EDMUND JOHN:UNATTAINABLE PERFECTION BY BARRY VAN-ASTEN
‘So sorrowful, and young, and so
unutterably sweet,Your tear-kissed mouth and your
sad eyes:As if your heart had told you
that the kiss you fear is fleetAs love that dies.’ ‘Song’. The Flute of Sardonyx. p. 114.
For many years I have
been a keen admirer of the works of the poet Edmund John, yet information on
him has remained lacking and insufficient to his unique, but sadly almost
forgotten stature. To a handful of fellow ardent admirers, I wished to bring
something of the poet into the light and uncloak part of the mystery which
surrounds him. The little we do know of course comes from that excellent volume
on the uranians, ‘Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English
‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889-1930’ [London. Routledge & K. Paul. 1970] by
Timothy d’Arch Smith, and a handful of anthologies, scarcely worth mentioning.
In fact, very little seems to be known about him and there is a tendency to
casually overlook his work as being insignificant, except by a few devoted and
passionate enthusiasts of strange, otherworldly and ‘decadent’ poetry who ‘art
of those who sing a secret song.’
Part of that mystery,
for myself, was being unable to initially find records relating to his birth
and to his family on census returns and it wasn’t until I discovered that he
wasn’t actually born with the surname ‘John’ that the key fitted the lock and
turned. I do not propose to write a complete and detailed account of his life
but I do wish to present some facts and articles which show the poet with more
than the slight, scant biographical information we already know and has been
churned out. There are deeper layers to explore and it is a wonder that nobody
has deemed him worthy of proper research, but perhaps some new acolyte may find
some small familiar echo or ray of light to follow.
Edmund’s parents,
Thomas Jones and Margaret Stuart, were married in 1878 in
In 1908 Thomas Jones,
a Baptist Minister, his wife Margaret and their three sons, Edmund aged 24,
William and Cyril both aged 20, decided to change their surname from ‘Jones’ to
‘John’ by Deed Poll. The following article was printed in The Morning Post (
‘We, Thomas Jones, of
S. David’s,
In September 1910,
Edmund, aged 26 and 10 months, with his mother, Margaret, went to New York Southampton ; his residence is given as Bournemouth .
Margaret and her son ‘Reginald’ [William Reginald] John can be seen living in Bournemouth in the 1911 census. Margaret is 50 years old
and married and Reginald is 23, single and working as a Bank clerk. With them
at the residence is their general servant, Clara Weller, aged 41 who is single.
(11) Edmund’s father, Thomas, is living in Sandhurst, Berkshire; he is
62 years old, born in ‘Pendylon, Glamorganshire’ in 1849 and his occupation is
‘Baptist Minister’. (12)
Edmund worked as a
schoolmaster and around 1913 he and his brother Cyril set up their own boys’
school in Crouch End. The School for day boys and boarders was named Heathfield
House School (formerly Tollington Park College), situated in Warltersville
Road, Crouch Hill, and a typical ad for the school, often printed in the
Hornsey and Finsbury Park Journal (August 1913), ran thus: ‘First class school
for boys from 7-18 years of age. Carefully Selected Staff of Specialists. All
Modern Languages taught by the Direct (Conversational) Method. Prepares for London
On the evening of Monday 22nd December 1913 the Headmaster Mr. E. A. John, presided at the first-prize distribution and presented his review of the term so far, saying it ‘had not been an easy one, and the success which had attended their efforts must be put down largely to the sympathetic spirit and understanding which had existed between the Masters and boys of the school. On both sides it was realised that unusual efforts were necessary, and on both sides unusual efforts were made. Indeed, they could congratulate themselves on the great amount of work done.’ The Headmaster also ‘noted marked progress in French, mathematics, and English, and in composition. He had observed the increased ability the boys had found in expressing themselves. In Latin, he was perfectly sure no one had touched their record of 58 chapters of Ciesar in one term – a feat accomplished by the Assistant head-master, Mr. Cyril John.’ (13)
The following July in
1914, on Tuesday 28th, the school held its First Annual Sports
meeting at the cricket ground, Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill and its second
Annual Sports and Speech Day took place the following year on Saturday 3rd
July 1915 (14).
While Edmund was
working hard as Headmaster of his school he was also receiving some success
upon the publication of his first volume of poems – ‘The Flute of Sardonyx’
(Herbert Jenkins. 1913) but the book was also whipping up a storm of
controversy from certain critics deploring its base immorality and ‘decadent’
flavour. One such critic, who found the book, particularly the poem ‘Salome’,
vile and obscene, was newspaper editor, author and critic, James Douglas
(1867-1940). In an article published in the Daily News in May 1913, Douglas,
having first invoked the ghost of Milton and the true meaning of the word
‘sensuous’, begins a tirade against the volume of poetry, with its
‘introduction which Mr. Stephen Phillips has written for a volume of poems
entitled The Flute of Sardonyx by a writer called Edmund John. Mr. Phillips
seeks to justify or excuse these poems by citing
As an example of one of those changes the poet made we can see the comparison of stanzas in the poem ‘Salome’ from the first edition and the second impression; these lines appear in the original first edition of 1913:
She grips the dead
drawn cheeks with her smooth thighs,
And sees the dull
locks black on her white skin,
Then lies she down all
nude and garlanded,
Holding above her eyes
the matted head,
And brings it slow to
the white velvet wave
Of her sweet breasts,
until the dead lips cling
Unto her nipples and
suck, blistering,
Inflamed by some
corrupt lust of the grave.
And these in the
second impression of 1914:
She traces symbols
like a lover’s sighs
With those dead locks
dull-black on her white skin.
Holding above her eyes
the matted head,
She chants an
invocation to the dead,
Whilst the drawn lips
writhe frenzied at the spell,
Rent by a cry
half-human, half-insane,
As of some voice from
the mad depths of hell.
Many other critics
praised the volume and the new young poet, Edmund John; one such critic was the
author and Editor of The English Review, Norman Douglas, who published this
appraisal of the book within its pages in September 1913: ‘This, then, is the
book concerning which there was some little talk not long ago… Well, as it now
stands, at all events, there is nothing in it that could annoy any save those
who, through organic defects of one kind or another, are unfit to be regarded
as judges or poetry. Of course there are, and always have been, people of this
kind – men who have strayed from their workshops and counting-houses into the
realms of literature and there established themselves as critics of matters
quite beyond their ken. It is one of the terrors of our democratic age – this
increasing multitude of self-appointed and ill-equipped censors in every
department of thought.
Mr. Stephen Phillips,
in a discriminating foreword, has touched upon the author’s strength and
weaknesses. He is sensuous, no doubt; very sensuous. And he has not yet
attained that clean-cut paganism which in our opinion, his subject demands; he
is too exuberant, too tropical; there is a haze of Christian imagery, and
flowers, and death, and pain floating through these love-poems. The faults of
youth, very possibly. But the reader, concentrating his attention, will find
much of fine workmanship to be admired in them, of courage and veracious
feeling; above all, a promise of still better things. The element of wilful
obscurity is not predominant – the author is quite human and intelligible to
those who can sympathise with his outlook. His verse is musical and harmonious
above the common measure; in short, he is a refreshing phenomenon amid our herd
of cold-blooded, hopelessly conventional songsters.’ (18)
Comparisons with Wilde
and Baudelaire and the decadent period of art and literature seem to suggest
the volume is out of its time in the modern twentieth-century but many found
the poems fresh and vibrant, such as this example from
The poems in The Flute
of Sardonyx are really quite remarkable and have a tender, somewhat melancholic
quality about them which speaks of love lost and dissolving and deep regret at
words not said or moments not fulfilled. The poem, ‘Before Dawn’ has some
rather enigmatic lines as the poet muses deep in reverie of thought –
Lay lightly your two
hands upon my brow –
It has been burned by
many bitter brands –
For “when I give, I
give with my two hands,”
You said, and your
young voice, I know not how,
Seemed sweet with
sorrow from unsaddened lands.
Love on my tired lids
lay your lips a space,
A little space, enough
to give me rest
From dreaming how they
clung to mine, hard-prest,
So that their pain of
youth may half efface
The pain of hours that
they themselves have blest. (pp. 31-32)
After comparing his
beloved to a beautiful garden where there are ‘rare roses red for your red
lips’, the poet asks himself – ‘is it your memory I love, or you? / Your eyes,
or only what they were to me?’
In another poem,
‘Passional’ which he dedicates to ‘E_ L_’ we find the same ecstasy summoned
between the poet and his beloved, with perhaps a measure of sadistic or
vampiric lust, when he says ‘Cling to my mouth with your young curved Greek
lips, / cling closer till the blood come and life swoon...’ (p. 59)
The mouth, for Edmund
John is a very sensuous and erotic part of the body and recurs throughout many
poems – ‘Did I not swoon / with the wild flame and honey of thy mouth? / Did I
not kiss the shadows in thy hair, / and kneel to see thy beauty slim and rare /
beneath the moon?’ (‘Nostalgia’, p. 104) and in the poem, ‘Ballad of Loss’
there is sadness and regret at not having kissed, when he says ‘your lips have
never touched my own, although / their sorrow lies upon my mouth, / sweet, like
a boy’s voice singing very low / at evening, in the South!’ (p. 112) A similar
‘Housmanesque’ regret infuses the heart of the poet when he sings: ‘You were
afraid of Love who fashioned you / from tears and cassia and a rose... / My
stained wild heart had purged itself anew, / if you had kissed my mouth, - who knows?’
(‘Song’, p. 115)
Norman Douglas became a friend of Edmund John and gives him the space of a small chapter in his book, ‘Looking Back’ (1933) in which he mentions how he came to know of the young poet: ‘Returning from the country on 4 August 1913, I found a note from Edward Garnett saying that a young poet unknown to himself, Edmund John, had been viciously attacked on grounds of morality by a certain puritanical reviewer…’ Douglas does not name his vicious namesake, but Edward Garnett (1868-1937) asks Norman in his note if he would ‘write a short notice of his Flute of Sardonyx in the English Review and vindicate, if I thought fit, its reputation on that score? He himself was doing the same elsewhere, and had asked other critics to do so too.’ Douglas then goes on to say how he and the poet, Edmund John met, ‘through his sending verses to the English Review after the publication of the Flute of Sardonyx, and it often struck me how greatly his person resembled his writings – sensuous and ornate, elaborate in manner, a little over-dressed, too many rings and tie-pins, too much thought expelled upon the colour of socks.’ Douglas mentions Edmund being ‘poor’ and a ‘hard worker, keeping a boy’s school at Crouch End with his brother and coaching undergraduates in his spare time; he had a passion for the classics and wrote a half-imaginary Life of Anacreon, quite a long production…’ and apparently he could ‘drink like a fish, and remain perfectly sober.’ He tells us that John was ‘invalided out of the army on account of his heart’ and that he had also ‘married – for money, as he frankly confessed.’ Perhaps more interesting are the snippets of correspondence Douglas received from Edmund John such as this, John’s last note to Douglas from Sicily – ‘”I am not writing anything except this blasted letter to you, which you insist on with such offensive emphasis.” Then follows an ominous sentence inspired by that entanglement of which I knew nothing:
“I don’t know how long
I shall stay here – probably until I am impressed with the idea that another
climate might be healthier for me – a not impossible contingency by any means.”
I replied to this
letter on the
Ah God, it was the
Hope You gave to me,
Within the womb, of
things unknown and fair,
The Bud that blossomed
into this Despair…
Art Thou content, O
God, with this Thy work?
Art Thou content that
Thou hast planned so well?
That Thy cold hands
have thrust me into Hell?
You may find several
such premonitory passages in his poems. You may find them, too, in the works of
poets who have died at a patriarchal age in their beds.’ (21) It seems
to me that Douglas is hinting at something, some ‘entanglement’ which he was
unaware of at the time but later concluded or was confirmed of, that caused
Edmund to take his own life; the ‘another climate’ being ‘healthier for me’
seems to suggest running from or hiding from something or someone where there
maybe some scandal attached, but this is mere conjecture on my behalf.
Two poems that appeared in The English Review by Edmund John were ‘Turannus Mundi’ ( February 1914) and ‘Envoi’ (January 1916) which had not been previously published.
TYRANNUS MUNDI
There is a menace in
the cold dank breath
That rises from the
swamp stretched stark like death
Through mouldering
fungi to the world’s sick edge:
And the marsh moans in
evil elegy
Of deathlike odours
and one blackened tree,
And reeds, and bubbles
clustering round the sedge.
There are things
moving in the damp grey grass,
Obscure and formless
with dead eyes like glass;
And through rank
rushes the weird wind makes sound
As of dead lips that
whisper in decay;
And sinister the trees
bare branches sway
With liverwort and
henbane twisted round.
The sky is like a
cloak, grey, dim and vast,
With low and monstrous
clouds that hurry past,
And moist mad mists
that writhe across the plain;
And in the pool there
floats a drowned man’s face,
Mud in the eyes, and wet
wild weeds to grace
His brow with symbol
of the curse of Cain.
He gazes upward
dreaming of his crime,
The livid lips sealed
up with stagnant slime,
Marked with a message
from the mists above
To tell me that the
place where I have come
Is home of Anguish
where all hopes succumb,
The place of Pain
victorious over Love.
Here dwells the
conqueror of the wan world,
And agonies beat down,
and red limbs curled,
Torment of beauty and
the spirit’s frost,
Of hope of things to
come, of young lips stained,
Of longing
unfulfilled, desire attained,
And bitter memory of
sweet things lost.
I would invoke the
soul of this full thing
To curse it… vainly…
though all hell should ring
Across the wastes. And
lo, a threatening sound,
Low, dolorous, throbs
through the swamp’s slow sigh,
Relentless, like a
terrible reply;
And a dark vapour
curls up from the ground.
Then rises a gigantic
sexless form,
With hanging breasts
and arms spread cruciform,
And awful eyes red
with the soul of Pain,
And obscene
mutilations, and wild hair
Draggled in blood, and
gnawed lips, and despair;
And in its hands
Love’s body torn in twain.
ENVOI
You did not turn away
your fragrant head,
Your eyes were brown,
as yesterday, although
There was no greeting
in the words they said,
Wanly. I think you
smiled; you could not know
I suddenly saw the
piteous rose was dead.
You did not shrink
away when I drew near,
But you no longer
leaned and crept my way;
And in your eyes I saw
a shade of fear,
Though when I asked,
you kissed me – and there lay
Upon my lips ashes of
yester-year.
You are not vain and
heartless, only young!
Too young to bear the
weight of such a love
As my heart sought in you, bled for, and wrung
From night’s deep
lakes and burning stars above –
Such love it was at
your fleet feet I flung.
Ah, God! Ah, God! a
week ago you lay
Here slim and smooth
and lithe, like a gold flame
Imprisoned in my arms – flame that must slay
Or save. How should
you know? – I have no blame
For you, who wrought
my soul deep wrong that day.
I cannot plead, my
lips have grown too pale;
I cannot beg for
gifts; I will go out
In silence, weaving
around my heart a veil,
Covering it up, and
wrapping all about
My soul a steel-bright
coat of icy mail.
I will blot out the
shining of your eyes,
The flaming of your
lips, the moonlit ways,
Your clear voice
singing from the dead Julys –
I will walk through
the bitter nights and days
Smiling, as all men
smile who agonize. (22)
Another critic who
reviewed The Flute of Sardonyx favourably was the poet Edward Thomas, writing
in The Bookman in December of 1913, saying ‘Mr. John is the one whose grasp
equals his aim. His verses are full of love and of remorse, of Greek or
Graeco-Roman gods, who mingle in a half-Christian, half-Pagan temple with
acolytes, and with Salome, “Our Lady of the Ivory Tower,” and many other
ladies, real and imaginary.’ Thomas has many kind words on the volume and
praise and advice for his fellow, younger poet – ‘If it were not that initials
are put at the head of some of the erotic poems it might be supposed that they
were the result chiefly of reading Wilde and the early Swinburne. “For my
Desire” he sings:
“For my Desire, for Love and Song and Pain, / Now hid beneath dead rose-leaves of regret, / I would walk joyous in the Devil’s Net, / And welcome death and hell – for you again.”
He is full of voluptuous epithets and substantives arranged with firm, hard rhythms, and plangent rhymes which produce the effect if imitation bronze work. He is cold with all his use of passionateness. He is scarcely more real than one of his women whom he says Love made “from tears and cassia and a rose.” He is melodramatic and declamatory. But his grasp is always equal to his aim, and though he conveys only a general sense of amorousness, luxury, melancholy and exhaustion, every poem, every verse, every line, is visibly the work of one who has mastered his trade, and must unlearn it if he would be a poet.’ (23)
Edmund John’s second
volume of poetry, The Wind in the
There are some lovely
poems in the collection, which although the flavour is a little less
flamboyantly decadent than that of The Flute of Sardonyx, some of the old
themes still keep the poet occupied. The poem, ‘Litany of the Seven Devils’ has
some rather telling lines –
There are Seven Devils
in my heart;
And one is young and
agile, with limbs slim and bare
And scented with the
lure of youth, and eyes that snare
With the frail call of
dawn, and wayward heart wound round
By delicate wickedness
like some half-wanton prayer. (p. 23)
The poem ‘Lux Perpetua’ (p. 25) uses the line: ‘with tufts of samphire where the lost sun’s heart’; the ‘tufts of samphire’ appeared in his poem ‘Nocturne’ which also conjures images of the sea. ‘Death Song’ has the passionate erotic lines: ‘your clinging lips and body I still hold / against me, fierce and passionate, in my dreams, / your satin skin hot like a flame of gold.’ And the poem continues:
And your young wayward
naked heart throbs yet
On mine, and your
lithe youthful limbs entwine
My own; and the faint
vein so frailly set
In your slim neck,
makes mad my mouth like wine.
I bartered the
to-morrows for your kiss,
I was less wise than
tender with your youth,
You were content to
slay me with brief bliss,
Then bitterness of one
more barren truth. (p. 30)
The lines have a touch of sadistic beauty about them, as in some unresolved love that will not die – ‘sweet their shame – but sweet so long ago!’ (p. 31) The same love unattained is invoked in the poem, ‘Carpe Diem’ where the poet questions the fleeting beauty of love fulfilled, and the unfulfilled tortures of love withheld:
Thou shalt grow old
with gazing through the dark
At some vain world
beyond the bounds of this:
And thy Reward, for
lips thou didst not kiss,
Will profit little
when thou liest stark. (p. 40)
The Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal (December 1915) said that ‘Mr. Edmund John sprang into fame as a poet with his ‘Flute of Sardonyx’ and the present volume leads us to expect still more from him. ‘The Litany of the Seven Devils, In a Wood, and Ichabod’ are all beautiful in their way…’ (24) but verse about ‘curled vapours’, ‘dim sunk grass’ and ‘dream shrouded amethyst’ probably meant very little to the general public who were losing loved ones in the slaughter of the Somme and other battles.
At the outbreak of the war Edmund John was in a dilemma as to his duty to his school-mastering and to his boys and to his country. In the end he decided that his duty lay at the Front serving his country. He expressed his thoughts and concerns to the parents of the boys at his school in a letter to them, in which he said – ‘”For many months past I have been in deep and somewhat painful debate with myself concerning where my duty lay in these grave hours of our country’s peril. On the one hand, I realised I was under the heavy responsibility of educating and preparing for the future more than seventy young boys; on the other, I saw, clearly enough, that unless every available man took his place in the fighting-line there would be no future worth the having for any one of those boys. If, therefore, I could arrange to leave in equally efficient hands, and ensure that the school would be carried on in the same spirit and by the same methods as in the past, there seemed in my mind no more doubt that my place was in the fighting-line, where so many of my friends have gone, and from which some of them will never return.” Concerning his brother, who is not physically suited for the Army, Mr. John pointed out his efficiency, his powers of teaching and organisation, and his complete and sympathetic understanding of boy-nature, and said the school would need all his friends to rally around it in these trying times.’ (25) Edmund John’s last day at his beloved Heathfield House School was on Monday 20th December 1915 when the school held its prize-giving before breaking-up for the Christmas holidays. The day was ‘viewed by the boys with mixed feelings’ as ‘the occasion marked the parting for a time from the head-master, Mr. Edmund John who has been accepted by the Artists’ Rifles O.T.C., whence he will obtain a commission. Previously, the pupils and staff, in order to show their pride and respect, had given Mr. John a luminous wrist-watch and cover, the presentation being made by Mr. A. M. James, one of the assistant masters, and considerable feeling was shown when the boys, led by J. W. Wix, the captain of the school, cheered their departing headmaster. A similar compliment was paid to Mr. Cyril John, who will conduct the school until his brother returns. At the prize-giving, Mr. John took leave of the boys and said the gift would beat out memories of the pleasant times he had spent with them.’ Edmund John also gave his ‘terminal report’ on the achievements of the school, saying that ‘the marks were decidedly better than he expected. Never before had they had four separate hundreds per cent. – three on examinations, gained in C. H. Soutter for drawing, and P. A. M. Soutter and E. Francq for arithmetic, and one for conduct, recorded by L. J. Soutter. This in itself showed that their standard had not fallen and he thought they might congratulate one another upon having attained such satisfactory results, not withstanding various adverse circumstances. There had been very keen competition for the form prizes, which was an excellent sign, and in certain instances the difference between the first and second places had been of the smallest.’ (26)
Edmund John, not long
after his 32nd birthday, volunteered and joined the 28th
Battalion London Regiment, Artists’ Rifles in December 1915, his regimental
number was 6344 and his residence at the time of joining was 9, Langford-Place,
St. John’s Wood, N. W. London. (27) Edmund appears to be boarding at the
address which is the home of a woman named Kate Lyon Dalliba, for on the
afternoon of Thursday 24th June of that year, ‘by the kind
permission of Mrs. K. L. Dalliba, at 9 Langford Place, St. John’s Wood’ she is
giving a violin recital by the violinist Miss Olga Rudge, which apparently ‘won
eulogistic comment’. (28) Kate Lyon
Dalliba is an American author and playwright and she has some success with a 3
act play she wrote called ‘Pay Up’ which was performed at the Lyceum, Ipswich
in August 1914. The Evening Star of 14th August says that ‘we have
an important production of a new play at the Ipswich Lyceum by the celebrated
American authoress Miss K. Lyon Dalliba, entitled “Pay Up”. It is described as
“a modern up-to-date play”. It is understood that this production is shortly to
be placed at one of the most important West End theatres, and judging by the
plot and the artistes chosen for the parts for Ipswich as well as London an
immediate success is anticipated. The authoress, Miss Dalliba, has written many
successes for the American stage, apart from her well-known novels. The
production is being launched by Messrs. Horsfield and Woodward, the well-known
dramatic agents and producers.’ The article then goes on to outline the plot
which concerns gambling, romantic entanglements and misunderstandings, and even
an attempted suicide. (29) We shall
hear more of Kate Lyon Dalliba later.
Edmund’s poem, ‘The Seven Gifts’ was first published in The English Review in May 1916; the poem has the curious introduction ‘Suggested by the fragment of a letter from an Athenian father to his son, in the time of Pericles, now in possession of Sydney Oswald, Esqre.’:
I give my clear-eyed
boy a star
Of clematis from
summer days
That dwelt among the
scented ways
Of an old garden still
and far:
So that it lights his
dreams with truth
From that walled
garden of my youth,
I give my clear-eyed
boy a star.
I give my soft-haired
boy a crown
Of olive from the
groves of Greece
That all life’s
passion turn to peace
For him, and perilous
paths lead down
To clear calm lakes
beneath the moon;
So that his brow be
cool at noon ,
I give my soft-haired
boy a crown.
I give my red-lipped
boy a rose
Fresh from the dew of
waking dawn,
A rose for my fair
dancing faun
Whose laughter all the
summer knows:
Sweet, careless,
unstained, fragrant boy,
So that love bring him
only joy,
I give my red-lipped
boy a rose.
I give my
white-skinned boy a pearl
Fair as his body and
as strange
As still pools veiled
in mists that change
Their mysteries as
they wreathe and curl:
So that his visions
ever be
Wondrous and subtle as
the sea,
I give my white-skinned
boy a pearl.
I give my singing boy
a lute
With silver strings
whose chant belongs
To Youth for him to
sing his songs
Among the ripening
flowers and fruit:
So that I hear his
voice in Spring
When I lie
unawakening,
I give my singing boy
a lute.
I give my laughing boy
a kiss
Too poor for lips so
exquisite –
With curious fleeting
tears in it
That glitter through a
love like this;
So that he never know
the pain
Of red bruised mouth
bruised red in vain,
I give my laughing boy
a kiss.
I give my sweet-souled
boy my heart
That has been cleansed
by bitter tears
Of all the fruitless
weary years
Which hope and sorrow
set apart:
So that his pain shall
pass before
Into myself and be no
more,
I give my sweet-souled
boy my heart. (30)
This beautiful poem
indeed shows in what direction the poet’s thoughts were turned throughout his
time in the army and what sacrifices he had given up. But some time in 1916,
perhaps only months after joining the Artists’ Rifles, he was invalided out
with a weak heart. I cannot find any articles relating to his return as
headmaster to his school and the school was still in existence during
1916-1917, so it is assumed his heart condition, if indeed that was the cause
of him leaving the army, was the cause of his complete rest and recuperation.
During 1916 he travelled to
In her time, Kate was
a great patroness of the arts, particularly music and singing. She was a friend
of the American violinist, Olga Rudge (1895-1996) who was a mistress to the
poet Ezra Pound for nearly fifty years, having a child by him named Mary in
1925. Her home in St. John’s Wood became known to some familiar guests as a
‘House of Music... ‘I remember being taken to a concert at a studio house in
St. John’s Wood’ writes a correspondent in the Daily News (London) in June
1930, ‘which belonged to Mrs. Dalliba, an American woman who took a great interest
in singers and musicians and helped some of them in a very practical way.
Zimbalist, the violinist, played that night, and Miss Ruth St. Denis, who does
Indian dances, was there... That was years ago. I have not seen Mrs. Dalliba
since. She lives in Florence.’ (34)
Kate appears to be a very wealthy woman with a ‘villa in Florence’ and more
than a touch of artistic flamboyance – ‘Katherine Dalliba-John, mother of the
poet Gerda Dalliba, was herself an author of romance novels, Katherine affected
the pose of a Middle Eastern princess, wearing oriental shawls bordered by long
fringe, her dark hair cut short across the forehead in bangs twenties style,
many years before it became fashionable. Olga’s affectionate name for
Dalliba-John was “Ramooh” (more appropriate than Katherine, in Olga’s view, for
her friend’s adopted persona). The Studio Meeting Society that Mrs. John
established in her home at 9 Langford Place was a short walk from the Dell
Sedie School [a school of vocal training named after the Italian operatic
baritone, Dell Sedie]. She provided food, lodging, and practice rooms for young
protégés beginning their career, some of whom later achieved international
prominence...’ (35)
We have no need to
doubt the words of Norman Douglas when he says that Edmund married for money,
for it is hardly likely that he married for love. While in Italy Edmund’s mood
seemed to change and he became more melancholy and perhaps more sentimental
than usual; there may have been other factors which we shall never know which
led him in his final days towards self destruction. But it is likely that, Kate
Lyon Dalliba John was not there in his final moments, for I have found an
article in a periodical called ‘Vote’ of June 1916 which says that a ‘Russian
song recital’ will be performed ‘at the house of Mrs. K. L. Dalliba, 9 Langford
Place, St. John’s Wood, N. W. on Sunday July 2, at 8.30 p.m.’ (36) Mrs. Dalliba John seems to spend
much of her time between London and Florence with many social commitments that
one wonders if she ever thought of Edmund much at all or even if she grieved
after his death.
Edmund John died on
‘For none can help you
read the secret scroll
Of Life; nor is there
rest nor rod
To aid you on the path
Love trod;
But all alone, if you
would find your soul,
You must gaze in the
eyes of God.’
The Daily Mirror of
March 1917 recorded that ‘every lover of poetry will be grieved to hear of the
death at
Taormina became a
fashionable and attractive destination for men of a ‘Mediterranean outlook’
much like Capri attracted expatriate artists and writers who gathered in
colonies, escaping the repressive atmosphere of Britain. The photographer
Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931), notable for his portrayals of the male nude,
became a resident of Taormina in 1878 and Oscar Wilde visited him there in his
studio. The painter, Robert Hawthorn Kitson (1873-1947) is another well-known
artist who found the tolerant and liberated nature of Taormina much to his
liking and he settled there and built a house in 1905. Kitson and von Gloeden
both died in Taormina and both reside in the same cemetery that Edmund John
rests in.
In July 1919, Arthur Waugh published a review of ‘Symphonie Symbolique’ in The Bookman which was a fitting tribute to the poet and one which I intend to repeat in full: ‘Edmund John… was one of those sacrificed, untimely to the war; he died in February 1917, of heart disease contracted upon active service. This, his last poem, is an attempt to translate Tchaikowski’s “Symphonie Pathetique” into poetry, or rather to translate the first three movements, for he left the fourth movement untouched. It is a very noticeable piece of work, beautifully served with symbolic illustrations by Miss Stella Langdale. It requires a trained musician to judge how far Edmund John’s poem interprets the soul of Tchaikowski’s music, but no lover of poetry can doubt that he succeeded in producing a fervid, eager, deeply-moving work of art. His poem is full of melody, of colour and of rich, sensuous imagery. It palpitates with feeling. It is intensely, compellingly alive:
I stretch out yearning
arms… I hardly dare
Hold your gold
fragrant body, young and bare,
Against me… Ah, sweet
God! Mine, mine at last –
I hold you, crush you,
almost desperately
In my love’s hunger,
and in agony
Lest you slip back
again into the past.
The world sways for a
moment in a mist
Of stars and leaves
and colours night has kist;
Then dim nocturnal
odours call and thrill
From the soft couch of
myrtles deep and low –
O come, O come to me,
beloved although
A sword shall lie
between us if you will.
Contrast this
perfervid “Attainment” with the elusive melancholy of ‘The Quest’:
The poplars are a
mystic wall
Of whispering Titans,
and a pall
Of vapour like a
breath of sleep
Dreams where the
violet shadows fall.
The faun is dancing in
a sea
Of opal, swift,
illusively –
Pagan, half god, half
animal
With Pan’s eyes lit by
fantasy.
Here is music
interpreted in its own language. It is grievous to reflect that so exquisite a
voice is silenced in the universal tragedy of the world.’ (39)
The English Review of
August 1919 published a thirteen page article on Edmund John by an anonymous
author and friend of the poet which may possibly, I believe, have been the
schoolmaster and poet, John Gambril Nicholson (1866-1931). It would be
interesting to discover how the two poets met, and it is tentative to presume
that it may have been while Nicholson was teaching at the Stationer’s School in
Hornsey from 1896 until he retired in 1925. The author of the article seems to
have known and corresponded with Edmund from around 1908 or earlier we can
gather and there is a sense of deep and lasting friendship between them, going
on walking holidays together and disclosing intimate details and thoughts. The
article is so fascinating to those interested in Edmund John and his work that
I am presenting it in full:
EDMUND JOHN AND SYMPHONIE SYMBOLIQUE
“…The quick heart quickening from the heart
that’s still.”
There is more than one
person, possibly, in the least complex of us: in the artist, inevitably,
several. In Edmund John – the brilliant young poet whose posthumous work,
Symphonie Symbolique, has recently been published – who shall say how many
souls, and how different, strove together for expression?
There was never anyone
quite like him before. He was unique. He used to declare he had the qualities
of a chameleon and assumed different colours according to the company of the
moment. Certainly he was a man of extraordinary and kaleidoscopic
many-sidedness. A reserved nature at bottom – possibly because of this,
possibly from sheer whimsicality – he liked to keep his life in compartments.
The friends belonging to one section knew nothing of those connected with another.
The coterie of artists and poets with whom he occasionally foregathered knew
him only as one of themselves, and never suspected his normal existence as a
hard-working schoolmaster. Those who saw him surrounded by a group of pupils –
(when he was really happiest) – all engrossed and fascinated by his wonderful
personality, his amusing and unconventional methods of teaching – would hardly
have recognised him on his occasional appearances among the careless Bohemian
circle at, say, the Café Royal or a meeting of the Poets’ Club. Witty, with a
keen sense of humour, always a scoffer at conventional standards – his deepest
feelings he concealed beneath a cynical attitude and layers of many differing
poses, an armour which successfully hid an extreme sensitiveness, an unusually
tender heart and a deep respect for true goodness as opposed to merely
artificial and conventional morality.
It was this, the real
Edmund John, “the true man whom God designed,” whom I knew best, and possibly
as few others were privileged to do. It is of him I would write to-day that the
many admirers of his work may understand him better.
When through all the
barriers, the concealing poses, the assumed indifferences, the close reserve,
you got down at last to the real man – what a surprise! It was like finding a
clear running stream, set about with fragrant old-world flowers, in the middle
of an exotic jungle, through which one had to fight one’s way painfully. He was
at heart so essentially simple, so sweet and gentle… He loved children and
could romp endlessly as one of them. He loved a garden. Though he often mocked
at the ugly and dreary side of conventional domesticity, with its eternal cult
of “appearances,” yet he loved a real home – the serene atmosphere of a room
where there were flowers… and little ones… an open window… a green lawn
beyond…peace… He liked nothing better than nursery meals where, in gayest mood,
he would throw bread pills at the small people, inciting them to ever fresh
wickedness.
As I write, a picture
of happier times starts up from some forgotten memory cell:- Edmund almost
hidden beneath a joyous tangle of laughing, excited little children, his
carefully tended black hair standing wildly on end, his blue eyes alight with
merriment, his voice raised above the din saying imploringly, “All I ask is
that you don’t actually pull any out by the roots!”
They adored him. “When
is Edmund coming again?” was their constant cry – “It won’t be any fun if
Edmund isn’t there!” Most casual and forgetful of men, yet he never forgot a
promise to a child. The cigarette cards, the stamps, the coveted specimen
whatever it might be, always came by the first available post. Very charming,
too, were the little notes and cards he sometimes found time to send to his
little friends. A postcard to a girl of four whose dancing had pleased him is
addressed “To La Pavlovita,” and says –
“How the little
pavlovitas dance at dawn and
To the same child a
few years later he writes:-
“Little dear wicked
one, I hope you are just as sweet, evil and irresistible as heretofore and that
your powers of torment and captivation have increased and multiplied. It is
terribly hot here and I have had to buy blotting paper handkerchiefs to keep
myself dry. The river smells very sea-weedy to-night and the lights of the city
glitter in it like the eyes of sea-gods.”
To another he wrote
shortly before his death:-
“Bambino carissimo,
will you ever come and stay with me in
His first book, The
Flute of Sardonyx, published by Herbert Jenkins in 1913, achieved an
instantaneous success and received an unusual amount of praise from the critics.
As a rule so cold and diffident where a new poet is concerned, in this instance
they one and all agreed as to the “haunting beauty” of his lyrics, the “rare
sense of colour,” the “melody and fire,” the “illusion little short of
magical.” Again and again the words “magic” and “magical” occur in these
reviews. “A pantheistic Francis Thompson,” says one. “A lordling, if not a
lord, of language,” says another. “Gorgeous verse, full of the glow of youth and beauty.” “Here is the
spirit of song, the passion of youth, the seductive colour of life, and all the
throbbings of hope and desire.”
Of the much criticised
poem, “Salome,” the most important in the book, he wrote in a letter to the
present writer:-
“In Salome I had three
elements to work with – the outré, the beautiful, the horrible. These three
together have always fascinated artists; the fascinate, they always fascinate
me. Around them I had to weave the colour and odour of things of the old
Orient. The particular verse criticised is simply the climax of sensation into
that element of the horrible which is an indissoluble part of the theme. After
all, the function of art is just expression and the more truly and completely
one expresses the incident or emotions with which one is dealing, the more
perfect is one’s art. If the subject is objectionable to certain temperaments,
well, they had better give the thing a miss.”
To another friend he
wrote of The Flute of Sardonyx:-
“No, my Flute will
never play for the great world, caro mio. ‘A universal success’ will never
describe it. You see, I wrote it for you, for people like you, for the elect,
the white garments of the gods upon the hills, for the acolytes on the altar of
beauty, for the lovers of Love, for the very few. I find my reward in such a
letter as you have just written me, in knowing that my song has been heard
aright by you and such as you.”
In the same year,
1913, he began the Symphonie Symbolique, but it progressed but slowly, and the
third movement was not completed until the autumn of 1915, when his second book
of collected poems, The Wind in the
Edmund John had a
peculiar premonition that to write the fourth and last movement of this would
cause his death, as the Symphonie Pathetique (No. 6), on which it was founded,
is said to have killed Tschaikowsky. It was with relief he came to the decision
not to write the fourth movement at all, but to publish the poem incomplete.
As each movement was
finished he brought it to read aloud to me. It is a poignant thing and terrible
– this struggle and quest of an anguished soul towards attainment; and when,
greatly elated, he read these burning words aloud, with an intensity of feeling
amost [sic.] painful to hear, one felt that the mantle of the great had
descended on this young, beautiful and rarely gifted man.
Of this poem he says
in a letter to the present writer: “Can’t you feel the emptiness and longing
for something true and big and steadfast and far-off coming through my work?
That is why I began the Symphonie in my mind years ago.”…
My space is very
limited, but I must quote a few stanzas of the strange, splendid poem, although
to detach a few lines here and there is doing scant justice to the work as a
whole:-
(First movement.
Adagio.)
And what I seek I know
not,
Save that it is unseen
and flawless… and uncrowned…
Some great perfection
of form or colour or sound
Or odour, of the soul
and body; so my limbs may slake
At last their touch,
so that my heart may flame,
Burn itself out and
ache
No more to hear thy
name.
……………
I will not answer the
voice
Of the solemn bell on
the shore; I will suffer, I will not die
Till my youth be gone
from the mirror; I will seek in the sea and sky
For the sudden star
that shall flame in my eyes and sear
My lips in its
flaming, illumine the holy place
Where the unknown god
shall appear
Like fire before my
face.
……………..
I will break the bars
of my cage,
I will have my joy of
the world though my reddened hands should wrest
The passionate star
that is mine from its depths in God’s breast;
My voice shall soar
through the murmurous prayers of the throng,
Shall reach thee, O
Fate, in the house of Saturn above;
Thou shalt answer, O
Life! Thy song
I will wring from thy
heart, O Love!
……………….
(Andante.)
The silence is like
death
After that white
singing… like something deeper far
And deadlier than
Death, seen through a door ajar
Upon the further side
of hell… like the Death I see
Far off… at the end of
the play… strange words he saith
And he waits… waits
for me…
…This shadow
swallowing Death.
(Andante Cantabile.)
……………………
Dawn… I will sing of
dawn… silver and still;
Far off the dawn is
rising… with lit eyes
And fragrant
wind-blown hair and breath that sighs
Cool perfumed like a
child’s, upon a hill
Builded of dreams
fallen from mist-hung skies.
Over the longing lake
the vapours curl
Like opals shrouded on
a pall of grey
That its pain for
Dawn’s lips be held away
From her eyes when her
fingers pale as pearl,
Draw back the great
gold flaming gates of day.
………………….
I will lay in thine
eyes the dreams that wake
On summer eves – the
fringed pool’s solitude
The copper pines, the
hushed serenitude,
The wall of
rhododendron round the lake,
The peace, the vision
and the sanctitude.
(Second movement.
Allegro con grazia.)
Veiled amethyst from
the faint dawn
Paints the dim poplars
round a lawn
Still clouded by the
night and spread
Like velvet ‘neath the
marble faun.
Far off upon the
flame-rimmed hills,
Pale green and gold
with daffodils,
The ivory lyric of a
flute,
The white faun’s cold
carved marble thrills.
…………………….
(Andante Cantabile.)
Sancta Mater dolorosa,
Bless our quiet graves
of the morrow,
Laughter is the mask
of sorrow,
Est laetitia res
morbosa.
Dew lies on the leaves
for weeping,
Death hath blossoms
for our sleeping,
Lilium mortis, somni
rosa.
Soft and slow our tears are falling,
For we hear thy far
voice, calling,
Mater mundi lacrymosa.
(Third movement.
Allegro molto vivace.)
I had waited so long,
I had sought you in every place,
In the joy of the
lark, in the delicate pain of the dove
And sometimes in music
had touched you, and sometimes above
In the stars I had
seen, as one sees in a mirror, your face;
But only at sunset
to-day have I found you, found Love!
………………..
Love – what word is
this?
What does it mean to
men? No more than lust, made sweet,
Perhaps, by pain; or
else just friendship over-pale;
…………………….
Little, men mean by
love;
But this – what new
incalculable wondrous thing is this?
This reaching towards
you till I cease to be, until
My soul has become
yours, fulfilled and still,
And yours the mutual
breath of all the worlds – God’s kiss.
…………………………
Pale pools of
moonlight shimmer on the ground,
The great green dim
magnolias rise around,
Their gleaming
blossoms scenting all the air
With passionate
perfume mingling mystical
With odour of night’s
secret ritual
That gives dreams
breath and strips desire bare.
And in the moon-mist
on the leaves you stand,
An unplucked rose in
an enchanted land;
O love of mine, young
voyager on my shore,
Breath of my lips and
blood of my wild heart,
We are made one, whom
death dares not to part,
And the night’s beauty
is a pain no more.
……………………
A critic of unusually sympathetic understanding has written of the poem (Vision, August, 1919):-
“There is perhaps a
closer bond of similarity between Mr. John’s Symphonie Symbolique and the
Tschaikowsky Symphonie Pathetique than the author himself admitted; but the
difference is that Mr. John had travelled a stage further on his quest with
every Movement than Tschaikowsky did, and in the end he had far outstripped
him. the poet indeed reached the inner threshold of the Mysteries, knew that he
would enter, and knew also that the finger of silence was laid upon his lips,
and that the final Movement was not to be written. Tschaikowsky all but reached
that threshold, but the drawn curtain was for him a signal of discouragement
and mockery, and so, unlike the poet, he wrote his last Movement, which he
expressed in music of the most heartrending and bitter sadness. For the mystical
of its imagery and its passion – these will be interpreted by every reader for
himself; by some as of the Earth alone, by others as of the Mystery of Heaven
and Earth clasped about the Eternal Spirit of Man.”
It is curious to note
that all through his correspondence, as all through his work, even dating back
to the early ‘twenties, are two recurring ideas – one that of premature death,
the other that of the “Perfect Thing” is unattainable – the subject of the
Symphonie. I give here a letter written to a friend of youth which vividly
exemplifies this. Although written hastily and with no thought of publication,
it is in itself a gem of prose and makes one regret that he never tried to
write for publication in this medium, as I so often urged him to do:-
“Caro mio, I think it
was the repose of your letter more than anything else that startled me. You
speak of unreposeful things in a manner so grave and calm – all the pain and
fret of human strivings after the unattainable, the seeking and never finding, the
cry unanswered, the unresolved chord, seem to become curiously quiet under your
handling. It reminds me of Walter Pater, your mental attitude appears almost
the same, that almost of the position of the spectator of life, of ‘one who
views the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions.’ And its calmness is
strange in one so young as you.
‘Some perfectly
beautiful thing, some ideal’, you say, that same day you must meet – ‘perhaps
in this span of existence, perhaps in another.’ My dear, I do not think you
will meet it on this side of the grave. Indeed, though it may be we return
again as the wheel goes round, I do not think we shall find that vision
beautiful at all on earth. And afterwards – what then is there? Perhaps sleep,
who knows? But I believe this – the pain of our long searching, the pain of our
eternal failure, is the flame of life’s lamp, of art’s achievements; the flame
in which, at least, we burn ourselves out. There are certain words in ‘The Epic
of Hades’ I shall never forget – ‘How far high failure overleaps the bounds of
low success.’ You remember the old Greek story of Icarus and Daedalus? For me
that is an allegory of human art, and it is better to fall than never to have
climbed high… This vain search after the unattainable ideal is a terrible
thing; but I believe the realisation, were it possible, would be immeasurably
more terrible, it would be the end of all things. We always hope – hope is the
great curse and the great salvation of us; yet I think that deep down in our
souls we know we shall never attain, never realise the unnameable perfection;
that is why in art or Nature anything extraordinarily beautiful brings
involuntary tears to our eyes – at the same moment we almost see the perfect
beauty and realise that it is for ever beyond our vision…”
One is struck by the
fact that he owed so little to his contemporaries. Here and there his work
reminds one of Arthur Symons, but he once told me he had never read a line of
Symons. Although he had a marvellous mastery of English when still quite young,
yet he seemed to have read very little in his own language except Swinburne and
Wilde. He was unusually well-read in Greek and Latin authors. Though possibly
influenced by Wilde, he did not imitate him. From his earlier work one imagined
Edmund John might have become an English Verlaine, or perhaps Baudelaire, but
the Symphonie strikes a deeper note. Stephen Phillips drew attention to his
distinctive quality and found that if he follow in any school, it is the
Undoubtedly he had not
yet reached the fullness of his powers. Arthur Waugh, reviewing the Symphonie
in the June Bookman, deplores that fact that “so exquisite a voice has been
sacrificed in the universal world-tragedy.” Had he lived he would doubtless
have sung many lovely songs yet, songs haunting and sweet, for in his
tenderly-beautiful “Seven Gifts” (published with the Symphonie) he seemed to
break altogether fresh ground. The “outré and the horrible” hold him no more –
gone are the passion and pain, the struggle and despair – this serene and
beautiful hymn of fatherhood in one of the most perfect things ever written in
this language. It attracted much attention when it first appeared in the
English Review in 1916, and was immediately done in Braille. The original rough
copy, written on the back of a schoolboy’s arithmetic examination paper, was
sent to me with the following note:-
“Ecco, here is the
poem at last. I wonder if you will like it? Technically it is hardly open to
criticism, but technique is not everything in poetry. The form is classically
correct and the metre that required by convention by the form. The feeling is,
I think, essentially characteristic of myself.”
I quote the third and
fifth verses:-
“I give my red-lipped
boy a rose
Fresh from the dew of
waking dawn,
A rose for my fair
dancing faun
Whose laughter all the
summer knows:
Sweet, careless,
unstained, fragrant boy,
So that love bring him
only joy,
I give my red-lipped
boy a rose.
I give my singing boy
a lute
With silver strings
whose chant belongs
To Youth for him to
sing his songs
Among the ripening
flowers and fruit:
So that I hear his
voice in Spring
When I lie
unawakening,
I give my singing boy
a lute.”
It is greatly to be
regretted that the present volume did not include his two characteristic poems,
“Nocturne” and “Resurrection”, hitherto only published in the pages of a novel
by another hand. It certainly cannot have been the author’s wish that
they should be left out of his collected works. Considering how small his total
output has been, this omission from the last volume is difficult to explain.
Both author and public are the losers thereby. Of the first-named poem, he once
wrote to the present writer: “I rather love the ‘Nocturne’; it is the colour of
and smells like your garden would do at night, if it were by the sea.”
Here are the opening
verses of “Nocturne”:-
The night hath fallen
like a great sweet chord
On this dark hill that
once sloped up to dawn;
Hath fallen solemnly
Upon the still soft
sward
Like some strange
harmony
That Love hath heard
and borne
Away from Death. Lo,
all the moon starred leaves
Are chanting the clear
choral of the night.
Like voices veiled and
swayed
By melody that weaves
Enchantments in the
shade
Of silvered clouds in
flight.
The dim, dark, silent
land curves round the sea,
The surf sighs to the
cliffs its sesame,
The shore is dreaming,
and the white sands wait
For Love’s fleet feet
when he shall wander there;
The light is like an
odour in the air
From caves of vervain
deep and passionate.
In the curiously
incomplete memoir which prefaces the Symphonie, no mention is made of his work
as a schoolmaster; rather one would get the impression that the poet was always
a man of leisure. This should be corrected, for these strenuous, austere years of
hard work, when he was head of a private school that he had worked up in seven
terms from thirty boys to seventy-five, were, in one sense, his life’s most
splendid achievement. For he was not naturally a worker, whereas poetry came to
him easily and without effort. Yet he poured his whole self into making a
success of his school, putting its welfare before all his own personal desires.
He spent his strength lavishly, worked early and late – far too late. Those who
had hitherto regarded him as the dilettante artist, the social butterfly, were
amazed at the strength of purpose he showed, the courage and determination in
the face of physical ill-health and many other obstacles.
His power over boys
was extraordinary, and they in turn adored him. I do not think anyone whom he
had taught could ever quite forget him – certainly not those children of whom
he made special friends. In their young, pure, faithful hearts he will be a
precious memory for ever. He felt the parting no less than his pupils when he
gave up his work to join the army, voluntarily, in December, 1915, as he had
long wished to do. It had been much on his mind during the foregoing year that
his position hitherto made this impossible. In the summer of 1915, walking with
me by the sea, he said suddenly: “Everything’s so lovely here, but I can’t be
happy in these white flannels. Haven’t you noticed I’m the only young man on
the front in mufti?”
I have before me a
copy of his farewell speech to his boys. It is so little like the man known to
the majority, especially to those who knew him only as a rising poet, that I
think an extract from it may interest his readers:-
“And in bidding you
goodbye, I would like to leave a word or so of advice for you to keep as you
grow older. Never give in. Remember that your own must come to you some day,
sooner or later, if you are steadfast and patient, if you play the game, if you
are true to yourself. To know and be true to yourself is the great secret, for
what is good for one is often bad for another. Do not be for ever asking
yourself, ‘Is this right? Is this within the law?’ – that way one reaches
nothing but priggishness. If your motive is stainless and you know your deed
will not cause suffering to others, then what you do is good enough whatever
the world may say.”
Contrast this and the
letters already quoted with his amusing social manner. I quote a few examples
of his distinctly unconventional mode of accepting invitations:-
“Your divine
reasonableness pleases me intensely. It makes my spirit rush out to you in a
great wave of appreciation and affection. Since Friday won’t suit you and
Thursday is impossible for me and we are both willing to bear each others
company for a few hours this week, and next week I have 60 parents to see and
all the stationary to deal with, etc., Wednesday must be managed somehow.
Therefore, if you are willing to support my presence, notwithstanding that I
may not impossibly be mean and rag-like, I will be kind enough to step into
your car at
“If you will let me
know what time I am expected to have shaved and had my bath on Saturday, I will
be charmed to stagger to the car at the appointed moment. If I am still in a
trance, you must try to forgive it – I am not awake on Saturdays until a very
late hour indeed, owing to the accumulated weekly malady of living and to the
fact that I do not rise betimes on that day. Your worn but devoted.”
“May I come on Sunday
about 4.30 ? I shall be indescribably hideous, dull, white, cross, stupid,
decayed and worried. I shall appear soaked in ink and grey with good works, and
you will execrate me with an intense fury. At 9.30, however, I shall show signs
of returning consciousness. Your devoted wreck.”
“Thank you; at
Reading these, one is
irresistibly reminded of Stephen Phillips’ memorable line, “a little jest too
slight for one so dead.” There is infinite poignancy in recalling or reading
the jokes, the jesting remarks of the beloved dead. Of that which was grave or
sad about them it is easier to bear the recollection.
After the above,
perhaps it would be permissible here to say that his was a face of remarkable
and haunting beauty. His wavy black hair, growing curiously low at the temples
on either side, a fine forehead, strongly-marked straight black brows,
wonderful mystic blue eyes which were generally grave but could smile
irresistibly, a Greek profile, a rare charm of manner and a voice made up a
deeply impressive and unusual whole. Yet withal he was entirely lacking in
conceit and one of the least egoistic of men. Although always very carefully
dressed and well-groomed, he was by no means dandyish, never fussed about
“appearances”, spoke but reluctantly of himself, and never in praise.
Among my collection of
the poet’s letters (most of which are too intimate and personal to be suitable
for publication) I find another referring to the school life which helps to
show the essential goodness of heart that he was so often at pains to conceal.
“Here stirring times
are toward. The locum tenens is aged 172; is deaf, blind and partially dumb;
and oh, so piteously anxious to please. When I enter the room where he happens
to be, in school hours or not, he springs up, with his poor old limbs, and an
anxious, childishly beseeching expression on his face! I almost weep every time
he does it and long to tell him to pay me less deference.
Think, he is a
Here is a charming
little nature-study, written during his last holiday in
“How you would love
this country. Here time moves slowly like the silver thread of the Axe that I
can see from my window winding its way to the waiting sea; the seasons follow
in their place serenely; and love and birth and death come beautifully, each at
its desired moment, so it seems, and sure of welcome.
Although I strayed
into no little church yesterday, as I might have done, my prayers went up for
you from the summit of a pine-clad hill – very high – perhaps not so far from
heaven; nearer, doubtless, than I shall be hereafter.
The serenity of this
life is wonderful. The ‘fret of the soul’ is not seen in the peasant’s faces. A
few small villages, an ancient church or two, the budding copses, woods of
sycamore and birch and pine, the deep valleys, the eternal dreaming hills, the
occasional lowing of cattle, the sweet, soft Devonshire air, stung sometimes
with the salt of the sea – there are the Alpha and Omega of existence here.
Somehow one wishes in
such circumstances to blot out all the wild years behind one, and to know never
again that sort of mental fever which seems inseparable from such temperaments
as mine. Beauty always makes me sad. I think it must be one’s soul realising
that impossibility of attaining the Perfect Thing seen afar off.”
Again the allusion to
the unattainable perfection! Here is yet another letter to a child-friend
cherished in her collection of treasures:-
“I have only received
your adorable illustrated letter this morning, and loved it so much that I
immediately made an altar before it, lit by amber candles in copper
candlesticks, burnt incense before it and kissed its extreme beautifulness
until I brought on an attack of lead-poisoning. Therefore take warning and
never let love lead you to gorge unduly on lead pencil… Will you be mine?
Accept me and you shall have cakes of chocolate soap to wash with, ice-cream
sodas for shampoo, meringues to sit on, peches Melba for medicine, and beds of
toffee – Macintoshes – from which I myself will drag you every morning in case
you should stick. In other words, I would show you the inner meaning of life
here below…”
The following, culled
from another letter written about the age of twenty-five, is a very
characteristic passage:-
“If you want to find
perfection, you must turn and wander through the labyrinthine passages of the
dead centuries beneath the arch of time, until you reach
About the same time he
wrote of his religion as
“an exquisite
porcelain vase wherein lie frankincense and myrrh and many sweet perfumes, and
every day I take it out and dust it, and touch it with my fingers and with my
lips, and smile upon it – but it is just a marvellous porcelain vase, no more.”
Later on I fancy he
had occasion to revise this view. His thoughts apparently dwelt much on sorrow
and on the possibility of future troubles. Of later years he seemed
increasingly afraid of life, distrustful of destiny.
“I know that it is
sorrow most often which stirs the artist’s soul” (he writes) “and shapes his
art, and guides his hand and at last – breaks his heart.”
And again:-
“I feel sometimes as
if I could weep with some deep, hardly-realised happiness that, nevertheless,
has pain in it. Why pain, I do not know; at times I think perhaps there is
unknown pain in store – a long way off.”
After he went to
“Do you ever think how
quiet and still we shall all be soon?” I have heard him say more than once.
“And though tears
jewel Love and spring from Laughter,
And joy comes but to
teach us how to weep.
And each kiss has red
wounds that follow after,
The quiet end of it is
always sleep” *
It was in spring that the call to release and promotion came to him, and, as he had prophetically written:-
“Spring, and the
falling days, and a swift cloud
Upon one’s eyes at
last! ‘Tis well with thee – “
Truly it is well now
with him…
“Let be, let be, these
things touch not the Dead –
Love nor Forgetfulness
nor Memory –
Bring roses to the
mound that covers me,
But wreathe them
laughing round thine own live head!
And where I lie,
‘neath the wild grass without,
On my dead mouth a
Kiss shall find re-birth,
That the slow rain
which soaks through the grey earth
About my silent lips
shall not wash out.” *
*The Wind in the
The two poems the
author of the article mentions, ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Resurrection’ can be found in
the novel: ‘The Honey of Romance: Being the Tragic Love-Story of a Publisher’s
Wife’ [
The following verses
of ‘Nocturne’ have a rather magical quality typical of John:
The faint breeze
traces symbols on the grass,
Signs sad as hopes
that pause a space and pass,
Writ slow by the pale
priestess of the moon,
And there is moonlight
in the music of its breath,
Uncertain like a
shattered kiss at death,
Like incense from the
altar of dead June.
It hath crept through
the oleander wood,
And kissed the glad
crushed blooms where Eros stood,
Hath seen sweet
sensuous children on the shore
Clad in sea-jewels
where the moon’s beam dips,
And heard their song,
and left it on my lips
Where only Requiem had
sung before.
And thou, whom I have
never held nor known,
Nameless, most
beautiful, and most alone,
Whom I have only seen
half-veiled at night,
The moon upon thy
cheeks and in thine eyes,
Thy lips for love, thy
shadowy hair for sighs,
And on thy heart the
pain of my delight.
Thou, whom I find in
dreaming, hide thy voice
Among narcissi that I
may rejoice
At last, at death, to
know that I shall keep
Its music mingling
with the youth of thee
And breath of night
and tears flung from the sea
On tufts of samphire
by the shore of sleep.
The poem ‘Resurrection’ also has some fine lines, and begins:
After so long? After
the dreamless bell
Hath done its tolling
for the tears Love gave?
Wouldst thou awake
slain souls, the sad words said,
Lay low the lilies and
unclose the grave?
Wouldst thou weep yet?
And thinkest thou ‘tis well
To raise past Pain
from pale lips of the dead?
The poem continues and
seems to recall a remembered romance, which hints at a forbidden love and
‘things unattainable’:
After so little time?
I am afraid
Of thy strange
sensuous immaturity
And of thy fear and
passion, and then – loss
Once more… and hell. I
dream yet how I made
On thy young heart,
one night by the still sea
Sadly, slow sign as of
an ancient cross.
God! how I dream,
although I would lie dead
Beneath wild-briers
and lad’s-love, nor ever seek
Things unattainable
that call without…
Thyself… thy limbs’
lithe satin on my cheek…
Nay, I would wake so
that my lips grow red
Again… so that they
flame, burn and go out…
Ah noon , whose fever withers the wild grass,
O curled sweet mouth
kissed into bitterness,
O Love and Death to
whom men bow the knee,
… How swift their
frail flowers fall to barrenness!
Let be – have we not
wept enough alas!
Have I not paid in
blood for thee and me?
Parallels can be drawn with many other scholars and poets, such as Housman and Arthur Benson, who felt the need to repress much of their natural instincts and desires; one can only assume that the inner turmoil Edmund suffered towards his decline were brought about by his marriage to Katherine, which by his own admission, was financially necessary to him and lacked any sense of real love and devotion: is this the ‘entanglement’ Norman Douglas is alluding to or is there some other fatal attachment to him? Was the hedonistic and tolerant atmosphere of Taormina, which resonated with his yearning towards an ‘ideal’ notion of pagan joy, free of sordid convention and social constrictions, too great and too late a freedom for him? Possibly his upbringing as the son of a Baptist Minister caused much in the way of conflict running contrary to his nature. It is a common cause of many destructive souls in torment riddled with deep-rooted guilt and the fear of ridicule and persecution; torn between what is considered natural and unnatural in their desires; a perpetual ache in search of fulfilment and acceptance, which in some overly sensitive individuals, such as Edmund, morally at odds with their own beliefs, have tragic consequences. The theme of the ‘unattainable perfection’ runs throughout his life and his poetry and he really believed that he was never meant to find it. Perhaps he glimpsed the measure of it in Taormina but by then it was all too late...
Edmund John’s death
was it seems a lonely end of a life lived in disillusion in search of the
unattainable thing; a young and sentimental poet much like Keats who conjured
curious and mesmerising lines of beauty in his poetry; deep and sensual sentiments
that hint at forbidden desires that he could not face nor accept willingly
except in his wondrous verse, where the erotic flame of his enchantment burns
long. His works will live on and his name shall be remembered by perhaps a few
loyal and tormented acolytes, who like the poet –
Step forth from the
pomegranates with thy frankincense –
Musk in my hair and
balsams on thy skin,
And moon-flowers for
thy grave, and jessamine
To clothe thy youth
and half-awakened turbulence
Of curious senses
seeking some new sin! [‘The Quest’, Symphonie Symbolique. pp. 47-48]
WORKS BY EDMUND JOHN:
The Flute of Sardonyx:
Poems.
The Wind in the
Symphonie Symbolique.
The Seven Gifts.
Edmund John.
NOTES:
- Marriage Records for
- In the 1871 Census for
- In the 1871 Census for
- 1881 Census for
- Thomas Harborne Jones. Birth: April-June,
1879,
- Edmund Arthur Jones, born:
- William Reginald Stuart Jones (later
‘John’), born Woolwich, Kent, January-March 1888, 1d, 1211; and Cyril
Hubert Stuart Jones (later ‘John’), born Woolwich, Kent, January-March,
1d, 1211. William Reginald Stuart John died in
- 1891 Census for
- 1901 Census for England and Wales,
Crowthorne, Berkshire. RG13, schedule: 137, piece/folio: 77, p. 22.
- The Morning Post (
- 1911 Census for
- 1911 Census for
- Hornsey and
- Hornsey and Finsbury park Journal.
- Daily News (
- Daily News (
- Daily News (
- The English Review. Volume 15, September
1913, p. 318.
- Daily Citizen (
- Northern Whig. Recent Verse.
- Looking Back. Norman Douglas.
- The English Review. ‘Tyrannus Mundi’,
Volume 16, February 1914, pp. 308-309; ‘Envoi’, Volume 22, January 1916,
p. 1. It’s interesting to note that Aleister Crowley’s poem ‘The City of
God’ (
- The Bookman. Volume 45, issue 267.
December 1913. p. 178.
- Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal.
- Hornsey and Finsbury Journal.
- ibid.
- United Kingdom World War 1 Service
Records, 1914-1920, WO 363.
- Hampstead News. Thursday 1st
July 1915, p. 4.
- Evening Star. Friday 14th
August 1914, p. 2.
- The Seven Gifts. The English Review.
Volume 22, May 1916, pp. 417-418; Symphonie Symbolique. Edmund John
(posthumous)
- Poetry by Gerda Dalliba: ‘Fate and I, and
Other Poems’. New York, The Grafton Press. 1902; ‘An Earth Poem, and Other
Poems’ [Introduction by Edwin Markham]. London, G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1908;
‘Poems’ [Introduction by Edwin Markham]. New York, Duffield and Company.
1921. There is an interesting story in the Daily Mirror [Saturday 20th
February 1909, p. 4] of how Gerda was kidnapped by a relative who
disapproved of her secret marriage to the poor musician and composer
Ernest Edward Blake in March 1908. I shall produce some of the article as
it gives details as to Katherine and her daughter’s wealth and is worth
repeating for its neurotic and romantic charm. We learn that Gerda’s
father ‘was a rich man’ and when Gerda was 16 she had an annual allowance
of 11,000 dollars. On her father, James Huntington Dalliba’s death on 8th
October 1906, this was increased to 12,000 dollars and further by her
mother, Katherine to 13,000 dollars; Katherine herself had an allowance of
111,000 dollars. After Gerda fell in love with Ernest Blake and was
rejected by him, in November 1907, Gerda’s mother, Katherine, wrote to Mr.
Blake from Brussels requesting him to give Gerda ‘lessons in harmony’.
Gerda was besotted with Ernest and said she would ‘commit suicide’ if he
refused to marry her – the couple were married a fortnight later in March,
1908 at Paddington Registry Office. Returning from their honeymoon in
Norway, they stopped off at Stonehenge and performed a strange ceremony
involving dressing in ‘Grecian costumes’, reading the marriage service and
dancing bare foot reciting poetry the whole night (Gerda believed her
poetry was ‘dictated by spirits’, twenty of them and all with names).
Later, a Lady relative of Gerda’s arrived in London and invited Gerda to
stay in Hampstead where she was held prisoner and compelled to go to
Southampton and board a steamer to New York, arriving on 29th
November 1908. She escaped and was ‘watched by detectives day and night’.
She managed to board a ship back to England and makes her way to Salisbury
where she and her husband lived and back into the loving arms of her
husband, Ernest. A romantic tale, but I have found Ernest (who was born in
Harrogate, Yorkshire, 1879) on the 1911 census which was taken in April
that year, living with his widowed mother in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire,
[his parents were: Dodsham Browne Blake (1837-1890) and Sarah Ann Robinson
(1840-1913) who were married in 1861, Bradford, Yorkshire]. Ernest, aged
31, a ‘musical composer’ describes himself as ‘single’ [RG14, schedule:
47, piece/folio: 93, p. 1] Also that year, on 16th November, at
St. Andrew’s Church, Ashley-Gardens, London, there was a marriage between
Francis Lloyd Lowndes, ‘eldest son of the late Alfred S. and Frances Hoff
Lowndes of San Fransisco, California, to Gerda, daughter of the late James
Huntington Dalliba, of New York, and of Mm. Dalliba, of 6, Finchley Road, [London]
N.W.’. [The Standard. 20th March 1911, ‘marriages’. p. 1]
- 1911 Census for England and Wales, St.
John’s Wood, Marylebone, London. RG14, schedule: 3, piece/folio: 5, p. 1.
Kate Lyon Dalliba John died on 8th June 1938 in Italy (Probate
14th July 1939).
- Daily News (London), Thursday 19th
June 1930, p. 8.
- Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound. Ann Conover
Carson. Yale University Press. 2001, p. 38. The volume also mentions (p. 45) that in
February 1918, ‘Olga was engaged to play a benefit concert for the Italian
Red Cross at the British Institute in Florence, and went there to stay
with Katherine Dalliba-John’ who had a ‘flat on the Lungarno Giucciardini
near the Scottish Church in Florence.’
- Vote. Friday 16th June 1916, p.
6.
- Daily Mirror. [To-day’s Gossip],
- The Bookman. Volume 56, issue 334, July
1919. p. 144.
- Maud Churton Braby (1875-1932), journalist
and author. Her most notable work is: ‘Modern Marriage and How to Bear It’
(1908). She married the solicitor, Percy Braby in 1902. The author
dedicates her novel ‘The Honey of Romance’ to Edmund John and beneath each
poem states that ‘this poem is by Edmund John’; either in return or prior
to her novel being published, Edmund dedicated his volume of poetry ‘The
Wind in the Temple’ to her and the poem ‘Litany of the Seven Devils’ (pp.
22-24) is dedicated to ‘M. C. B.’
