아이버 거니의 전쟁시 ―전원의 기억과 전장의 현실

Abstract

In order to deal with the Great War and Ivor Gurney’s poetry, this paper starts with Paul Fussell’s questions in The Great War and Modern Memory: “What did the war feel like to those whose world was the trenches?,” “How did they get through this bizarre experience?,” and “How did they transform their feelings into language and literary form?” This study examines the poetry of Ivor Gurney, and discusses the contrast and juxtaposition of his homeland and his battlefield. His works have gained relatively less attention, due to his career as a composer and due to his insanity, than those of other World War I poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Own, and Isaac Rosenberg. In addition to the two slim volumes of his poetry, Severn & Somme (1917) and War’s Embers (1919) that were published during his lifetime, this paper covers some poems of his posthumous volumes, such as Ivor Gurney: Collected Poems (1984) and Rewards of Wonder (2000), exploring how Gurney attempts to forge meaning out of his horrendous war experiences. In his poetry, Gurney poses as a pastoral walker, a soldier, and an artist. More significantly, facing the physical reality of the war on the Western Front, and juxtaposing this with his recalled homeland landscapes, he poignantly reveals the terrible truths of the battlefield. At the same time, from his distinctive memories of the Gloucestershire landscapes, he draws the strength to cope with his war torment. Even after being discharged from the army, he composed poems in a mental hospital that reflect his later perspective on the traumatic war experiences juxtaposed with his pastoral memories, in order to reconstruct a “momentary stay against confusion” and chaos. On the 100th anniversary of the breakout of World War I, this paper stresses that Gurney’s consistent and sincere attempt to create a “wrought” art through imaginative processes under disintegrating and desecrating circumstances should be reevaluated.