Violets from Plug Street Wood

I've been trying to read this poem at the beginning of class for a couple of weeks now, but it never seems like the right time, or else Kunkle's already got something in mind, so I'm going to do a blog post on it instead.

Sour Grapes: I can get in more background information: This poem was written by Roland Leighton in 1915 for Vera Brittain. The two of them were been sweethearts, or lovers, or something--it's difficult to settle on a word. Had they remained together, they certainly would have married, because they were madly in love with each other's beautiful intellects and sexy Oxford English degrees (no joke). As it was, they never even became engaged because when WWI broke out they both thought it was more important that Roland enlist with the British forces and Vera sign up as a nurse.

Roland was a poet long before the war and wrote Vera many poems over the course of their relationship. This is a poem he sent to her in England while he was stationed in Ploegsteert Wood in Belgium. The envelope contained actual violets, whose color, she claimed, was still blue when she received them.

VILLANELLE

Violets from Plug Street Wood,
Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head ;
It is strange they should be blue.)

Violets from Plug Street Wood---
Think what they have meant to me---
Life and Hope and Love and You
(And you did not see them grow
Where his mangled body lay,
Hiding horror from the day ;
Sweetest, it was better so.)

Violets from oversea,
To your dear, far, forgetting land
These I send in memory,
Knowing You will understand.

R.A.L.
Ploegsteert Wood, April 1915





I chose this poem for this class because it reminds me, distantly, of "The Man I Killed" from Tim O'Brien's book. Think of the phrase "dear, far, forgetting land." More on this later.