A Poem Edited by JRR Tolkien
Created | Updated Sep 23, 2018
A Poem Edited by JRR Tolkien
Editor's Notes: If you look up 'harvest' in the Internet Archive, you'll get 5000 book titles: some simply called 'Harvest', others called 'Something Harvest' or 'Harvest Something'. It's a popular title. This book is called A Spring Harvest, and it contains poems by an Oxford man who died too young.
Geoffrey Bache Smith was a good friend of JRR Tolkien's. They went to school together, and were also friends at Oxford. Then came the First World War. Smith and Tolkien joined up. Smith died at the Somme while Tolkien himself was in hospital. Smith had written to his friend, '….may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot.' Scholars have noted the profound influence that the war had on The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien lost almost all his friends in that conflict. He edited his friend's work in a 1918 collection, to which he wrote a very simple preface.
Here's one of Geoffrey Bache Smith's poems. Be kind when you read it: he died at 22. If you have lived longer, work harder. We owe it to the ones who didn't get the chance.
To an Elzevir Cicero
| Dust-covered book, that very few men know, Even as very few men understand The glory of an ancient, storied land In the wild current of the ages' flow, Have not old scholars, centuries ago Caressed you in the hollow of their hand, The while with quiet, kindly eyes they scanned Your pages, yellowed now, then white as snow? A voice there is, cries through your every word, Of him, that after greatest glory came Down the grey road to darkness and to tears; A voice like far seas in still valleys heard, Crying of love and death and hope and fame That change not with the changing of the years. |
