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Ivor Gurney was born in Gloucester, England on August 28, 1890. He began composing music at the age of 14 and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London in 1911. His studies were interrupted by World War I in which he served as a private. He spent 16 months at the Front where he was wounded in April 1917 and gassed in September of the same year. During the time he spent in France, his poetic gift revealed itself and his first book of poems, Severn and Somme, was published in the autumn of 1917.

After his discharge from the Army, he returned to London to resume his music studies. His second book of poems, War’s Embers, was published in 1919. Gurney was regarded as one of the most promising men of his generation, both in music and poetry. However, in 1922, the manic depressive illness that had plagued him from early adulthood prompted his family to have him declared insane. He was institutionalized for the last 15 years of his life, and died on December 26, 1937 at the City of London Mental Hospital. He wrote hundreds of poems and composed more than 300 songs as well as instrumental music, primarily for the piano.

Prologue

Ivor Gurney has long since left the Severn valley but the Severn valley will never leave Ivor Gurney. His legacy of songs and poetry offers far more than just a sense of place; according to one commentator he was “possessed” by Gloucestershire. (Stars in a Dark Night – Anthony Boden 2004)

Ivor Gurney

Severn valley highs
Hedges trees and banks
Were for Gurney the sinews of his frame.
So when he walked the green Gloucestershire lanes
He walked the very pathways of his soul.

As he climbed the hills “Bredon” and “Chosen”
So his spirits rose,
And when standing high up on these windy reaches
His thoughts soared higher still
And flew and swooped across the flat meadows of the river plain below.

Then the horses whinny sang
Then wooden carts and gates creaked in time with man and beast.
Now the car horn clamours to be heard
And engines everywhere drone and moan.

And whilst we still conduct this symphony of sounds
Its melodies seem to chime less well
With the pulse of other living things around.

When in France
Steeped in the blood-sodden soil of the Somme
Gurney wrote of Gloucester times
And home.

His verses then yearned and ached for the quiet fields of England,
Yearned like lovers forcibly removed,
Ached like a mother wrenched from her child too soon.
Gurney was one part of an indivisible two part whole
The Severn valley the other part as told.

© David Johnson, August 2010