Jennifer Bohnhoff
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The Bard of the East Mountains

8/15/2022

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PictureA sketch of San Antonio, New Mexico, by A. Petticolas, Confederate soldier
A while back, a neighbor was over and we were talking about the history here on the east side of the Sandia Mountains. He was raised here. I spent my teens in Albuquerque, the city that lies just west of the Sandias. I hiked in the mountains plenty, and I had friends that lived over here, especially after I got to high school. Manzano High School was, and still is the high school that kids from the east mountains attended. I’ve always been interested in the geology of the mountains. Its most ancient of records are the rocks, which tell us that what is now the top of a mountain used to be at the bottom of a sea. But I didn’t become interested in the human history of the east mountains, its small towns, and the people who inhabited them until I moved here in 2017.

This visiting neighbor told me he’d like to get his hands on a novel entitled Fiddlers and Fishermen because it was set in the east mountains. He’d searched, but he’d never been able to find a copy. That set me on a mission that began on Google, went to the public library, and finally to rare booksellers. What I discovered was that Fiddlers and Fishermen is one of two books written by Benjamin Frederick Clark. Born in Kansas in 1873, Clark moved into a cabin in Sandia Park, New Mexico in 1927. He passed away in that same cabin on May 30, 1947. He was 74 years old. 
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Back in 1947, Sandia Park was the area uphill from the little village of San Antonito. A dirt road went through the middle of it on its way up to the crest of the mountain. My area was on the outskirts of a village called La Madera, whose economy was based on truck farming, limestone mining, and timber. The stream that was the lifeblood of La Madera has ceased to flow and the town has become a ghost town. I drive a little over six miles to get my mail at the Sandia Park Post office.

Clark’s other book is a small tome of poems. Entitled Melodious Poems from the Hills, it was published in 1945 under the pen name of Sandia Bill by Crown Publications.  I managed to get a copy delivered to my local library through interlibrary loan. The copy is signed, in pencil, by the author. A second pencil notation, reading “gift of the author 6/30/45” is written along the gutter of the first page. There is a picture of Clark playing his fiddle in the frontpages.  I have included it here.
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Melodious Poems from the Hills has ninety-six pages. Some pages have two short poems on them. Most have one poem, and a few poems span a couple of pages. The first poem, “When I Am Dead,” is mentioned in his obituary and is the reason he was cremated.

​When I Am Dead

When I am dead, don’t cry for me;
Just wrap me in a shroud
And burn me, that the vapors may
Help form some lovely cloud.
Then place my pictures and my dolls,
And my ashes pure and clean,
‘Neath my rosevine and that tree
That always is so green.
Just leave the earth plain and smooth--
I want no omark or stone.
Just let the yard look like it did;
When in flesh, it was my home.
Take care of my sweet rosevine
And that evergreen tree –
This still my home will be;
And may flowers bloom around by tome
While gay robins sing for me.

This was one of my favorites, and seems appropriate in a year that saw so much of the west burning: 

​The Dying Monarch

Here stands the monarch of the forest,
Slowly expiring on the mountainside,
Who only a few hours ago,
Was the embodiment of health and pride.
His kindred pines for miles around,
And neighboring aspens, oaks, and firs
Are slowly tumbling to the ground
In bulks of smoldering embers.
 
The Lively squirrels and cheerful birds
From these parts have fled,
And they’ll be homeless for awhile,
For their friendly trees are dead.
 
Stands here the monarch of the forest,
Preaching a sermon as he expires,
Broadcasting his message to the world:
“Oh, men, be careful with your fires.”

Like the poem above, many of Sandia Bill’s poems are about the nature that surrounded him. Some are about the people, mostly ranchers, who he associated with. A few tell tales of love lost and found, of pretty women, dangerous men, and faithful old dogs, horses, and mules. This one, dear reader, I find speaks his heart, and mine. 

​I Am Thankful

I am not a rich or famous man,
And perhaps I’ll never be.
But I am in love with many things
And they’re all in love with me.
 
I am thankful for the sweet sunshine,
For snow, the clouds, and summer showers.
I am thankful for the Love Divine,
For butterflies, the birds, and flowers.
I am thankful for the girl I love
With eyes so soft and blue;
I am thankful for the stars above,
But more thankful, dear, for you.

I have yet to get my hands on a copy of Fiddlers and Fishermen. The only copy I’ve managed to locate is housed in the special collections in Zimmerman Library on the University of New Mexico campus, and they are not willing to circulate it through interlibrary loan. The only way I can read this 76 page novella is to make an appointment to read it at the library. Zimmerman’s old reading room is a beautiful, contemplative space. I did much of my undergraduate study there because it was such a peaceful place.  Perhaps someday soon I will jump through the hoops to make this appointment happen. 
Jennifer Bohnhoff’s newest novel, Where Duty Calls, is set in New Mexico during the Civil War and is the first in a trilogy.  Written for middle grade readers, it is a quick, informative read for adults. She lives and writes in the mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, close to the camp the Confederate Army used as they advanced towards Santa Fe in the spring of 1862 that is pictured above. .
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Poet’s Corner and the Poets of WWI

1/16/2022

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Because over 100 poets, playwrights and writers are buried there, the South Transept of Westminster Abbey in London, England is known as Poets' Corner.
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Geoffrey Chaucer, author of 'The Canterbury Tales,” was the first poet interred in Poets' Corner. When he was buried there in 1400, it was not because he was a poet, but because he was Clerk of the King's Works. 198 years later, Edmund Spenser, author of 'The Faerie Queene,' asked to be buried near Chaucer. This began the tradition of either interring famous writers there or erecting memorials for those buried elsewhere. William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy are all represented in this area of Westminster. More recent memorials acknowledge Ted Hughes, C.S. Lewis and Philip Larkin. Not everyone buried or memorialized in the South Transept are poets. Musician George Frederic Handel is also buried there, as are several prominent clergymen and actors. 
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On November 11, 1985 a memorial stone was laid in Poets Corner recognizing the poets of World War I. This stone has the name of 16 British poets who also served as soldiers during the Great War. Some had died during the war. Others went on to live full lives. All seemed tormented by their experiences. At the time of its dedication, only Robert Graves was alive to see his name etched in the stone.
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In 2021, as part of my promotion for my World War I book, A Blaze of Poppies, I wrote a series of blogs on World War I poets. I included all of the poets whose names are on the Westminster stone, plus a few who were American or Canadian. Links to each of these blogs is listed below. The names in red are on the stone. The names in green are not. Names in purple did not serve in the war, but wrote about it. May all of these names continue to be remembered both for their service on the battlefield and their contributions to our literary heritage.
Edward Thomas https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/october-14th-2021
Richard Aldington https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/trench-idyll-of-richard-aldington
Siegfried Sassoon https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/siegfried-sassoon
Robert Graves https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/two-fusiliers-and-two-poets
Laurence Binyon https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/for-the-fallen
Isaac Rosenberg  https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/break-of-day-in-the-trenches
Julian Grenfell https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/a-poem-to-lead-men-into-battle
 Henry Chappell  https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/a-poem-for-a-horse
Wilfred Owen https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/dulce-et-decorum-est
John McCrae https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/in-flanders-fields
Ivor Gurney https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/on-somme-by-ivor-gurney
Alan Seeger https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/a-rendevous-with-death
Edmund Blunden https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/a-poet-looks-back-at-world-war-i
Rupert Brooke https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/rupert-brooke-the-golden-boy-of-wwi-poets
Wilfrid Gibson https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/two-poems-by-wilfrid-wilson-gibson
David Jones https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/david-jones-wwi-poet-and-painter
Robert Nichols https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/robert-nichols-wwi-poet
Charles Sorley https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/charles-hamilton-sorley-world-war-i-poet
Herbert Read https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/herbert-read-world-war-i-poet
Edgar Albert Guest https://jenniferbohnhoff.com/thin-air-my-blog-about-writing-and-my-books/the-wrist-watch-man

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Jennifer Bohnhoff's novel A Blaze of Poppies was published in October 2021, and tells the story of a ranching woman from Southern New Mexico during the turbulent years of World War !. It is on sale on Amazon for .99 from January 15-20, 2022. 
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Herbert Read: World War I Poet

11/24/2021

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Herbert Read was unlike many of the young, privileged Englishmen who left university to prove themselves in the bloody cauldron of war. Born in Yorkshire, he was the eldest child of a tenant farmer who died when he was still young. Because they didn’t own the farm, the family had to leave. Read was sent to a school for orphans. His mother took a job managing a laundry. 
Read considered studying medicine after graduation. As a way to pay for it, he joined the local unit of the Royal Army Medical Corps and received a commission in the Green Howards, a Yorkshire Regiment. By the time he entered the University of Leeds, he’d decided that medicine wasn’t for him, so he transferred from the Medical Corps to the Officer Training Corps, where he found himself surrounded by men who had come through Eton or other public schools. Compared to them, Read felt provincial.
When the War broke out, Read left his studies and was shipped overseas.  He found that he was far more comfortable dealing with the sixty or so men in his platoon than the other officers. His platoon was filled with men who had done hard work in the mines and factories of Durham and North Yorkshire. Many were older and more experienced than he, who became a captain in his early twenties, but he developed a good repoire with them.  His fellow officers struck him as “snobbish and intolerant.”
He soon realized that “all the proud pretensions which men had acquired from a conventional environment” became insignificant at the front, and his fatalistic soldiers with their “Every bullet has it billet. What’s the use of worryin’?” attitude coped better than “men of mere brute strength, the footballers and school captains.”
Politically, Herbert Read was what the English call a “Quietist Anarchist.” He was no waver of flags and felt no fervor for one people over another. He expressed hope that the relationships that he had developed in the trenches would lead to new social movement after the war, and that class conflict and nationalities would be abandoned for a more egalitarian, universal social order. He saw signs that the world had wearied of war and was ready to put aside nationalism in this remembrance:
In April, 1918, when on a daylight ‘contact’ patrol with two of my men, we suddenly confronted, round some mound or excavation, a German patrol of the same strength. We were perhaps twenty yards from each other, fully visible. I waved a weary hand, as if to say: What is the use of killing each other? The German officer seemed to understand, and both parties turned and made their way back to their own trenches. Reprehensible conduct, no doubt, but in April, 1918, the war-weariness of the infantry was stronger than its pugnacity, on both sides of the line 
However, when the end finally came, Read found that he had lost too much to sustain much hope. His youngest brother, who had followed him into the Green Howards and had served on the Italian Front, died of a bullet shot in the last few months of war, leaving him in a state of grief that allowed no sympathy or consolation. Others, he knew, felt similarly. “We left the war as we entered it: dazed, indifferent, incapable of any creative action. We had acquired only one new quality: exhaustion.” 
When the Armistice came, a month later, I had no feelings, except possibly of self-congratulation. By then I had been sent to dreary barracks on the outskirts of Canterbury. There were misty fields around us, and perhaps a pealing bell to celebrate our victory. But my heart was numb and my mind dismayed: I turned to the fields and walked away from all human contacts.
Read, who earned both the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross, wrote two volumes of poetry based upon his war experiences: Songs of Chaos (1915) and Naked Warriors (1919). His poems are seen as a bridge between the lyrical forms used by Owen, Sassoon, and Graves and the epic form used by David Jones in In Parenthesis.  His poem, Kneeshaw goes to War, which I have included here, tells the story of one soldier who finds his personal meaning through, or in spite of, the horrific experiences he endured during the war. 
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Aerial view of the Polygonveld (Polygon Wood) 25 June 1917. The town of Zonnebeke shelled to annihilation during WWI.

Kneeshaw goes to War

1

Ernest Kneeshaw grew
In the forest of his dreams
Like a woodland flower whose anaemic petals
Need the sun.

Life was a far perspective
Of high black columns
Flanking, arching and encircling him.
He never, even vaguely, tried to pierce
The gloom about him,
But was content to contemplate
His finger-nails and wrinkled boots.

He might at least have perceived
A sexual atmosphere;
But even when his body burned and urged
Like the buds and roots around him,
Abash'd by the will-less promptings of his flesh,
He continued to contemplate his feet.

2

Kneeshaw went to war.
On bleak moors and among harsh fellows
They set about with much painstaking
To straighten his drooping back:

But still his mind reflected things
Like a cold steel mirror — emotionless;
Yet in reflecting he became accomplish'd
And, to some extent,
Divested of ancestral gloom.
Then Kneeshaw crossed the sea.
At Boulogne
He cast a backward glance across the harbours
And saw there a forest of assembled masts and rigging.
Like the sweep from a releas'd dam,
His thoughts flooded unfamiliar paths:

This forest was congregated
From various climates and strange seas:
Hadn't each ship some separate memory
Of sunlit scenes or arduous waters?
Didn't each bring in the high glamour
Of conquering force?
Wasn't the forest-gloom of their assembly
A body built of living cells,
Of personalities and experiences
— A witness of heroism
Co-existent with man?

And that dark forest of his youth --
Couldn't he liberate the black columns
Flanking, arching, encircling him with dread?
Couldn't he let them spread from his vision like a fleet
Taking the open sea,
Disintegrating into light and colour and the fragrance of winds?
And perhaps in some thought they would return
Laden with strange merchandise --
And with the passing thought
Pass unregretted into far horizons.

These were Kneeshaw's musings
Whilst he yet dwelt in the romantic fringes.

3

Then, with many other men,
He was transported in a cattle-truck
To the scene of war.
For a while chance was kind
Save for an inevitable
Searing of the mind.
But later Kneeshaw's war
Became intense.
The ghastly desolation
Sank into men's hearts and turned them black --
Cankered them with horror.
Kneeshaw felt himself
A cog in some great evil engine,
Unwilling, but revolv'd tempestuously
By unseen springs.
He plunged with listless mind
Into the black horror.

4

There are a few left who will find it hard to forget
Polygonveld.
The earth was scarr'd and broken
By torrents of plunging shells;
Then wash'd and sodden with autumnal rains.
And Polygonbeke
(Perhaps a rippling stream
In the days of Kneeshaw's gloom)
Spread itself like a fatal quicksand, --
A sucking, clutching death.
They had to be across the beke
And in their line before dawn.
A man who was marching by Kneeshaw's side
Hesitated in the middle of the mud,
And slowly sank, weighted down by equipment and arms.
He cried for help;
Rifles were stretched to him;
He clutched and they tugged,
But slowly he sank.
His terror grew --
Grew visibly when the viscous ooze
Reached his neck.
And there he seemed to stick,
Sinking no more.
They could not dig him out --
The oozing mud would flow back again.

The dawn was very near.

An officer shot him through the head:
Not a neat job — the revolver
Was too close.

5

Then the dawn came, silver on the wet brown earth.

Kneeshaw found himself in the second wave:
The unseen springs revolved the cog
Through all the mutations of that storm of death.
He started when he heard them cry " Dig in!"
He had to think and couldn't for a while.
Then he seized a pick from the nearest man
And clawed passionately upon the churned earth.
With satisfaction his pick
Cleft the skull of a buried man.
Kneeshaw tugged the clinging pick,
Saw its burden and shrieked.

For a second or two he was impotent
Vainly trying to recover his will, but his senses prevailing.

Then mercifully
A hot blast and riotous detonation
Hurled his mangled body
Into the beautiful peace of coma.

6

There came a day when Kneeshaw,
Minus a leg, on crutches,
Stalked the woods and hills of his native land.
And on the hills he would sing this war-song:

The forest gloom breaks:
The wild black masts
Seaward sweep on adventurous ways:
I grip my crutches and keep
A lonely view.

I stand on this hill and accept
The pleasure my flesh dictates
I count not kisses nor take
Too serious a view of tobacco.

Judas no doubt was right
In a mental sort of way:
For he betrayed another and so
With purpose was self-justified.
But I delivered my body to fear --
I was a bloodier fool than he.

I stand on this hill and accept
The flowers at my feet and the deep
Beauty of the still tarn:
Chance that gave me a crutch and a view
Gave me these.

The soul is not a dogmatic affair
Like manliness, colour, and light;
But these essentials there be:
To speak truth and so rule oneself
That other folk may rede.
 
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Jennifer Bohnhoff used to teach high school and middle school English, and she often included a unit on the World War I poets. She has now retired and writes from the quietness of her own mountain home. He most recent book, A Blaze of Poppies, is about the experience of two New Mexicans during the Great War.
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Charles Hamilton Sorley, World War I Poet

11/17/2021

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Charles Hamilton Sorley was born on May 19, 1895 in Aberdeen, Scotland. His father was a professor of moral philosophy. The family moved to Cambridge when Sorley was five.  He attended King’s College choir school and, like fellow WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon, Marlborough College, where he ran cross-country. Several of his pre-war poems are about running, especially in the rain.
 
Sorley received a scholarship to University College, Oxford. Before attending, however, he decided to spend sometime in Germany. He spent three months studying language and culture at Schwerin, then enrolled at the University of Jena. When Britain declared war on Germany, he was detained for a brief time, then told to leave the country.
 
Sorley returned to England and volunteered for military service. He joined the Suffolk Regiment, which arrived at the Western Front in May 1915. Sorley quickly rose from lieutenant to captain. On October 13, 1915 he was killed in action during the Battle of Loos by a sniper’s head shot. His last poem, “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead” was discovered in his kitbag after his death.

The first collection of Sorley’s poetry, titled Marlborough and other Poems, was published posthumously and went through six editions in the first year. Sorley’s deeply conflicted attitude about war is evident in his poetry and is likely due to his time in Germany.  was from its start. His poetry has been called ambivalent, ironic, and profound. In his autobiographical book Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves counted Sorley, along with Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg as “the three poets of importance killed during the war.” 

'When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead'
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When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,
“Yet many a better one has died before.”
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
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David Jones, WWI Poet and Painter

11/3/2021

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David Jones is not the most recognized of the World War I poets, but his work is considered among the finest.

Jones was born on November 1, 1895 in a suburb of London. His mother was a Londoner, but his father, who was a printer for the Christian Herald Press, was Welsh and had grown up in Wales. David’s father learned to speak English to help his career. However, he sang Welsh songs, and that stimulated his son’s interest in Welsh language and Welsh mythology.

His parents belonged to the Church of England. David Jones converted to Roman Catholicism after the war. Both his Welsh heritage and his religion are very evident in his artistic work.

Jones knew by the time he was six years old Jones knew that he wanted to be an artist. When he was 14, he entered Camberwell Art School, where he studied literature and the Impressionist and Pre-Raphaelite schools of art. His teachers had worked with Van Gogh and Gauguin, who both influenced his style. By the time the First World War broke out, he was already a very successful watercolor painter, focusing mostly on portraits and landscapes. His work as a wood-engraver was also well known. 

At the beginning of the war, Jones tried to join the Artists' Rifles, but they rejected him because his lungs were weak. Undeterred, he enlisted in the London Welsh Battalion (the 15th) of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He served on the Western Front from 1915 to 1918.  He was wounded at Mametz Wood, recuperated in England, then returned to the Ypres Salient, where he participated in the attack on Pilckem Ridge at Passchendaele. In 1918 he contracted trench fever and nearly died. He spent the rest of the war stationed in Ireland.

Like many men, Jones’ own personal war continued long after the Armistice was signed. Jones suffered from shell-shock, which is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. In order to combat it, he threw himself in to his art. In 1932, his work has risen to such a frenzied state that he finished 60 large paintings in just four months. He also worked on writing, including a first draft of his epic work In Parenthesis. But such drive could not continue, and in October 1932 Jones suffered a nervous breakdown. So profoundly was Jones shaken that he was not able to paint again for 16 years.  

During the period in which he could not paint, Jones work on In Parenthesis, an epic recalling his experiences in the war through the eyes of a fictional character. The title implies that the events take place in a parenthesis of life – during a period that was set aside and distinct from what came before and what came afterward. It is a long and lyrical poem that is at once specifically about one man’s experiences in a specific war and about war in general, and it is filled with Biblical allustions, Welsh folklore, and allusions to Shakespeare and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.

Praise was heaped on In Parenthesis and on Jones when it was published in 1937. It won the Hawthornden prize, which at the time was Britain’s only major literary award. T.S. Eliot praised the poem for using words in a new way and W. H. Auden declared it "the greatest book about the First World War." The war historian Michael Howard called it "the most remarkable work of literature to emerge from either world war." Graham Greene thought it "among the great poems of the century." In 1996 the poet and novelist Adam Thorpe said "it towers above any other prose or verse memorial of ... any war." The art historian Herbert Read called it "one of the most remarkable literary achievements of our time."  Dylan Thomas wished that he had "done anything as good as David Jones." Hugh MacDiarmid announced that Jones was "the greatest native British poet of the century," and Igor Stravinsky thought him "perhaps the greatest living writer in English". Some have said that Jones did for England what Homer did for the Greeks.

Despite all the praise heaped upon Jones, he is not well read. His highly allusive poems are difficult and long; definitely not appropriate for including in a blog such as this. Reading one is a major undertaking. His visual arts have ascended even as his written ones have fallen in favor, and his paintings now command a hefty price.
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In 1970, Jones fell and broke the ball of his femur. He never fully recovered and died on October 28, 1974. 
Jennifer Bohnhoff's novel A Blaze of Poppies is set in New Mexico and the battlefields and field hospitals of France during World War I. 
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Rupert Brooke, The Golden Boy of WWI Poets

10/27/2021

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In his day, the handsome and charming Rupert Brooke was a celebrity. In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Doris L. Eder calls him "a golden-haired, blue-eyed English Adonis." The Irish poet W B. Yeats called him “the most handsome man in Britain". But it was his poetry that made Brooke a national hero.
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Brooke had his finger on the pulse of the nation. Before the outbreak of World War I, the British were proud colonialists, confident in their strength and proud of their ability to control an empire that stretched around the globe. But the Pax Britannia, the relatively peaceful world that Britain’s control had secured, weighed heavily on its restless and pampered youth, of which Brooke was one.
Brooke was born into a privileged family on August 3, 1887. He attended Rugby, where he was a head prefect and captain of the rugby team. At Cambridge University he studied Classics and moved in intellectual circles. After college he traveled to America and the South Seas and spent a year in Germany. His first book of poems, published in 1911, were not well received. However, one of his poems written in Germany in 1912 touched the hearts of the English and catapulted him into the limelight. The speaker in "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," is a homesick Englishman who asks 

“Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?"

When war broke out in August 1914, Brooke, like the rest of the nation, was ready to join. His sonnet, "Peace," demonstrates how war was welcomed by a youth whose life felt frivolous and void of meaning. Wanting to prove himself, he enlisted in the Royal Naval Reserve and saw some brief action at Antwerp in October 1914.
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Brooke’s best-known poem, “The Soldier," was read from the pulpit on Easter Sunday 1915. The reader commented that “such enthusiasm of a pure and elevated patriotism had never found a nobler expression". On March 11, both the poem and the comment were repeated in The Times, and Rupert Brooke became Britain’s ideal handsome young warrior.   His poems expressed the idealism, patriotic fervor, and romantic sacrifice that the public wanted. 
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But Brooke would not live to hear the nation’s praises. He was sent east with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force at the start of the Gallipoli offensive.  While sailing aboard the transport ship Grantully Castle, he was bitten on his lip by a mosquito. The bite festered, and he was transferred to a French hospital ship that was anchored off the island of Skyros. About a week after his poem was red, Brooke died, of septicemia or blood poisoning, on April 23 1915. His friends buried him in an olive grove on Skyros. He was only 27 years old.
A month after Brooke’s death, his friend Edward Marsh rushed the poems he had written in his last few months of life into print. Titled “1914 and Other Poems,” the collection included a romantic photo of him with bare shoulders and flowing hair that made many a woman swoon. Brooke became, according to Bernard Bergonzi, author of Heroes’ Twilight, the “quintessential young Englishman; one of the fairest of the nation’s sons; a ritual sacrifice offered as evidence of the justice of the cause for which England fought.” People as varied as Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill paid him homage. First published in May 1915, the book was so popular that it had been reprinted 24 times by June 1918.
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Brooke had expressed the sentiments of a nation anxious to show itself in war. As the war dragged on, the nation realized that it was not the glamorous, heroic show they had expected. Critics began to call Brooke’s poetry foolishly naive and sentimental, and harsher and more realistic poems began to grab the public imagination. There is little doubt that, had he lived longer and experienced some of the horrors other war poets did, Brooke’s poetry would have changed as well.  

PeacE

Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,
      And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping!
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
      To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary;
      Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
      And all the little emptiness of love!
Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
      Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
            Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there,
      But only agony, and that has ending;
            And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
      That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
      In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
      Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
      Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
 
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
      A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
            Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
      And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
            In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
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Jennifer Bohnhoff lives and writes in the mountains of central New Mexico. Her latest book, A Blaze of Poppies, is the story of a young cowgirl struggling to keep the ranch during the tumultuous years leading up to and during World War I. It is available directly from the author and in paperback and ebook on Amazon. 
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Two Poems by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

10/21/2021

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Poetry was much more widely read during the early part of the twentieth century. 

I am willing to be that few of my friends could name a contemporary poet, but at the time of World War I, many people could, and periodicals like the one pictured were common, making poetry accessible. 

The August 1915 edition featured two poems by Wilfrid Gibson, a poet who was popular in his day but largely forgotten now. He was a member of the Georgian poets at a time when the Modernists were becoming popular.
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Gibson almost missed World War I. The Army rejected his admission for several years because of his poor eyesight. When he finally entered, his experiences affected his poetry. A reviewer for the Boston Transcript said that Gibson’s battle poems were “nothing more than etchings, vignettes, of moods and impressions, but they register with a burning solution on the spirit what the personal side of the war means to those in the trenches and at home.”
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Jennifer Bohnhoff's historical novel A Blaze of Poppies is set in southwestern New Mexico and on the Western Front during World War I. 
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A Question of Right and Wrong: Edward Thomas

10/14/2021

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Edward Thomas
​(1878-1917) was a poet, critic, biographer who was first encouraged to write poetry by his friend, the American poet Robert Frost. Most of his poetry focuses on rural English life. He was 39 years old when he was killed during the Battle of Arras, leaving behind a wife and three children. His first book of poetry had not yet been published when he died, but his work is now highly regarded.

This is the only poem he wrote on the subject of war. 

This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong
BY EDWARD THOMAS

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This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true:--
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
And like her mother that died yesterday.
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate our foe.
Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. Her World War I novel, A Blaze of Poppies, is available on Amazon in ebook and paperback.
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Trench Idyll of Richard Aldington

10/13/2021

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Richard Aldington was a poet who interacted with the most famous poets of his time. He was born on July 8, 1892. His family had a large library of European and Classical literature. Both his mother and father wrote and published books. After attending school at Mr. Sweetman's Seminary for Young Gentlemen, Aldington attended Dover College and the University of London. Aldington was good at languages, and mastered French, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek. He then went on to become a sports journalist and started publishing poetry in British journals. Soon he was associating with the likes of William Butler Yeats and Walter de la Mare.

In 1911 Aldington met society hostess Brigit Patmore, who introduced him to American poets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, who published as H.D, and whom he married two years later. In 1914, the American poet Amy Lowell introduced him to writer D.H. Lawrence.  T. S. Eliot was also acquainted with Aldington.

Aldington joined the Army in June 1916 and was sent to the front in December, where he dug graves. By the end of the war, he had become a signals officer and temporary captain. He was demobilised in February 1919.

Aldington found the lice, cold, mud and unsanitary conditions of a soldier's life degrading, but he managed to write poems, essays, and begin work on Death of a Hero, a semiautobiographical novel while still overseas. His encounters with gas on the front affected him for the rest of his life.

Aldington had difficulty returning to his former life after the war. He felt distant from his poet friends who had not undergone the tortuous life of a soldier, and felt they didn’t understand what he had gone through. Although published four volumes of poetry, Images of War and Images of Desire in 1919, Exile and Other Poems in 1923, and Roads to Glory in 1930, he never regained his prewar confidence in his own talent as a poet. He quit writing poetry entirely after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1925. His marriage also suffered, and he divorced his wife in 1938.

Like many American writers during this period, Aldington went into self-imposed exile. He moved to Paris in 1928.

In 1955 Aldington published a biography of T. E. Lawrence that caused a scandal by making public Lawrence's illegitimacy and homosexuality. His own reputation never recovered after he attacked the popular hero as a liar, a charlatan and an "impudent mythomaniac." Another English Poet from WWI, Robert Graves called Aldington "a bitter, bedridden, leering, asthmatic, elderly hangman-of-letters." Many wonder if he was still suffering from his trauma in the trenches.
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Aldington died on July 27, 1962, shortly after his seventieth birthday.

Trench Idyll

We sat together in the trench,
He on a lump of frozen earth
Blown in the night before,
I on an unexploded shell;
And smoked and talked, like exiles,
Of how pleasant London was,
Its women, restaurants, night clubs, theatres,
How at that very hour
The taxi cabs were taking folk to dine …
Then we sat silent for a while
As a machine gun swept the parapet.

He said:
“I’ve been here on and off two years
And only seen one man killed.”

“That’s odd.”

“The bullet hit him in the throat;
He fell in a heap on the fire-step,
And called out ‘My God! dead!'”

“Good Lord, how terrible!”

“Well, as to that, the nastiest job I’ve had
Was last year on this very front
Taking the discs at night from men
Who’d hung for six months on the wire
Just over there.
The worst of all was
They fell to pieces at a touch,
Thank God we couldn’t see their faces;
They had gas helmets on …”

​I shivered:
“It’s rather cold here, sir; suppose we move?”
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This is one of a series of blogs on the poets of World War 1 written by Jennifer Bohnhoff, an author who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. Her WWI Novel, A Blaze of Poppies, is available in ebook and paperback.
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Siegfried Sassoon

10/6/2021

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​Siegfried Sassoon was born into a wealthy Jewish family who were sometimes referred to as the “Rothschilds of the East” because their fortune was made in India. Before the war, he lived the leisurely life of a cultivated country gentleman, writing poetry that is not considered very good, and fox hunting.

When the war began, Sassoon joined the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He saw action in France in late 1915 and received a Military Cross for bringing back a wounded soldier during heavy fire.

After Sassoon was wounded in action, he wrote an open letter of protest to the war department in which he refused to fight any more. Sassoon thought his letter would lead to a court-martial, but friend and fellow poet Robert Graves successfully argued that Sassoon was suffering from shell-shock and needed medical treatment. In 1917, Sassoon was hospitalized.

Sassoon's war poems are angry and avoid sentimentality. Many of his detractors argue that his refusal to support the war effort was unpatriotic, but Sassoon's shockingly realistic depictions of war captured the feelings of soldiers and a public grown tired of the carnage. 

After the war, Sassoon became involved in Labour Party politics, lectured on pacifism, wrote a trilogy of autobiographical novels, and published a critical biography of Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith.  In 1957, Sassoon became a Catholic and began writing religious poems. He died in 1967 from stomach cancer. 

Attack
​by Siegfried Sassoon

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun 
In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun, 
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud 
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one, 
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire. 
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed 
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear, 
Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire. 
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear, 
They leave their trenches, going over the top, 
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, 
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, 
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!
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Jennifer Bohnhoff's novel, A Blaze of Poppies is set in southern New Mexico and in the trenches of World War I France.
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    ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

    I am a former middle school teacher who loves travel and history, so it should come as no surprise that many of my books are middle grade historical novels set in beautiful or interesting places.  But not all of them.  I hope there's one title here that will speak to you personally and deeply.

    What I love most: that "ah hah" moment when a reader suddenly understands the connections between himself, the past, and the world around him.  Those moments are rarified, mountain-top experiences.


    Can't get enough of Jennifer Bohnhoff's blogs?  She's also on Mad About MG History.  

    ​    Looking for more books for middle grade readers? Greg Pattridge hosts MMGM, where you can find loads of recommendations.

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