he wrote appreciatively of the sonnets Sassoon had enclosed. Writing to him on 2 August, Sassoon suggested he might travel north to meet Carpenter, but in the event he stayed at Weirleigh and revised his poetry.
In November he sent a copy of the revised sonnets to Edmund Gosse and received, some three weeks later, a reply which opened on a note of encouragement and ended with a word of advice:
You show a firm advance beyond all verse of yours which I had previously read. You have the sonnet-spirit and something of the sonnet-touch. The picturesqueness of ‘Autumn’ and the tender melancholy of ‘Evening in the Mountains’ leave nothing to be desired. They achieve a rare beauty. You must, however, be careful to resist a mere misty or foggy allusiveness. The danger which lies before the poet who endeavours in a sonnet to capture one of those volatile and capricious moods of emotion which are particularly fitted for the sonnet is to resign himself to its haziness. Your sonnets are not firmly enough drawn.
Gosse’s reply endorsed the advice Helen Wirgman had already given him in that summer of 1910, after she had read the revised work. Coming up to his study with the manuscript in hand, she said that this new edition was really no improvement on the original. In Gosse’s words it was all ‘haziness’. Wirgie described the weakness as a lack of physicality, of sharpness and definition:
Wirgie had given me the clue that I needed, though I was unconscious of it at the time. She meant, as I now see it, that the feeling I put into my poetry was derived from delight in word-music and not from observation and experience of what I wrote about. She saw that my verbal imagery was becoming exclusively literary, while the opportunity for writing poetry was waiting for me all the time, as it were, in that view across the Weald from our garden. The vaguely instinctive nature-worship which I had sometimes tried to put into words needed to be expressed in a definite form.
Reading those poems now is to confirm Gosse’s and Wirgie’s assessment, and the poems which followed show the same deficiencies. Sassoon was slow learning the lesson and even slower in applying the advice. He continued, however, to be published in The Academy and in the more highly regarded Westminster Gazette, achieving 11 poems in print in 1911. In that same year, having revised many of the 1909 sonnets, and with some new additions, he ordered another private edition entitled Twelve Sonnets.
But his assiduity in working and re-working his verses and adding to their number did not find reward in solving the problem of the lack of concreteness. He remained sure of his vocation. Gosse continued to receive the fruits of Sassoon’s endeavours and encouraged him to go on writing, despite the seemingly intractable nature of the problem, though Gosse’s last sentence may suggest he was running out of kind things to say: ‘I see progress. Try your hand at some objective theme. You must not spend all your life among moonbeams and half-tones. Better than all the listening to advice – go on writing hard and reading the old masters.’ That letter from Gosse, dated 30 June 1912, came in response to Sassoon’s latest effort entitled Melodies, a collection of 15 poems. It is difficult to see where exactly is the progress mentioned by Gosse. The Swinburnian inscription:
The silence thrills with the whisper of secret streams
That well from the heart of the woodland
sounds a warning note that what follows is still fanciful, disconnected and, as one observer noted of his earlier efforts, ‘musical, grandiloquent and mindless’.
He was doing much better at cricket for his club, the Blue Mantles. His golf was also coming along, although here, as in his poetry, a lack of technique marred the possibilities of a good round. Theresa’s busy social activity and the flow of guests through Weirleigh filled the summer. Autumn and winter brought the point-to-point and hunting, with time to enjoy the Harbords’ liveliness at Colwood Park, the company of Norman Loder, country-house parties and dances. Here was the seemingly immutable rural England of cricket on the village green, church on Sunday, the cottage-garden, country lanes along which Sassoon would walk and enjoy his ‘localised existence’, where as he admits, the great affairs of the world seemed hardly to intrude. It was a world he evoked in later years, a partial world, romantic, sentimental and deeply loved.
There arose, however, doubts in Sassoon’s mind about this rural existence and its value to him as an aspiring poet: ‘Although I had always regarded the writing of poetry as a thing which needed to be kept to oneself, I now began to feel that it would be to my advantage if I were a little less remote from the literary world. I often wished that I could make friends with some other poets, but I never seemed to get any nearer to knowing any of them.’ His most immediate connection with that world was Edmund Gosse and his wife Nellie. Gosse’s most enduring work, Father and Son, had been published in 1907; he was a successful lecturer and arbiter of literary taste, who had introduced the work of Ibsen to English audiences. Returning with Theresa from London to Weirleigh after a visit to the home of the Gosses in Hanover Terrace, Sassoon was unsettled. ‘To me it had been a tantalising glimpse which made the journey back to Kent not unlike an exodus from Eden.’ He wanted recognition and was confident, given the right stimulus and a conducive environment, it would only be a matter of time before he ‘stormed the heights of Hanover Terrace with a prodigious poem’. This aspiration reveals his ambition to be a poet of note rather than dissatisfaction with Weirleigh and the Weald; but the first signs are there that the rural idyll might have to be sacrificed for the goal to be achieved.
Early in December 1912, Sassoon’s eyes wandered along the rows of books in his Studio and he randomly selected a copy of The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield. Published in 1911, this long narrative poem was the first of its kind since Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. Its language was earthy and quite unlike the exalted expressions of High Victorian poetry. It created shock-waves with its realism and use of ‘common and vulgar expressions’. Writing of the poem in The Poetry Review on 12 January 1912, Arundel del Re stated: ‘Mr John Masefield is a revolutionary. His latest work is an assault upon cherished principles and venerable conventions. Its value lies not so much in sheer audacity, though this indeed had peculiar interest, as in the influence it may have on contemporary poets.’
Sassoon, who possessed a good ear for dialect, decided to amuse himself ‘by scribbling a few pages of parody’. The result of this whimsical exercise was radical:
Having rapidly resolved to impersonate a Sussex farmhand awaiting trial for accidental homicide of the barman of the village ale-house, I began his story in the crudest imitation of Masefield’s manner. After the first fifty lines, or so, I dropped the pretence that I was improvising an exuberant skit. While continuing to burlesque Masefield for all I was worth, I was really feeling what I wrote – and doing it not only with abundant delight but a sense of descriptive energy quite unlike anything I had experienced before. Never before had I been able to imbue commonplace details with warmth of poetic emotion. Wholly derivative from The Mercy though it remained, my narrative did at any rate express that rural Sussex which I had absorbed through following the Southdown hounds and associating with the supporters of the hunt. In other words I was at last doing what had been suggested by Wirgie in 1911 – writing physically. Far into the night I kept up my spate of productiveness, and next day I went on with unabated intensity. By the evening I had finished it. Reading it through again, I did not ask myself what use there could be in writing a poem so extravagantly unoriginal. Nothing mattered except the mental invigoration it had brought me. I felt that in the last twenty-four hours, I had found a new pair of poetic legs.’
The Daffodil Murderer, as the poem was subsequently named, relates the story of an altercation in a village pub. The narrator and his friend Ted are ejected after someone called Bill takes them by the scruff of the neck. They wait in hiding to give Bill his deserts:
Bill seem’d hours and hours a-comin’;
‘Home Bill Bailey,’ he was hummin’;
