Muddy Poetics: First World War poems by Helen Saunders and Mary Borden

Abstract

In its appearances in English literary history, mud is associated with dirt and disgustingness, but also with vitality, insurgence and creativity. Mud in First World War poetry, however, has been most often read as figuring ontological and epistemological crisis: the taboo and the abject. Two poems about mud written by women during the First World War permit a different interpretation. In Helen Saunders’ ‘A Vision of Mud’ (1915) and Mary Borden's ‘The Song of the Mud’ (1917), mud is as fascinating as it is repellent. Blurring the boundaries between combatant and non-combatant, it serves as the inspiration for and the stuff of female creativity. It also reveals the possibilities of a critical thinking with muddiness which productively resists reductive dichotomies.

Keywords:

• Mud
• First World War
• Helen Saunders
• Mary Borden
• poetry

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The first mention of mud on the Western Front in the London Times was on 22 September 1914: ‘The mud is awful’ (Anonymous 1914b). On 31 December 1914, an ‘eye-witness’ reported: ‘The liquid and cold mud from which the men suffered invaded the breeches of their rifles, so that they could no longer fire … Our soldiers … have become blocks of mud’ (Anonymous 1914c).

2 The edition of Trivia used is Brant and Whyman's (2007: 169–205). Book and line numbers are given parenthetically in the text. I am grateful to Ros Ballaster for alerting me to the muddiness of Gay's and Pope's poems.

3 The 1729 version of The Dunciad in Butt (1985) is used. Book and line numbers are given parenthetically in the text.

4 ‘[T]hese Imagists’, wrote Read, ‘may be accused of expressing a “slice” of their emotions, and of not discriminating between the vision of purely aesthetic value and the vision of emotional value only’ (Read 1918: 78).

5 The remarks were made by Etchells in an interview with Cork in 1972.

6 The remark was made in an undated letter from Saunders to Lewis held in Cornell University's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

7 Subsequent references to ‘A Vision of Mud’ are to this text.

8 Peppin also ascribes the colophon on page 16 to Saunders (Peppin 1996: 13).

9 Saunders made this remark in a letter of 1 September 1962 to William Wees. Peppin plausibly conjectures that the family pronunciation of the name was ‘Sarnders’ rather than ‘Sawnders’ (Peppin 1996: 12).

10 Or ‘a restless reverie on the urge to bridge the chasm between home and the front in verse’ (Peppis 2000: 126).

11 See www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bomberg-the-mud-bath-t00656/text-catalogue-entry (viewed 4 March 2015).

12 See www.jewishmuseum.org.uk/jb-Russian-Vapour-Baths-sign (viewed 4 March 2015).

13 Fango is the Italian word for ‘mud’.

14 In a striking forerunner of Saunders’ ‘dingy feather’, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–2), Will Ladislaw laments that Dorothea will not ‘value any word I ever uttered to her again at more than a dirty feather’ (Eliot 1986: 835). But, while Eliot aligns the ‘dirty feather’ with verbal worthlessness, Saunders uses the feather image—a classic sign of writing—to figure her speaker's ability to float.

15 On the ‘alternate … persona’ to Borden's ‘depersonalized, deadened, and de-gendered voice’—‘a frankly sexual, gendered voice’ evident in her sonnets—see McGowan (2011).

16 The edition of ‘The Song of the Mud’ referred to in this article is in Borden (1929: 179–82).

17 On the similarities between Borden's and Walt Whitman's versification, see Montefiore (2003: 119–20).

18 There is a notable resemblance (though no influence is suggested) between Borden's evocation and the officer's description of mud in The Times’ ‘Letters from the Front’ column: ‘My hands are caked in mud … My breeches are thick with mud … my muffler is more like a mud pie than anything else … My watch has stopped at 5, as the wet and mud have penetrated it … I have just waded through our trenches, which have fallen to pieces and are filling with mud and water … men … wet and grimy and caked in mud’. It is after this account that the officer asks: ‘Am I a human being?’ (Anonymous 1915a).

19 ‘When grieving is something to be feared, our fears can give rise to the impulse to resolve it quickly, to banish it in the name of an action invested with the power to restore the loss or return the world to a former order, or to reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly … Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability?’ (Butler 2006: 29).