is over, to the rapture of day yet unwakened,
We shall slumber as dreamless and still.