Not yet will those measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed;
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.
But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column’s head.
And over the stairway, at the foot—oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread
Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things
Speaking so wistfully of other Springs
From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.
In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers
To lovers—to mothers
Here, too, lies he:
Under the purple, the green, the red,
It is all young life: it must break some women’s hearts to see
Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!
Only, when all is done and said,
God is not mocked and neither are the dead.
For this will stand in our Market-place—
Who’ll sell, who’ll buy
(Will you or I
Lie each to each with the better grace)?
While looking into every busy whore’s and huckster’s face
As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.
The poem first appeared in The Westminster Gazette on 7 September 1919, and it seems reasonable to assume that Mew wrote it in July or August of that year. The word ‘Cenotaph’ (from the Greek for ’empty tomb’) was current thanks to Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose wood-and-plaster structure was unveiled at Whitehall in July 1919; he replaced it with a near-identical stone structure at the same spot in 1920. (Lutyens had been commissioned to design a ‘catafalque’; the ‘cenotaph’ was his own term.)
Mew may also have known Lutyens’s plans for a more elaborate war memorial in Southampton, a city which she passed through regularly on family trips to the Isle of Wight.
However, neither the London nor the Southampton Cenotaph depicts what Mew describes: ‘Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column’s head’. Her poem is an example of what John Hollander calls ‘notional ekphrasis’—the verbal representation of an imaginary work of art.
Tim Kendall