Edgell Rickword is Envious of the Dead in "Moonrise Over Battlefield"

 

             

Edgell Rickword

             

Moonrise Over Battlefield by Edgell Rickword

After the fallen sun the wind was sad 

like violins behind immense old walls. 

Trees were musicians swaying round the bed 

of a woman m gloomy halls. 

In privacy of music she made ready 

with comb and silver dust and fard; 

under her silken vest her little belly 

shone like a bladder of sweet lard. 

She drifted with the grand air of a punk

on Heaven's streets soliciting white saints;

then lay in bright communion on a cloud-bank

as one who near extreme of pleasure faints.

 

Then I thought, standing in the ruined trench,

(all around, dead Boche white-shirted lay like sheep),

'Why does this damned entrancing bitch

seek lovers only among them that sleep?

                When I first read “Moonrise Over Battlefield” by Edgell Rickword I was most intrigued by the imagery in the first stanza. The sun is described as “fallen” which feels reminiscent of men who fall during battle. The wind is depicted as “sad”. This imagery suggests that even nature is mourning the scene of the battlefield.

                The poem seems to be about the joys that those who have died and gone to heaven can experience. While the poem depicts the woman and her act of “soliciting white saints,” in the last stanza, the tone of the poem shifts. The narrator seems angry that those who have died are the only ones who can experience this pleasure. The narrator states that he is in a “ruined trench” – a stark contrast from heaven’s streets and the cloud-banks which is where the woman could be found. The anger is cemented in the final stanza with the lines “why does this damned entrancing bitch / seek lovers only among them that sleep?” While the narrator’s anger is clear, it also seems that there is jealously in his words. He does not describe the men who are the woman’s lovers as dead but rather says they are sleeping, evoking an image of peace for the dead.

                Edgell Rickwood was born in 1898 and enlisted in the British army in 1916 at the age of 18. Though Rickwood lived through the war – he dd not die until much later at the age of 83 – he still experienced trauma during the war. Rickwood was wounded twice in battle, and won the Military Cross for distinguished service. He also lost an eye to septicemia in 1919.

                After the war, Rickwood became a freelance literary reviewer and published collections of his poems. Rickwood once stated that the greatest influence of his early work was Siegfried Sassoon because Sassoon was the “first poet [he] knew of who dealt with war in the vocabulary of war.” This Rickwood seems to show the effects of war in this poem through the personification of nature as sorrowful and his depiction of the “ruined trench he is left in.”

                Rickwood lived through World War I, but it seems that during Rickwood’s time on the battlefield he was at times jealous of those who had died. While he is left with the horrific scene of the trenches and the mourning nature, those who have died are at peace as saints on heaven’s streets.

 

To learn more about Edgell Rickword:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgell_Rickword

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edgell-rickword