From Shakespeare’s sonnets and Donne’s songs (“Tell me where all past times are”) to Wordsworth and Eliot (“All time is unredeemable”), poets have gone in search of lost time. It was this theme—one of the great sorrows of human life—that struck the young JRR Tolkien in Lichfield during the First World War, and which became the making of him as a young poet. He recollected the moment, in a letter written 50 years later.
I said, outside Lichfield Cathedral, to a friend of my youth — long since dead of gas-gangrene (God rest his soul: I grieve still) — ‘Why is that cloud so beautiful?’ He said: ‘Because you have begun to write poetry, John Ronald.’ He was wrong. It was because Death was near, and all was intolerably fair, lost ere grasped. That was why I began to write poetry.
“And all was intolerably fair, lost ere grasped” is a nice poetic phrase: unbearable, too, like an inversion of Shakespeare’s “When I consider everything that grows/Holds in perfection but a little moment”. This is Tolkien’s familiar grand theme from The Lord of the Rings—the time of Middle-earth being, to mankind, almost lost ere grasped. Notice, too, the Wordsworthian note in this letter: “Why is that cloud so beautiful?” We think of Tolkien as a writer inspired by the lost civilisations of the north, a man of myth and saga. In his poetry we can see more clearly the late romanticism that pervades his work. He shares those poets’ sentimental sorrow of the world. This is often the great animating force of much of the work in the new Collected Poems of JRR Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G Hammond.
What struck me most from the first volume (of three) of the Collected Poems was just how much Tolkien was a poet of his times. The editors deny this, pointing to the idiosyncratic nature of his verse, and they are surely right about that. But if you gave some of these poems as a close reading exercise, it wouldn’t be too hard to devise that the poet was born the year Tennyson died (1892) and was an undergraduate in the days of Rupert Brooke and John Masefield. Here he is, in 1911, sounding, at times, almost as if he were anticipating the young Betjeman:
In a pale saffron sweetness
Shadows o’er the city flow:
Bluely dark its spires and mansions
Grimly loom against the glow.
The poem continues very much in that vein, about “Earth’s endless birth and doom”. But Tolkien was never going to be a writer who merely lamented lost time, rather he would become one who tried to recreate it. The same poem ends:
But beyond the golden yearning
of that evensong of flame
Stretch eternities of splendour
Ardent ages without name.
Even in his school days, Tolkien was sounding the note of eternal splendour that he worked for in his novels.
Still, it was the war that made him, specifically the tragic deaths of his school friends. One of those friends, GB Smith, who was killed by shrapnel at the Somme in 1916 (Tolkien was invalided out with a bacterial infection), wrote a poem that was clear inspiration for “Bilbo’s Last Song”. First, Smith:
We are old, we are old, and worn and school’d with ills,
Maybe our road is almost done,
Maybe we are drawn near unto the hills
Where rest is and the setting sun…
Now, Tolkien:
Shadows long before me lie,
beneath the ever-bending sky,
but islands lie behind the Sun
that I shall raise ere all is done;
lands there are to west of West,
where night is quiet and sleep is rest.
It is little wonder, reading those lines, that Tolkien became the great writer of the lost age of heroes. (Remember, too, his father died when Tolkien was four, and his mother a mere nine years later.)
Where the modernists made fragmentary literature from the disorder of the new world, Tolkien saw the fresh power of old stories: the terror of the waking dragon and the reality of the evil eye. Though he is not often (if ever) a truly great poet, Tolkien’s war poetry is hugely moving about lost time, lost men, lost ideals. The year after Smith died (along with their friend Rob Gilson, killed on the first day of the Somme), Tolkien wrote a poem before a commemorative dinner for the Battle of Minden, fought in Prussia in 1759 and in which Tolkien, Smith and Gilson’s regiment had fought. Although “Companions of Honour” is ostensibly about 1759, it is clearly a memorial to his friends.
For you to-day I drink the silent toast
And pour the wine, and wear my rose, and sing
That yours is now of all the proudest boast
Who, loathing wars and all they mean or bring,
Went forth in horror, charged the Gates of Hell,
And poison-piercèd by a foe unseen
Drenched with your blood the tortured Earth, and fell
Where no rose springs nor any blade of green.
Though Tolkien is frequently an indifferent poet, many sensible readers will surely prefer this sort of thing to Rupert Brooke’s sentimentalism. There are moments when Tolkien’s despair comes howling through in lines of unremitting feeling.
Hail! whom I love—beyond forgiveness slain
By that most dastard most dishonoured foe
That all the warfare of the world can show.
“Beyond forgiveness slain” is fierce and poignant and has the baleful quality that marks the best of so much of Tolkien’s later prose. It is good to remind ourselves, too, that the verray, parfit, gentil scholar—who is so often known to us as a wise old man on charming YouTube clips—felt such deep, hard feelings about the Germany of the First World War. That, too, is part of the animating spirit of The Lord of the Rings.
I don’t want to overpraise Tolkien’s early poetry simply because it has the emotional force of the war. Much of it is dull, such as the parody of the Finnish Kalevala that allegorises his undergraduate journey up to Oxford as a battle between the heroic Lemminkäinen and a dragon. His verses experiment with world-building, archaic language and mellifluous, atmospheric settings, but are often, ultimately, simply less rewarding to read than his prose. And at 1,400 pages—longer, that is, than a fully annotated edition of Chaucer or The Faerie Queene—readers are advised to set out on this journey with some caution for their own lost time.
Still, this Collected Poems is a significant achievement, and the editors are to be praised for their work. The book’s value is largely as a storehouse of knowledge about Tolkien’s development and career. Sometimes the footnotes are more interesting than the verses. I did not want to read the various drafts of the Kalevala allegory, but the discussion of Finnish metre and parallel sounds was illuminating. The earlier drafts can be a delight, though more often they could have been handled with judicious use of appendices, endnotes and the like. I found that I preferred the earlier draft of “The Man in the Moon”, and was disappointed to discover the Edward Lear-esque tone of “a Yarmouth boat found him far afloat” dulled in revision to a mere “fisherman’s boat”. A little hint of Lear appears elsewhere, too, such as:
O the hoot! O the hoot
Of his jolly little flute!
O the hoot of Tinfang Warble!
Those who enjoy the details of Tolkien’s mythmaking and lore will perhaps find a lot of value in the notes, though how much will be new to them is hard to say. Overall, though, I found the level of detail perplexing. Tolkien’s mythology is a vast, and, to the novice, incomprehensible system, which is not well understood through footnotes. Tolkien once said that his poems in Quenya, his elvish language, were written for private pleasure, not the enjoyment of an audience. I am inclined to agree. If you are new to Tolkien’s poetry but want to read his best work then, outside the novels, you can find it in books such as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. These collected volumes are best suited for specialists, devotees, completionists, collectors and cranks. I find myself somewhere in between these two categories. For anyone who truly cares about the particulars of The Lay of the Fall of Gondolin, for example, they are surely worth looking into.
Some of the long poems, such as the various iterations on the tale of Túrin and Nienor, are printed in extract because they are already published elsewhere (in this case in The Lays of Beleriand, edited by Christopher Tolkien). However, the selections are just and I, for one, was grateful for some abridgement. In these extracts, more of Tolkien’s emotional force comes through, this time responding to the death of his mother, many years earlier.
O! Morwen my mother, I am meshed in tears,
for grim are the hills and my home is gone.’
And there came his cries calling faintly
down the dark alleys of the dreary trees,
that one there weeping weary on the threshold
heard how the hills said ‘my home is gone.’
More often, I was inclined to think that while Homer might have sometimes nodded, Tolkien sometimes snoozed. From the great pen that wrote Smaug, came this (the opening stanza of a poem called “Moonshine”):
The mounting moon doth whitely shine;
The curtains wide are open cast;
The trees are trembling, larch and pine,
And sighing softly in the blast;
The stars are pale, when line on line
The dancers go a-piping past,
And music with their measures twine,
And lilt on lawns all greyly grassed.
Not only is this hardly Tolkien’s best work, but it appears in no fewer than three versions across five pages, with interstitial notes. Those notes quote various scholars to illustrate how Tolkien is working in a mediaeval or Saxon mode, but tastes are unlikely to be changed by footnotes.
This Collected Poems is far more rewarding when, for example, it prints the single version of “For WHA”, a poem in Anglo-Saxon dedicated to WH Auden with a translation and brisk note, adding up to three pages of non-repetitive, highly informative pleasure.
Anyone who works through to the final volume will find a more pessimistic tone. The pressures of fame, the loss of CS Lewis and the modernisation of the Catholic Church all depressed Tolkien. As he had done when he was young, he responded to his trials with poetry of strong, fine feeling about the travails of lost time:
’Tis hard indeed not to believe
that endlessly without reprieve
the dreadful ghost of What-is-done
shall still pursued for ever run
from the remorseless wraith unseen,
the Ghost of Ghosts, the Might-have-been.
The Collected Poems comes at an apposite moment: 2024 was the 70th anniversary of the publication of the first four books of The Lord of the Rings, and Peter Jackson’s films are now joined by the second season of Amazon’s The Rings of Power and the new Netflix anime film The War of the Rohirrim. A new volume of Tolkien’s letters and a spiritual biography by Holly Ordway have also been published recently.
These poems are not going to become a major part of Tolkien’s legacy. His reputation as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century will rest on his two great novels (and the often splendid poems, a hundred in all, that they contain). But in these Collected Poems we can trace much of Tolkien’s development, both in terms of his attempt to capture time before it was lost in youth and in his mourning the loss of the world in his old age.
