‘Shining Pins and Wailing Shells’: Women Poets and the Great War

Abstract

My title ‘Shining Pins and Wailing Shells’ repeats a traditional opposition between women’s and men’s experiences of and poetic rhetoric about World War 1: crudely speaking, Jessie Pope writing patriotic rhymes like ‘The Call’ at home, against Wilfred Owen producing his bitter pacifist masterpieces from the trenches. I originally intended to represent female patriots by the phrase ‘white feathers’: notoriously distributed as public badges of shame by patriotic women to civilian males of military age, these are handy metonyms for feminine jingoism and by now have become part of the received mythology of the Great War. But the image of woman knitting and thinking is a far more apt representation of the specifically feminine non-combatant experience: it recurs constantly, from Rose Macaulavious sister in 1914 ?‘In a trench you are sitting, while I am knitting / A hopeless sock that never gets done’³ to the ‘shining pins that dart and click’ of Jessie Pope’s optimistic sock-knitter: ‘He’ll come out on top somehow / Slip 1, knit 2, purl 14’,⁴ and the woman in Violet Spender’s long patriotic poem ‘Knitting’, unwillingly obsessed with visions of war’s horror as she sits ‘knitting, knitting, knitting’.⁵

I knew a time when Europe feasted well:

bodies were munched in thousands, vintage blood so blithely flowed that even the dull mud

grew greedy, and ate men; and lest the gust should flag, quick flesh no daintier taste than dust

spirit was ransacked for whatever might sharpen a sauce to drive on appetite.

Sylvia Townsend Warner²

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.¹