Gurney, In Flanders

Last week we featured a work by George Butterworth, a young English composer who was killed in action in World War I.

Today, we look at Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), another English composer and contemporary of Butterworth. Gurney saw combat in World War I but survived. He was, however, plagued with mental issues for the much of his life. He had been diagnosed as bipolar in his teens, but he suffered a serious breakdown at the end of the war, perhaps caused or exacerbated by combat, or perhaps owing to the end of a romantic relationship with a nurse he had met in the hospital.

In spite of that, he re-entered the Royal Conservatory and his music was published and performed. But his health worsened, and he spent the last 15 years of his life in psychiatric hospitals. He continued to write while hospitalized up until about 1930.

Gurney also wrote poetry during and about the war in two collections: Severn and Somme (1917) and War’s Embers (1919). And he continued to write poetry during his hospitalization. He is one of 16 Great War Poets memorialized in “Poet’s Corner” of Westminster Abbey.

Gurney’s work includes some 300 songs, some on his own texts and some by others. In Flanders is a poem by Frederick William (“Will”) Harvey (1888-1957). Harvey had been a lawyer before serving in the war. He was captured in 1916 and spent the remainder of the war in German prison camps where much of his poetry was written. In Flanders appeared in his 1916 collection A Gloucestershire Lad, at Home and Abroad.

Unlike the famous In Flanders Fields by John McCrae, which honors the war dead, Harvey’s poem focuses on the soldier’s longing for home.

I’m homesick for my hills again –
My hills again!
To see above the Severn plain,
Unscabbarded against the sky,
The blue high blade of Cotswold lie;
The giant clouds go royally
By jagged Malvern with a train
Of shadows. Where the land is low
Like a huge imprisoning O
I hear a heart that’s sound and high,
I hear the heart within me cry:
‘I’m homesick for my hills again –
My hills again!
Cotswold or Malvern, sun or rain!
My hills again!’