"Going Out at Dawn" is the longest of six poems by Ivor Gurney that was first published in the TLS in 1978 at Geoffrey Grison's suggestion, some forty years after the poet's death. All six show Gurney immersed, after the First World War, in his Gloucestershire world of country walks and music, the two sometimes folding into one another, as in the last line of "Fragment": "No-one walks. String quartett fills Northwest space . . .". The "Quartett" in "Going Out at Dawn" comes in the last line, too, and again the darkness of the northward road catches the poet's eye; the communing with night and dawn in this lonely way seems quite bound up with the creation of "my own writing", whether it is poetry or music. As the creator of both, Gurney occupies a distinguished position among artistic survivors of the war (he was discharged as unfit for duty in 1917, and Severn and Somme, his first collection of poems, saw publication in the same year). So it is strange to think that "Going Out at Dawn" is also the work of a man who never saw Gloucestershire again after 1922: Gurney had been committed to a mental asylum in September that year, and it was there that he wrote some of his most striking poetry.

Going Out at Dawn

Strange to see that usual dark road paving wet
With shallow dim reflecting rain pools, looking
To north, where light all night stayed and dawn braving yet
Capella hung, above dark elms unshaking, no silence breaking,
And still to dawn night's ugliness owed no debt.

About eleven from the touch of the drear raining,
I had gone in to Shakespeare and my own writing,
Seen the lovely lamplight in golden shining,
And resolved to move no more till dawn made whitening
Between the shutter-chinks, or by the door mat.

Yet here at five, an hour before day was alive . . .
Behold me walking to where great elm trees drip
Melancholy slow streams of rain water, on the too wet
Traveller, to pass them, watching and then return,
Writing Sonata or Quartett with a candle dip.

IVOR GURNEY (Written c.1926, published 1978)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "Elegy for Jane" by Theodore Roethke, click here.

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