Ivor Gurney

Ivor Bertie Gurney (28 August 1890 - 26 December 1937) was an English poet and composer.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937). Courtesy World War I and English Poetry.

Life

Youth and education

Gurney was born at 7 Queen Street, Gloucester, the 2nd of 4 children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress.

Gurney showed musical ability early. He sang as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral, from 1900 to 1906, when he became an articled pupil of Dr Herbert Brewer at the cathedral, where he met fellow composer Herbert Howells (who became a life-long friend).

Gurney also enjoyed an enduring friendship with poet F.W. Harvey, whom he met in 1908. The most significant adult figures in Gurney's early life were Rev. Alfred H. Cheesman and 2 sisters, Emily and Margaret Hunt who nurtured Gurney's interests in music and literature.

Gurney began composing music at the age of 14, and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1911. He studied there with Charles Villiers Stanford, who also taught Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Marion M. Scott, Rebecca Clarke, Frank Bridge, Arthur Bliss, Howells and many others. Stanford told Howells that Gurney was potentially "the biggest of them all", but he was "unteachable".

Gurney possessed a dynamic personality but had been troubled by mood swings that were apparent during his teenage years. He had a difficult time focusing on his work at college and suffered his earliest documented breakdown in 1913. After taking a rest, he seemed to recover and returned to college.

World War I

Gurney's studies were interrupted by World War I. He enlisted as a private soldier in the Gloucestershire Regiment in February 1915. At the Front, he began writing poetry seriously, sending his efforts to his friend, musicologist-critic Marion Scott, who worked with Gurney as his editor and business manager. He was in the midst of writing the poems for what would become his debut collection, Severn and Somme, when he was wounded in the shoulder in April 1917. He recovered and returned to battle, still working on his book and composing music including the songs "In Flanders" and By A Bierside."

Sidgwick & Jackson accepted Severn and Somme in July with publication set for the autumn. In the meantime, Gurney was gassed in September the same year and sent to the Edinburgh War Hospital where he met and fell in love with a VAD nurse, Annie Nelson Drummond; but the relationship later failed. There remains some controversy about the effects of the gas on him but it did not exacerbate his bipolar illness. "Being gassed (mildly) [his parenthesis] with the new gas is no worse than catarrh or a bad cold” Gurney wrote in a letter to Marion Scott on 17 September 1917.

After his release from hospital he was posted to Seaton Delaval, a mining village in Northumberland, where he wrote poems including "Lying awake in the ward." Severn and Somme was published in November 1917.

In March 1918, Gurney suffered a serious breakdown triggered in part by the failure of his relationship with Drummond, combined with other factors in his life. He was hospitalized in the Gallery Ward at Brancepeth Castle, co. Durham, where he wrote several songs, despite the piano sounding like "a boiler factory in full swing because of the stone walls". In June he threatened suicide but did not go through with it. He slowly regained some of his emotional stability and in October was honourably discharged from the army.

Gurney has often been described as a victim of shell shock, a notion perpetuated by his close friend Marion Scott, who wrote the initial press releases after Gurney's death and the entry on him in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians using the term "shell shock". However, Gurney suffered from bipolar disorder or manic-depressive illness.

Postwar

Although Gurney seemed to thrive after the war when he was regarded as among the most promising men of his generation, his untreated illness continued to worsen. He studied for a brief time with Ralph Vaughan Williams upon returning to the Royal College of Music but he withdrew from the college before completing his studies. His 2nd volume of poetry, War's Embers, appeared in May 1919 to mixed reviews. He continued to compose, producing a large number of songs, instrumental pieces, chamber music and two works for orchestra, War Elegy (1920)and A Gloucestershire Rhapsody (1919–1921). His music was being performed and published.

However by 1922, his condition had deteriorated to the point where his family had him declared insane. He spent the last 15 years of his life in mental hospitals, first for a short period at Barnwood House in Gloucester, and then at the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford, where he was diagnosed as suffering from "delusional insanity (systematized)"

Gurney wrote prolifically during the asylum years, producing some eight collections of verse. He also continued to compose music but to a far lesser degree. By the 1930s Gurney wrote little of anything although he was described by Scott as being "so sane in his insanity".

Gurney died of tuberculosis while still a patient at the City of London Mental Hospital shortly before dawn on 26 December 1937, aged 47. He was buried in Twigworth, near Gloucester. His godfather the Reverend Alfred Cheesman conducted the service.

Writing

Gurney is regarded as one of the great World War I poets, and like others of them, such as Edward Thomas whom he admired, he often contrasted the horrors of the front line with the beauty and tranquility of his native English landscape.

Gurney wrote hundreds of poems and more than 300 songs, as well as instrumental music. He set only a handful of his own poems, the best known being Severn Meadows. His best-known compositions include his Five Elizabethan Songs (or 'The Elizas' as he called them) and the song-cycles Ludlow and Teme and The Western Playland, both settings of poetry by A.E. Housman. Gurney was "a lover and maker of beauty", as it said on his gravestone (now replaced after it was damaged — the original stone now stored inside Twigworth church). There is something of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, but considerably less of the prevailing folk idiom of the time, in the intensity of his musical language.

Gurney is known both as a poet and composer and his reputation in both arts has continued to rise. Edmund Blunden, at the urging of composer Gerald Finzi, assembled the first collection of Gurney's poetry which was published in 1954. This was followed by P.J. Kavanagh's Collected Poems, first published in 1982 and reissued in 2004. It remains the best edition of Gurney's poetry.

Recognition

Marion Scott preserved Gurney's manuscripts and letters and worked with composer Gerald Finzi to ensure that his legacy should not be forgotten.

On 11 November 1985, Gurney was among 16 Great War Poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.Net.lib.byu.edu</ref> The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

A memorial to Gurney was erected in 2009 near Ypres, close to the spot where he was the victim of a mustard gas attack in 1917.

Publications

Poetry

• Severn and Somme. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1917.
• War's Embers, and other verses. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1919.
• Poems of Ivor Gurney, 1890-1937 (introduction by Edmund Blunden; biographical note by Leonard Clark). London: Chatto & Windus, 1973.
• Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (edited by P.J. Kavanagh). Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
• Severn and Somme & War's Embers (edited by R.K.R. Thornton). Northumberland, UK: Mid Northumberland Arts Group / Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1983.
• Selected Poems of Ivor Gurney (edited by P.J. Kavanagh. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Best Poems & The Book of Five Makings (edited by R.K.R. Thornton & George Walker). Northumberland, UK: Mid Northumberland Arts Group / Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1985.
• Ivor Gurney (edited by George Walter). London: J.M. Dent, 1996.
• Rewards of Wonder: Poems of Cotswold, France, London (edited by George Walker). Northumberland, UK: Mid Northumberland Arts Group / Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2000.
• Three poets of the First World War : Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen (edited by Jon Stallworthy). London & New York: Penguin, 2011.

Songs

• Five Elizabethan Songs: For voice and piano. London & New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1920.
• The Western Playland (and Of Sorrow): A song-cycle to poems of A.E. Housman. London: Stainer & Bell, 1982.
• 20 Favourite Songs (compiled by Neil Jenkins). Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, Music Dept., 1996.
• Ludlow and Teme: Song cycle, for tenor, string quartet and piano. London: Stainer & Bell, 2007.

Non-fiction

• "The Springs of Music". Musical Quarterly 8 (July 1922).

Letters

• War Letters: A selection (edited by R.K.R. Thornton). Northumberland, UK: Mid Northumberland Arts Group / Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1983.
• Collected Letters (edited by R.K.R. Thornton). Northumberland, UK: Mid Northumberland Arts Group / Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1991.
• Stars in a Dark Night: Letters of Ivor Gurney to the Chapman family. Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton, 1986.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Songs (selection)

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) - "Sleep" - from "Five Elizabethan Songs"

5 Elizabethan Songs

• Orpheus
• Sleep
• Spring
• Tears (5 E. S.)
• Under the Greenwood Tree

Other Songs

• A Piper
• All Night Under The Moon
• An Epitaph
• Black Stitchel
• Blaweary
• Bread And Cherries
• Brown Is My Love
• By a bierside
• Cathleen ni Houlihan
• Desire In Spring
• Down By The Salley Gardens
• Edward, Edward
• Epitaph in old mode
• Even Such Is Time
• Far in a western brookland
• Golden Friends
• Goodnight to the meadow
• Ha'nacker Mill
• Hawk and Buckle
• I Praise The Tender Flower
• In flanders
• Is my team ploughing?
• Lament
• Last hours
• Loveliest of trees
• Ludlow and Teme
• Ludlow Fair
• Most Holy Night
• Nine of the clock
• On the idle hill of summer
• Only the Wanderer
• Reveille
• Severn Meadows (setting of his own poem)
• Song of Caibhan
• Song of Silence
• Snow
• The Aspens
• The Apple Orchard
• The Boat is chafing
• The Cloths Of Heaven
• The Far Country
• The Fiddler of Dooney
• The Fields Are Full
• The Isle of Peace
• The Lent Lily
• The Night of Trafalgar
• The Scribe
• The Ship
• The Singer
• The Sun at noon to higher air
• The Twa corbies
• The Western Playland
• Thou didst delight my eyes
• Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town
• To Violets
• Twice a week the winter thorough
• Walking Song
• When I was one-and-twenty
• When smoke stood up from Ludlow
• You are my sky

See also

Ivor Gurney "The Silent One" Poem animation WW1

To His Love - Ivor Gurney poem reading Jordan Harling Reads

• English World War I poets
• List of British poets
• List of English-language songwriters

References

• Pamela Blevins, Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty. The Boydell Press, 2008.
• Pamela Blevins, "New Perspectives on Ivor Gurney's Mental Illness", The Ivor Gurney Society Journal, Volume 6 (2000), 29-58.
• Pamela Blevins, "One Last Chance: Dr. Randolph Davis and Ivor Gurney", The Ivor Gurney Society Journal, Volume 9 (2003), 91–99.

External links

Poems

• Gurney the poet at the Ivor Gurney Society (11 poems)
• Ivor Gurney at PoemHunter (110 poems)
• Ivor Gurney at AllPoetry (112 poems)

Audio / video

• "Music from the Western Front", performance by Chamber Domaine, which includes the premiere of Ivor Gurney's Slow Movement for violin and piano (1924), given at Gresham College, 26 September 2007 (available as an MP3 or MP4 download, as well as a text file).
• The Poet Who Loved the War: Ivor Gurney at BBC
• Ivor Gurney at YouTube

About

• Ivor Gurney at FirstWorldWar.com
• Ivor Gurney at the First World War Digital Poetry Archive

Etc.

• The Ivor Gurney Society (UK site)
• The Ivor Gurney Society (US based site)
• Archival material relating to Ivor Gurney listed at the UK National Register of Archives