The Source of Wilfrid Gibson's Poem 'The messages'

Abstract

WILFRID Gibson’s ‘Battle’, published on 28 September 1915, marked the high point of the poet’s brief fame.1 The sequence of short lyrics describing soldiers’ thoughts as they fought on the Western Front was widely admired. It was also influential: Edward Marsh, creator of the popular Georgian Poetry series, sent it to Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Isaac Rosenberg who considered it ‘the best thing the war has turned out … so fine’2. Wilfred Owen bought his own copy.3 The poems had already appeared in batches in various journals.4 Two of the best were very early: ‘Under fire’ (later retitled ‘Breakfast’) and ‘The messages’ were published in The Nation on 17 October 1914. From the first, readers wondered how Gibson had seen into the minds of soldiers with such imaginative sympathy. He was not a soldier in 1914–15 and, even when he was finally called up in 1917, he never went to the Front.5 A reviewer in The Nation concluded with acuity that ‘these lyrics are the result, not of direct experience but of psychological invention’.6 Some of the poems, however, have a documentary basis. Gibson told the poet Harold Monro that his work had been based on ‘tales brought back by people from overseas, or on newspaper accounts of such experiences’.7 Roger Hogg and Dominic Hibberd have already traced the origin of ‘Breakfast’ to a soldier’s anecdote in The Nation of 3 October 1914.8