Explore the poem

‘Strange Hells’ is one of the poems Gurney wrote in response to his experience in the First World War. Look at the first three lines of this unconventionally structured sonnet and consider the shifts in feeling and thinking. Notice how our expectations of the poet being plunged into the nightmarish hell of war are not necessarily met when, in the third line, Gurney writes about not being as afraid ‘As one would have expected’.

However, the central section of the poem deals with the ‘hell’ of enduring a bombardment in the trenches when the regiment tries to drown out the sound of the guns by singing. In line ten, the impact of the bombardment is emphasized by the use of repeated sounds.

In the last four lines of the sonnet, we jump forward to dwell briefly on the survivors who have returned home. How does Gurney depict the soldiers who have survived the war? The poem concludes with the idea of the heart burning but the need to ‘keep out of the face how heart burns’. Why might Gurney suggest this need for concealment?

About Ivor Gurney

Ivor Gurney suffered periods of mental ill health before the First World War, but his condition had deteriorated significantly by the end of the conflict. He had joined up after initially being rejected and was subsequently wounded and gassed.

At the end of the war he had a number of temporary jobs, but his mental instability worsened and he was committed to a mental asylum in 1922. Gurney never fully recovered and died in an asylum in Kent in 1937 from tuberculosis. He almost certainly suffered from some form of bi-polar disorder.

Gurney was not only a poet but also an extremely gifted composer. Although tormented by mental illness, he wrote over two hundred musical pieces and hundreds of poems. During his lifetime he was probably best known for his music, but after his death his friends ensured that his poetic work was collected and preserved and its originality and value recognised.