Poem of the Week: Papers of Frederick Manning | hair

papers

Weak, brittle mist on the confusing and gnarled branches;
Little gilded leaves lie still, for stillness seizes every branch;
The pools in the muddy road sleep, and the stars reflect indifference;
Steeped in the beauty of moonlight are the earth, the valleys,
Full of quiet shadow, with the mist of sleep.

But far on the horizon rise great pulses of light,
The methods of rifles, wrestling and grappling
Like ancient brute stone gods struggling in confusion;
Then a shell purred above our heads, burdening us
I answer with sudden sounds of applause,
Our shells, which are rapidly flowing moaning and wailing, relax.
Stalking through the blood-thirsty air.

And small golden leaves
It flashes in the fall like flakes and flakes of flame.

The author of this week’s poem, Sydney-born Australian Frederick Manning (1882-1935), is considered to have written one of the finest novels of the First World War ever published. He was 32 years old when war was declared. While living in England at the time, he joined the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in 1915, after being rejected several times for lack of medical fitness. He has always had respiratory problems and generally delicate health.

He failed the officer training course, but went on to fight with the 7th Battalion, participating in the Battles of the Somme and Ancre. His novel, praised by Ernest Hemingway among others, The middle parts to luck, It was published in 1929.

Manning’s experiences in trench warfare also constitute his best poems. His contact with Ezra Pound, whom he first met in London around 1909, had another decisive influence on his poetic style. These war poems, including “Papers”, form the first and most interesting part of his second collection, “Idola” (1917). Even the title, which means “ghosts” or “idols,” has a Poundish tinge. The entire collection can be read here.

The Papers are a good example of Manning’s modifications to the imaginative style guide. It is elaborate beyond the usual spare standards of imagination, but despite the poem’s many pictorial forms and effects, the “little gilded leaves” of lines two and thirteen are a specific and memorable image, marked by a particular sense of subtle visual weight.

The leaves are perhaps unexceptional, as they hang motionless in the deceptive calm before battle in the opening stanza. In the couplet, where the abrupt two-beat line is repeated and isolates the image with a new definite article (“the little gilded leaves”) something almost strange happens. Leaves fall but it is not a normal autumn process; They are softened by the echo of our “heavies” (heavy weapons) with “sudden sounds of applause”. Admittedly, the last phrase is a tautology, but if the word “bruits” is pronounced in English, as I think it should be, it heightens the impact of the adjective “bruits” in the third line of the second verse. The final view of the leaves “like flakes and flakes of flame” does not seem written all over it: the visual transformation of the leaves with fire and shooting creates more significant visual effects.

The first line of the poem is striking. The pair of commonalities between fog and branches are designed to work as a team, as if there were a thread of understanding between the “weak and fragile fog” and the “confusing and complex branches.” The word “bewildering” refers to a form of normality that is mystified by the unnatural lights and noises of war, and is also associated, in sound, with the faint quality of fog. The stars are perhaps as “indifferent” as might be expected, but the theme is important in the little drama of unconsciousness that characterizes the scene – the sleepy ponds, the deep woods and the “valleys, / Full of quiet shade, with the mists of sleep.” Human actors who set the forces of war in motion without full awareness of their destructive power may be implicated. The poetics of the land “drenched in the beauty of moonlight” are almost absorbed into Manning’s overriding sense of an illusory peace about to be shattered.

As an unrhymed and somewhat experimental sonnet, “Leaves” is balanced in three sections. There is a “turn” that occurs after the first five-line stanza, and Manning handles the change of mood and scene in the following seven-line stanza without loss of eloquence. His opening is clear and exciting. The metaphor Manning finds for the “hammer” cannons – “the ancient brute stone gods struggling in confusion” – recalls and gives a powerful new force to the previous bewilderment of the tree’s branches. Then there is a change of form, and the sounds of shells conjure up a pack of hounds, “that river moaning and groaning swiftly, / stalking through the blood-thirsty air.” Hounds impatient to kill are given a line that seems to strain the metrical leash, and the presence of “chase” in an unusual refrain form adds to the rapid menace of the four-beat twelfth line: “chase through the bloodthirsty air.” Anger at the English class system may be indicated in this inescapable association between hunting and abusive social privilege.

Manning’s war service continued until early 1918, when he resigned as an officer. He was serving in the Royal Irish Regiment, perhaps out of loyalty to his parents, both of Irish descent. He continued to write in various genres, including autobiography, and died in Hampstead, London, succumbed to the respiratory ailments that had always dogged him relentlessly.