Explore the poem

Mary Borden’s loose, impressionistic and repetitive ‘Song of the Mud’ turns a fascinated gaze upon the horrors of the ubiquitous trench mud. Influenced in its style by Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ it begins with comparisons that are not overtly disturbing. ‘Satin’, ‘silvery’ and ‘enamel’ appear in the first three lines and in describing the French infantryman, the ‘poilu’, constantly caked in mud Borden introduces an element of grim humour suggesting that the mud uniform is a new kind of ‘chic’ fashion. However, by line twenty the mud has become, ‘a slimy inveterate nuisance’ and the terrifying threat of ‘the obscene, the filthy, the putrid’ mud is now explored.

What is the impact of Borden’s use of a kind of listing technique to convey the appalling, destructive, nightmarish nature of the mud? It is worth looking at Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ to consider his use of lists and the extent to which Borden’s poem becomes almost an aggressive parody of Whitman’s verse.

Mud, even more than shell fire, is a constant source of trauma in the writings of soldiers in the trenches. One contemporary account talks of forty men drowning in the mud in one night. Borden’s poem stares unflinchingly but compassionately at, ‘The vast, liquid grave of our armies’.

About Mary Borden

At the start of the war American Mary Borden was 28 and living in England and moving in literary circles. Born in to a very wealthy family in Chicago and educated in New York her financial resources allowed her to equip and staff a field hospital near the Western Front. Her experiences as a volunteer nurse vividly inform her poetry and prose. A prolific and successful novelist between the wars her challenging and unorthodox poetry was not received as enthusiastically especially during the war and for some time afterwards. ‘Song of the Mud’ is taken from her little known classic of war reminiscence, ‘The Forbidden Zone’ which consists of prose sketches, stories and poems influenced by her fellow American Walt Whitman.

Mary Borden had three daughters with her first husband but married for a second time at the end of the war after having met Captain Edward Spears in Paris. Their marriage lasted for fifty years until Mary’s death in 1968. She gave active support to Spears’ distinguished political and diplomatic career whilst developing her own reputation as a writer of considerable talent and working tirelessly on humanitarian projects which included running mobile hospital units in France during the Second World War.