Elinor Jenkins
1893 - 1920 Famous poet

We buried of our dead the dearest one-
Said to each other, ‘Here then let him lie,
And they may find their place, when all is done,
From the old may tree standing guard near by.’

Strong limbs whereon the wasted life blood dries,
And soft cheeks that a girl might wish her own,
A scholar’s brow, o’ershadowing valiant eyes,
Henceforth shall pleasure charnel-worms alone.

For we, that loved him, covered up his face,
And laid him in the sodden earth away,
And left him lying in that lonely place
To rot and moulder with the mouldering clay.

The hawthorn that above his grave head grew
Like an old crone toward the raw earth bowed,
Wept softly over him, the whole night through,
And made him of tears a glimmering shroud.

Oh Lord of Hosts, no hallowed prayer we bring,
Here for They Grace is no importuning,
No room for those that will not strive nor cry
When loving kindness with our dead lay slain:
Give us our fathers’ heathen hearts again,
Valour to dare, and fortitude to die.

Analysis ( hide): The poem responds directly to World War I, reflecting a shift from early-war patriotic rhetoric to a more disillusioned perspective, common among British war poets post-1916 but distinct in its explicit rejection of Christian consolation.

Tone and Diction: It adopts a restrained yet bitter tone, contrasting religious expectations of burial with the grim physicality of death, using plain diction undercut by moments of lyrical intensity, particularly in the hawthorn's personified mourning.

Religious Subversion: Unlike many contemporaneous poems that appeal to divine meaning amid suffering, this work denies the efficacy of prayer, instead petitioning for pre-Christian virtues—reminiscent of Owen’s skepticism but with a pagan turn absent in his work.

Form and Structure: Written in quatrains with a near sonnet-like compression in the final six lines, the poem blends traditional form with thematic rupture, using rhyme and meter to contain emotional volatility without resolving it.

Nature Imagery: The hawthorn as a weeping crone introduces a non-human mourner, assigning empathy to the landscape—an inversion of pastoral conventions, which typically offer solace; here, nature mirrors desolation.

Emotional Restraint: The speaker suppresses overt grief, focusing instead on ritualized dismissal and a collective voice (“we”), which echoes the communal trauma in Sassoon’s early war poems but resists satirical sharpness.

Gendered Perspective: As a female war poet, the voice occupies a marginalized position, observing rather than experiencing combat, yet claiming intimate access to loss—a stance shared with other women writers like Mary Borden, though less clinical.

Less-Discussed Angle: The poem's plea for "heathen hearts" critiques not just war ideology but the failure of Christian pacifism, suggesting moral erosion through enforced passivity, a theme underexplored in mainstream war poetry.

Place in Author's Work: Among Jenkins’s limited surviving poems, this stands out for its assertive irreligiosity and sustained imagery, diverging from her more conventional elegies and aligning with post-1917 disillusionment.

Contemporary Relevance: While pre-dating high modernism's fragmentation, the poem anticipates modernist skepticism by rejecting redemptive narratives, aligning it with late-war works that dismantle national and spiritual mythologies.

(ai)

Edit Report content

Add to new list

Elinor Jenkins

A Legend Of Ypres

Before the throne the spirits of the slain
With a loud voice importunately cried,
"O Lord of Hosts, whose name be glorified,
Scarce may the line one onslaught more sustain
Wanting our help. Let it not be in vain,
Not all in vain, O God, that we have died."
And smiling on them our good Lord replied,
"Begone then, foolish ones, and fight again."

Our eyes were holden, that we saw them not;
Disheartened foes beheld -- our prisoners said --
Behind us massed, a mighty host indeed,
Where no host was. On comrades unforgot
We thought, and knew that all those valiant dead
Forwent their rest to save us at our need.

Analysis ( hide ) This poem flips the script on patriotic sacrifice. Most war verse from this time cheers noble death for a grand cause. This one skips that glory - dead soldiers beg to get back in the trench, hardcore.
It's grimmer and more literal than her other poems. Jenkins often wrote about grief from the home front. This one drops you in the mud with the ghosts, raw and supernaturally blunt.
The form is traditional but the message sticks it to tradition. That neat sonnet structure boxes a heretical idea: God calls valiant souls "foolish" and sends them back to a meat grinder they already escaped.
It ditches the era's romanticism for trench realism. No angels on clouds here - just phantom reinforcements appearing where "no host was." That’s a soldier's ghost story, not a statesman’s eulogy.
The core takeaway is hardcore loyalty over heavenly reward. These dead guys choose their living buddies over eternal peace. That’s a bond deeper than any flag-waving propaganda of the time could invent. (ai)

Edit Report content

Add to new list

Elinor Jenkins1893 - 1920 Famous poet

Dulce Et Decorum?

A Legend Of Ypres

Elinor Jenkins
1893 - 1920 Famous poet