Double sorrow: Proleptic Elegy and the End of Arcadianism in 1930s Britain

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Patricia Rae

     would go to war in a mood very different from that in which their
     elders had volunteered in 1914. They would go without dreams of
     glory, expecting nothing except suffering, boredom and perhaps
     death--not cynically, but without illusions, because they
     remembered a war: not the Great War itself, but the Myth that had
     been made of it. (467-68)

Numerous proleptically elegiac poems share this prediction, foregrounding the silence that will replace consolatory language in the new round of suffering. Writing in the tense autumn of 1938, for example, when conflict seemed imminent, H. B. Mallalieu foresees the absence of nostalgic "verbiage" in the coming winter:

      The landscape dulled for storm
      Holds trembling in its palm
      The summer trees of joy
      Which flourished for a day.

      No August heat will melt
      The flattened crystal frost,
      No verbiage resurrect
      The glimpses that are lost.

George Barker also repudiates consolatory language, implying that such language has itself contributed to the repetition of war: "[N]ot words or tears but only time makes heal / The bomb's burst," for the word that "heals as it falls / Anticipates the tear" ("Four Elegies" 42). One dramatic illustration of the exhaustion of compensatory discourse in practice was the decision to cancel Armistice Day services in November 1939 (see Gregory 172). The lead article in Peace News for November 10, 1939, spells out clearly why such a cancellation seemed necessary:

             Twenty-one years ago the guns were silenced at the end of
        the greatest slaughter in the history of the world.
             Every year since then the nation has gathered at war
        memorials throughout the country to remember the men who died
        in the belief that as a result of their sacrifice there should
        be no more war.
             But this year it is different. At the Cenotaph, the
        nation's shrine, the usual impressive ceremony will not take
        place tomorrow.
             Perhaps it is as well. It would be a hollow mockery, for
        we have betrayed the men who died.
             Their sons are being conscripted to fight another war for
        "freedom" and "democracy." And on the other side of no-man's
        land another generation of Germans are following in the steps of
        their fathers. (Editorial) (39)

The recurrence of war has made a mockery of familiar consolations, destroying the very resources for which it has also produced a need.

Not surprisingly, the repudiation of familiar consolatory discourse in general also meant the repudiation of Arcadianism. As the example from Mallalieu suggests, many commentators predicted that the discourse of nostalgia, the consolatory potential of the idea of restoring England's "green and pleasant land," had run its course. In his extended elegy to the 1930s, Autumn Journal (1939), Louis MacNeice bids farewell to an era in which people believed "That the road across the hill [led] to the Garden of Eden," and instructs the poets of the new war to "Sing no more idylls, no more pastorals, / No more epics of the English earth" (59, 33). Kenneth Allott, similarly, envisions the soldiers of the new war breaking with a long tradition of pastoral (more precisely, piscatory) compensations: