Charles Hamilton Sorley and Marlborough

Whereas few will not have heard of Rupert Brooke (I am afraid the more books I have read about him, the less I like him), the name Charles Hamilton Sorley may not 'ring many bells'. He was born in Old Aberdeen on 19th May 1895, but from 1900 onwards his home was in Cambridge. He was a schoolboy at Marlborough College from September 1908 until December 1913. Although he was elected to a scholarship at University College, Oxford University, the outbreak of the Great War put paid to that. Like so many others of his generation, he gave his life for his country: gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment in August 1914, Lieutenant in November and Captain in August 1915, he was killed in action (shot by a sniper when leading his platoon near Loos) on the Western Front on 13th October of that year. The 'long littleness of life' applied to him, too.

I have a copy of the third edition of Marlborough and other Poems, published with illustrations in prose in October 1916 (the first edition was January 1916) by his father W.R. Sorley. I also have a paperback edition, published by Yogh & Thorn Books in August 2010, entitled Death and the Downs. And it is to those Downs that I go, rather than to Sorley's war poetry (perhaps they are for another time). Having once lived in Marlborough for over a decade and retaining familial links with it for sixty years - I was there again yesterday - it is natural that his early poems resonate with me the most. He, like John Meade Falkner, Anthony Hope Hawkins and other literary lights, revelled in the chalk downland that lay to the north of the college and Savernake Forest immediately to the South. I too, spent hours exploring, tramping that countryside, returning home exhausted (often drenched) but in seventh heaven.
Here is an extract Sawley's poem of 1st March 1914, simply entitled Marlborough.

Crouched where the open upland billows down
      Into the valley where the river flows,
She is as any other country town,
      That little lives or marks or hears or knows...

I, who have walked along her downs in dreams,
      And known her tenderness, and felt her might,
And sometimes by her meadows and her streams
      Have drunk deep-storied secrets of delight,...

I, who have lived, and trod her lovely earth,
      Raced with her winds and listened to her birds,
Have cared but little for their worldly worth
      Nor sought to put my passions into words.   

Marlborough High Street

And, an untitled poem, from the Western Front on 12 July 1915,

And soon, O soon, I do not doubt it,
With the body or without it,
We shall all come tumbling down
To our old wrinkled red-capped town.
Perhaps the road up Ilsley way,
The old ridge-track, will be my way.
High up among the sheep and sky,
Look down on Wantage, passing by,
And see the smoke from Swindon town;
And then full left at Liddington,
Where the four winds of heaven meet
The earth-blest traveller to greet.
And then my face is toward the south,
There is a singing on my mouth:
Away to rightward I descry
My Barbury ensconced in sky,
Far underneath the Ogbourne twins,
And at my feet the thyme and whins,
The grasses with their little crowns
Of gold, the lovely Aldbourne downs,
And that old signpost (well I knew
That crazy signpost, arms askew,
Old mother of the four grass ways).
And then my mouth is dumb with praise,
For, past the wood and chalkpit tiny,

A glimpse of Marlborough ερατεινή !

So I descend beneath the rail
To warmth and welcome and wassail.

So, so poignant.

Note: I must look again at Richard Jefferies' work (Sorley admired him greatly); also at Edward Thomas, W.H. Hudson and Alfred Williams.