Oxford poetry, 1917 — Background and Themes

Water and the Suspended Moment

Water appears throughout the anthology as a medium of reverie, loss, or transition. P. Bloomfield’s “Second-Best” opens with a wish to “sail all alone up the stream,” using the river as a space apart from shared grief. T. W. Earp’s “The Canal” turns to still water as a setting for solitude, while E. E. Smith’s “The Voyage” extends the motif into open sea. More unexpectedly, water also marks a pause in action: in Huxley’s “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune,” the speaker lies “where summer’s drouth / Sifts fine the sand” and dreams “planet-struck by the grape’s round wine-red star.” The faun’s suspended state—between waking and sleep, pursuit and recollection—echoes the anthology’s broader fascination with moments held outside ordinary time. Even in poems without literal water, the language of tides, streams, and drowning recurs, as when C. R. Jury’s “Love” speaks of a “torrent” that “no death can stem.”

Elegy and the Unspoken War

Though the war is rarely named, its pressure shapes several poems. Bloomfield’s “Second-Best” addresses a “dear brother” who is “far away,” and the May landscape feels incomplete without him. F. St. V. Morris’s “Last Poem” carries a title that, in context, suggests finality beyond the page. More obliquely, D. E. A. Wallace’s “Sonnet in Contempt of Death” argues against death’s power through formal defiance, while M. Leigh’s “Two Epitaphs” compresses loss into epigrammatic form—one on lovers parted by the grave, another on an aristocrat “dying under a democracy.” The anthology’s editors, all in their twenties, were themselves close to the war; Childe and Earp had served. The poems they selected often prefer indirection to reportage, using classical or pastoral frames to approach grief. Readers may notice how frequently the word “dead” appears in titles and first lines, as if the collection is circling a subject it cannot directly name.

Classical and Medieval Frames

Several poets reach for myth or medieval legend to structure their work. J. E. A. Carver’s “Tintagil” invokes Arthurian associations, while W. R. Childe’s “The Last Abbot of Gloucester” and “The Gothic Rose” draw on ecclesiastical and architectural imagery. Huxley’s poem explicitly adapts Mallarmé’s faun, transplanting the figure into an English pastoral setting. Dorothy L. Sayers’s “Fair Erembours” takes its title from a romance heroine, and Joan Evans’s “The Hamadryad” personifies a tree nymph. These references are not decorative; they provide a vocabulary for emotions that direct statement might flatten. The anthology’s editors, all classicists or medievalists by training, clearly valued this allusive mode. For the reader, the effect is cumulative: the poems speak to each other across centuries, creating a conversation between modern Oxford and the older worlds it studied.

Formal Variety and the Lyric Self

The anthology showcases a wide range of forms, from sonnets and epitaphs to free-verse meditations and song-like lyrics. M. St. Clare Byrne’s “Favete Linguis” uses a Latin title and tight stanzas, while Chaman Lall’s “Thirty Years After” adopts a looser, repetitive structure that mimics obsessive memory. L. A. G. Strong’s “The Mad Man” and “The Bait-Digger’s Son” introduce dramatic monologue, giving voice to marginal figures. Robert Graves’s two contributions—“Double Red Daisies” and “Dead Cow Farm”—are among the shortest in the book, each compressing a vivid scene into a few lines. This formal range means the collection never settles into a single tone. Readers interested in craft will find sonnets that adhere to convention and others that stretch it, alongside poems that abandon meter for rhythmic prose. The lyric “I” shifts from poem to poem, sometimes confessional, sometimes masked, creating a sense of many selves speaking from the same historical moment.

This anthology rewards reading as a constellation rather than a sequence. The alphabetical arrangement encourages cross-reference: a poem about a canal gains resonance when set beside one about a river; a sonnet on love echoes an epitaph on death. The editors’ presence is felt mainly in the selection itself—they chose work that values compression, image, and indirect address. For readers interested in early twentieth-century poetry, the volume offers a snapshot of Oxford verse just before modernism’s full arrival, where traditional forms still hold but begin to show strain. The war, though seldom explicit, gives the collection its emotional gravity.

There’s something achingly tender in those Oxford pages—water-logged elegies, time held still. It reminds me of a quieter, older ache I found once in the harp-weaver’s threads, where loss feels almost wearable. I think of that volume often, The harp-weaver, and other poems — Inside the Classic, as a kind of distant cousin to those war-haunted lines. Both stay with you, not loudly, but like a watermark.