VERSES OF A V.A.D.
VERSES OF A V.A.D
BY
VERA M. BRITTAIN
(V.A.D. London/268, B.R.C.S.)
Foreword by MARIE CONNOR LEIGHTON
ERSKINE MACDONALD, LTD.
LONDON, W.C.1
{6}
All Rights Reserved
First published August 1918
DEDICATED
TO THE MEMORY OF
ROLAND AUBREY LEIGHTON
Lieutenant, Worcestershire Regiment
DIED OF WOUNDS NEAR HÉBUTERNE
December 23rd, 1915
Have found Love’s death in joy, and I in sorrow?
For hand in hand, just as we used to do,
We two shall live our passionate poem through
On God’s serene to-morrow.”
R. A. L.
FOREWORD
These poems, by a writer for whom I have literary hopes, belong veryclearly to that new and vigorous type of poetry which has sprung fromthe stress of the last few years and has its root in things done andsuffered rather than in things merely imagined.
Until lately our very belief in the saying that the poet is born and notmade proved that we had completely accepted poetry as coming only fromwithin, spun, as it were, out of our inner consciousness, and eitherquite unhelped, or else only partially helped, by active experiencesfrom without. We have always understood, of course, that such anexperience as, for instance, the sudden flashing upon us of a magneticface as a stranger passes in the street might set aglow a train ofthought that would quicken and melt into feeling, and the feeling would,in turn, need—and find—expression in poetry.{10}
So far as this we have admitted that outward occurrences in the courseof our quickly flying days can become a source of poetical inspiration.But, in spite of the pointing finger of Kipling, most of us clungdesperately to the verse that had its sole origin in imaginative emotionuntil the blaze of war in the world illumined our souls and showed allof us that out of our simplest practical work can be struck sparks ofreal and great and rare divine fire.
All the poems in this little book are the outcome of things very deeplyfelt. It is very difficult for me to write of them because where thereis pain uttered in them, it has almost always been my pain as well asthe author’s. One or two of the sonnets condense the expression oflosses that have meant a life’s upheaval. One or two, again, arepractically a concrete record of simple human things observed andsuffered and of duty strenuously done. Here there is no leisureddreaming, but sheer experience, solid and stored up, like the honey thata bee’s labour has stored.
But this practical quality, while it has so much that makes it rich andvaluable, has also the one