Scars Upon My Heart: Women's Poetry & Verse of the First World War

by Catherine Reilly (Editor)

Excellent Book

Genres: Poetry, World War I, War, History, Classics, Feminism, School

144 pages, Paperback

First published November 9, 1981

About the author

Catherine Reilly (4 April 1925 – 26 September 2005) was a British bibliographer and anthologist of women's poetry of the First and Second World Wars. She collected the poetry of female poets and published it in two 1984 anthologies - Scars Upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War and Chaos of the Night: Women's Poetry and Verse of World War Two.

Reilly was born in Stretford, Lancashire and won a scholarship to a Roman Catholic grammar school. The school was evacuated in 1939. She left school at the age of 15 and was employed for most of her working life in the public libraries of Manchester. In 1974 she became Assistant Borough Librarian for Trafford, with responsibility for children's services.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the quality of the verse here is a bit more variable than might be hoped, as a whole this is a wonderful collection that really does fill a gap in the literature; I am rather outraged that more of these poems are not routinely included in general First World War anthologies.

In fact, so completely forgotten are many of these poets that not even the barest biographical details can be given; some are simply omitted from the Biographical Notes, and of those that remain, the information provided for Eleanor Norton (‘b. 1881. Lived in London’) is not untypically sparse.

And yet these women's poems are an absolutely necessary part of understanding how society reacted to the War. Many of them were in service themselves in various ways; it was a revelation to me to discover how many nurse-poets there were alongside the solder-poets we're all familiar with, serving in VADs in various clearing-stations on the Western Front and becoming intimately familiar with the worst things that war can do to the human body. But equally if not more fascinating to me were the voices from back home, women who experienced the war as a constant background misery, straitened circumstances, missing loved ones, altered employment opportunities.

It's a much more compelling picture of the Home Front than the one you get from reading male poetry – just think, for instance, of ‘The Glory of Women’ by Sassoon (admittedly a poet who was constitutionally unromantic where women were concerned)—

You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.

And so on. In fact, the trope of the ‘white-feather’ woman urging men on to war from her position of civilian safety is present here as well, and roundly attacked by many of these poets. Helen Parry Eden's ‘A Volunteer’ can stand for several examples expressing a mixture of shame and vitriol:

Why had he sought the struggle and its pain?
Lest little girls with linked hands in the lane
Should look ‘You did not shield us!’ as they wended
Across his window when the war was ended.

This is just one way of coping with the pressure of living safely at home while your friends and family members are being shelled in France; there are many other responses to the same basic idea, which was one of the key ways in which the War separated men from women. Nora Bomford's ‘Drafts’ – for my money the best poem in the book – sums this up in a couplet: ‘They go to God-knows-where, with songs of Blighty, / While I'm in bed, and ribbons in my nightie.’ She goes on to rail against the apparent arbitrariness:

Sex, nothing more, constituent no greater
Than those which make an eyebrow's slant or fall,
In origin, sheer accident, which, later,
Decides the biggest differences of all.
And, through a war, involves the chance of death
Against a life of physical normality—
So dreadfully safe! O, damn the shibboleth
Of sex! God knows we've equal personality.
Why should men face the dark while women stay
To live and laugh and meet the sun each day.

Elsewhere the responses are many and varied. There is fury on behalf of all those who who had no say in the war:

‘Fight on!’ the Armament-kings besought:
Nobody asked what the women thought.

      (‘A Fight to a Finish’, S Gertrude Ford)

There is the direct assumption of soldiers' voices:

One minute we was laughin', me an' Ted,
The next, he lay beside me grinnin' – dead.
‘There's nothin' to report,’ the papers said.

      (‘Nothing to Report’, May Herschel-Clarke)

There are the feelings of outraged motherhood (how common must this have been):

When the day was done,
My little son
Wondered at bath-time why I kissed him so,
Naked upon my knee.
How could he know
The sudden terror that assaulted me?…
The body I had borne
Nine moons beneath my heart,
A part of me…
If, someday,
It should be taken away
To War. Tortured. Torn.
Slain.
Rotting in No Man's Land, out in the rain—
My little son…
Yet all those men had mothers, every one.

      (‘A War Film’, Teresa Hooley)

And, most of all, there are just many good poems that seem otherwise to be completely unknown. Catherine Reilly, who edited this anthology, deserves most of the praise for this, as the whole collection seems to have sprung from her own doctoral thesis into quantifying war poetry. I am very grateful for it and I hope it becomes much more widely read. Here's one more of my favourites to finish, by Nora Griffiths (about whom we know nothing at all).

THE WYKHAMIST

In the wake of the yellow sunset one pale star
Hangs over the darkening city's purple haze.
An errand-boy in the street beneath me plays
On a penny whistle. Very faint and far
Comes the scroop of tortured gear on a battered car.
A hyacinth nods pallid blooms on the window sill,
Swayed by the tiny wind. St. Catherine's Hill
Is a place of mystery, a land of dreams.
The tramp of soldiers, barrack-marching, seems
A thing remote, untouched by fate or time.
…A year ago you heard Cathedral's chime,
You hurried up to books – a year ago;
—Shouted for ‘Houses’ in New Field below.
…You…‘died of wounds’…they told me
                        …yet your feet
Pass with the others down the twilit street.

[Rosamund · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixed bag of poems but that's not a criticism as the interest of the collection is the range of women's poetic responses to the war.

[Steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is interesting about ‘Scars Upon My Heart’ is that it is a collection of WWI poetry written only by women. So often, the focus on the study of WWI Literature is solely on that of the male poets of the time. Who has not studied Sassoon and his brilliantly acerbic and sarcastic poems such as ‘Does it Matter?’ or ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ or examined the wonderfully moving poems of Owen such as ‘Strange Meeting’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’? Even if you haven’t, virtually everyone will be familiar with McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ from which we obtain the poppy as a symbol of remembrance. However, as is historically the case with Literature, women’s voices have been marginalised and ignored. It is easy to forget that women suffered too: they lost lovers, fathers, friends, children and witnessed their familiar worlds turned to chaos in a matter of months. Just like their male counterparts, their grief, anxiety and confusion also found an outlet in poetry and this collection is a testament to that outpouring.

As such, it is a brilliant and necessary testament to the work of women of this period that has so often been overshadowed by male writers. I have studied WWI Literature on multiple occasions and have read literature of and about this period extensively and thus it was with some embarrassment that I realised I was completely unaware of all but one of two of the poems in this collection (those by Jessie Pope, which in their patriotic, persuasive fervour are not representative).

Moreover, there are some superb poems in this collection and I think it is worth commenting on just a few of my favourites:

- ‘Field Ambulance in Retreat’ by May Sinclair is a wonderfully evocative poem where the red and white symbolism is stark and striking. Sinclair worked as a nurse on the front line and is thus writing from experience and the moving depiction of the men’s suffering and injuries evident in this poem is really affecting.

- ‘To my brother’ by Vera Brittain – herself a prolific writer is emotive in its depiction of personal loss and it is from this poem that the entire collection takes it title. This in itself is a reminder of the scars and wounds inflicted emotionally upon these women many of whom are writing from a very personal sense of loss as in this poem

- ‘The Veteran’ by Margaret Postgate Cole that sensitively presents the abandonment of the injured soldier.

- ‘Reported Missing’ by Anna Gordon Keown, which, in the speaker’s hopeless desperation to believe that her lover will return one day, is one of the most heart breaking poems in the collection.

What I also found interesting and as the compiler Catherine Reilly comments in her introduction, is that many of these female authors were expressing anti-war sentiments much earlier than their male contemporaries where the majority of poems spoke of a jingoistic desire to join the war effort. In their emotionally driven poetry, they seem to not merely express but foresee the terrible loss and damage that war will inevitably bring.

This is not to denigrate the superb war poetry written by men in this era. As a rather strange teenager, I grew up not in love with Keanu Reeves or River Phoenix, but utterly in love with Rupert Brooke despite his death some 60 years before I was born and then went on to read Sassoon’s biographies at 16 (despite understanding very little of his elite, hunting driven society as portrayed in ‘Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Gentleman’. However, what this collection provides is a different perspective; a means through which to see the war from another point of view and that is enlightening.

Having said this, I did also feel at times as if some poems had been chosen to bulk the collection out. Whilst there were some wonderful poems, there were others that felt rather childish and poorly constructed. They would not have found their way into any other collection of poetry, but were simply there because they were written by a woman during WWI and not really there because of their poetic merit. However, I also think it is important not to make comparisons to the poetry written by soldiers of the period. Can these women really portray the suffering and horror of the trenches? No – they were not there; they did not see the human devastation; they did not bare witness in this way. However, that does not mean that they do not have something equally important to say and a real sense of pain in many of the cases.

In short, this is an enlightening and interesting collection although not all of the poems are of equal merit.

[Velvetink · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry written by women during WW1 full of mourning and grief. It fills a gap - for many of us read male WW1 poetry at school like Sassoon and Owen & Rupert Brook with his young heroism., but none by women. There's been a great invisibility of women's poetry on the Great War and it's been said it stems from the "white feather" syndrome. Perhaps it's the same which generates a general lack of interest in women's wartime experience, including the endlessly repeated tragic one of bereavement.

There are 79 women represented. Not all unknown. ie Nancy Cunard, Edith Sitwell, Eva Dobell, Amy Lowell, Marie Stopes, Margaret Sackville.

[Glyn Longden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating: 7.5/10. Without appearing to be a philistine, I must admit that it's not often I read a volume of poetry; I question my ability to pass judgement...but, what the hell, that's never stopped me before. These poems are about World War I but they are all by female authors. The prevailing wisdom apparently was that women couldn't write about the First World War because they could not truly appreciate the horror of it all. Well, they can and they do; some of these poems show an extraordinary comprehension of how society was changing as the war progressed. While some of the poems are from a definite female viewpoint, many you would not recognize the gender of the author. I would also like the acknowledge the wonderful preface in this book by Judith Kazantzis who really is able to express in words some of the feelings I had when I read the poems. One of these themes was the idea that the authors could not express doubts about the aims and goals of the war without questioning the sacrifice of the millions of soldiers who had been killed. Do yourself a favour; read this book. It won't take long.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection, first published by Virago in 1981, is an attempt to give a voice to the women poets of World War One. Catherine W. Reilly, the editor, through her own research says that 2225 British men and women wrote poems about World War One, c.532 of them were women.

This collection contains poems by 79 women. Some of whom are familiar names: Vera Brittain; May Wedderburn Cannan; Eleanor Farjeon; Rose Macauley; Charlotte Mew; Edith Sitwell and Jessie Pope. But a lot of the poets are lesser known (or entirely unknown) people, which makes for interesting reading.

Jessie Pope, btw, is the poet that Wilfred Owen is raging at in 'Dulce et decorum est'. She was a writer of patriotic poems. This collection does contain its fair share of those kind of poems although none of them are as egregious as you might expect.

There's a tendency to think of war as the sole preserve of the men dying on the battlefield and that the poetry of war is surely only the job of men. Yet women played many roles in World War One - munitions workers, V.A.D. nurses and much more. Indeed, a number of poems address that very point, such as Jessie Pope's "War Girls" or Madeline Ida Bedford's "Munition Wages". Although Pope's poem suggests this is only temporary as each of the two verses ends:

"They're going to keep their end up
Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back."

Nature features a lot too. Either as a thing in itself or as part of a poem remembering a person. There are two poems called, "Spring in War-Time" for example. One by Edith Nesbit and one by Sara Teasdale. There are poems of loss, grief and remembrance. Some poets attempt to put themselves in the place of men at the frontline. Some lament that men must fight but their sisters can't. Religion and nature though seem to come in often. The crucifixion and sacrifice of Christ as metaphor for the sacrifice of the men at the front. There are protest poems too.

It's interesting to read poetry that isn't overly familiar to you. I'm not sure all of it is great poetry - some of it might not even be good - but it is important to hear other voices in these stories. Women worked and suffered in World War One. They might not have died in their millions or be wounded or shell-shocked but they suffered the loss of brothers, sons, fathers, husbands and lovers; they received the wounded and the broken back into their lives. They worked in many jobs, some with genuine risk to life.

This copy is a 2007 reprint. It has an fine preface by Julia Kazantis, which is worth a careful read and an introduction by Catherine W. Riley herself. Then there are brief biographies, where that information is available, on each poet.

I'm wondering if there is another more modern collection like this and if not, why not. It seems to me that with forty years having past since the first publication of this book the time must have come for a new collection of women war poets. I can't believe it is a subject untouched by academia. I know, for example, that a new biography of Charlotte Mew was published in 2021. I shall go and do some digging.

[Jordana Diengdoh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despair...that's the feeling conveyed in all these poems as seen from Vera Brittain's "To my brother", those powerful lines "Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart". "Peace" by Eleanor Farjeon "I am the sudden silence after clamour", "An incident" by Mary H.J. Henderson "And still on the battlefield of pain Christ is stretched on His Cross again;", "Dulce Et Decorum?" by Elinor Jenkins "...And made him of her tears a glimmering shroud", "He went for a soldier" by Ruth Comfort Mitchell "...Crows ...eager for the foul feast spread for them", "The hospital visitor" by Alys Fane Trotter "These are the men who've learned to laugh at pain...They've said brave words, or tried to make a joke" These are just a few quotes of such agony and pain profoundly expressed and penned down for posterity...what people went through during that period in history.
Their yesterday for our today...that is why I read these poems.

[Yara (The Narratologist) · Rating 4 out of 5]

(In a nutshell: the quality of the poems themselves varies wildly from heartbreaking to clumsy and wooden, but as a collection of female voices it is incredibly valuable. These women wrote about working in factories, putting together care packages, living on rations, watching propaganda reels, and watching over patients in war hospitals - if you have any interest in this time period and those voices rarely included in literary canon, I highly recommend it.)

[Silent_Song · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And if these years have made you into a mine-prop,
To carry the twisting galleries of the world's reconstruction
What use is it to you? What use
To have your body lying here
In Sheer, underneath the larches?"


from "Afterwards", by Margaret Postgate Cole

[Tamzin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poetry is so moving. I love being able to see the views of women in the war, which is something that (for me, at least) is forgotten.

[Homerun2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Aileen Lobban · Rating 5 out of 5]

interesting perspective - especially Vera Britton

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 - good selection but lacked vital biographical info on the poets

[Brad Medd · Rating 4 out of 5]

(A rough review I will be revisiting )

A diverse, insightful anthology which addresses the overlooked area of womens' WW1 poetry. The brutal tides of war are felt through the collective grief of these women, who's lives were changed through profound loss and grief. This does not denigrate the harrowing literature born from the trenches, but it's incredibly valuable in broadening the context of WW1 and how its clutches defied distance.

[Cleo Harper · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like war poetry as much as the next person, but this collection is put together extremely well, and highlights the experience of a woman on the home front during WWI, in all aspects of life.

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The earth is all too narrow for our dead,
So many and each a child of ours"

Poets of the First World War hold a special place in our collective memory. Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon..the men...boys really..

But what of the women? Those left behind, worrying, working, struggling..receiving the telegrams..nurses, volunteers, wives and widows

There is pain and beauty in these lost voices, as dark and violent as the Somme. There is grace and charm and forgiveness and charity..and a restless desire for change.

Cicely Hamilton's "Non-Combatant" is an angry cry of feminist rage, which reads closer to a Patti Smith lyric than a war poet.

Like war itself, all of humanity lives here, and dies slowly in the pages. Beautifully tragic.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

A more fractured read - deliberately, having picked it as a toilet book. Three standout poets: Ursula Roberts, Margaret Sackville and Alys Fane Trotter, All the rest far too flowery, religious or forced for my taste.

The style of poetry - or my appreciation of it - has inevitably changed. While the sentiments of some were lost amid the flowery prose, others, the simpler ones, read as fresh and impactful and relevant for war today.
The ordering of the poems, - alphabetically by writer - seemed a little careless; night have been better themed, but reading them en masse they certainly sadden one..

[Judith Rich · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anthology of women's verse from WW1, an area usually overlooked. I've given this 3 stars because the poems are so variable in quality. It was interesting to find authors I don't necessarily associate with either poetry or WW1 in here, such as Mary Webb and E Nesbit, alongside women you might expect to find, such as Vera Brittain.

I'm somewhat embarrassed that Jessie Pope, the "Jingo Woman" poet, who wrote dreadful verse "encouraging" (to put it mildly) boys to join up, was from my home town!

[Leah L Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems were written from the heart- wives and mothers, widows and sisters of the dead servicemen or M.I.A.
Some hurt you inside... You can feel their sadness. Some are filled with false hope. Each is written by a broken woman.
My favourite was 'Love' by May Wedderburn Cannan (page 19). It was so powerful and summed up the sense of lost they all felt in losing sons, husbands, fathers or lovers.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great to have a collection of First World War poetry by women. The poems cover the range of women's wartime experiences and their responses to them. Although, perhaps inevitably, there are few working-class authors, some poets, like Winifred Letts, give voice to ordinary women and men. The preface, introduction and biographical notes all add to your understanding of the poetry. There are some flashes of anger but, overall, I was left with a sense of the profound sadness felt by the women.

[Wendy Creed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Along with Testament of Youth this has to be the saddest collection of writings - the Great War - so much carnage - so much loss and longing - so many wounded both those who fought and those who were at home. Scars gives an insight into the tragedy of women's lives post war those who had lost sons, brothers and lovers. Some of these poems will make you want to weep ...

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I think that women's literature of the first world war is often under-acknowledged, the quality of the poetry in this anthology is pretty variable. Although it is interesting from a historical point of view to look at fenale expressions of the war, it mostly doesn't match up to the outstanding and painful quality of the most frequently-anthologised men's poetry.

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of women's poetry from World War One which is definitely well worth a read. Never had I imagined that there was poetry this intricate written by women during the war. I am so glad that Catherine Reilly compiled this anthology together :)

[Sareene · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad there's a collection of women's poetry from WWI. There are some great poems here and some not-so-good ones, but the collection does give a broad view of what women were doing and thinking during the war.

[Madden · Rating 4 out of 5]

while not all of the poems are well-crafted, many of the poems are equal in skill to their more famous male counterparts. the collection is striking as a collective experience of the tragedy, tropes, and opinions on the war.

[Pippa · Rating 5 out of 5]

At last! A book that looks at women's poetry in wartime. As granddaughter of Effie M Roberts I am very conscious of how women get left out of the war anthologies. Some fine poetry here.

[Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought provoking and heartbreaking.

[Steve Clark]

Hardcover