The Days That Forced Our Lives Apart
The days that forced our lives apart
Are shut up like a fan.
We shall not even speak of them,
Because at last we can.
There’s nothing in between us now,
Neither silk nor sheet.
Our lives have come so close tonight,
Even our graves meet.
I discovered Jill Furse’s poetry only recently, dipping into Anne Powell’s excellent 1999 anthology, Shadows of War: British Women’s Poetry of the Second World War. The three lyrics by Furse testify to a rather Housman-like talent for succinctness and musicality. The Days That Forced Our Lives Apart, written a year into the war, is my favourite of the three.
Furse was a granddaughter of the poet Sir Henry Newbolt, and enjoyed, for a short time, a promising West End acting career. In September 1939, the month and year that war began, she married the glass engraver and poet Laurence Whistler. Whistler was called up a year after the marriage, and spent the war years in army training camps. Furse suffered from what Powell describes as “intermittent illness, now thought to have been lupus erythematosus” and died shortly after the birth of the couple’s daughter. Laurence Whistler published an account of their lives together in a prose memoir, The Initials in the Heart.
The historical backdrop (war and a wartime marriage) adds a perspective to the poem, but the poem is not two-dimensional without it. Its eight lines contain every detail required to hold us attentive to the scene. The lovers have been separated: now they’re together. Their intimacy takes them beyond the necessity for words. They meet, unguardedly present to each other. And in the close connection of their bodies they seem to transcend, if not death itself, then the separation of death.
The word “days” in the title and opening line suggests understatement, while illustrating how time slows and its divisions are meticulously peeled off and counted when one person awaits another’s return. The simile invests the “days” with the muscular power to “force” people physically apart, only to reduce them to that lightweight object, a fan, hardly a weapon of force beyond a frivolous or flirtatious scolding. The transformation reflects the joyous psychological effect when homecoming erases absence. But even a folded fan, though slim, has substance. So the image doesn’t tell us, as in a more sentimental poem it might, that the days have become nothing. They’ve dwindled in importance, and, in the moment of the poem, are almost nothing, “shut up” like a fan and not to be talked about, so both senses of “shut up” are evoked. The recognition of the fact of this silence hints, in the poem, at experiences it might be difficult and painful to speak of. But there’s no psychological necessity: if, at last, the lovers are close enough to talk about the days they were absent from each other, it’s precisely because they’re together that they no longer need to. The “fan/can” rhyme of this first stanza curiously seems to underline male/female complicity. It’s beautifully judged – almost, but not quite, startling. It could have been awkward. It’s handled so deftly it seems entirely natural.
Rhythmically this is not a symmetrical poem. In the second stanza, certain small metrical shifts reflect the intensification of mood. The iambic rhythm of the second line of the first stanza (“Are shut up like a fan”) is exchanged for a trochaic metre in the second line of the second stanza (“Neither silk nor sheet”). The stress on the first syllable of “neither” gives the line its strong, almost archaic, negative emphasis, its echoes of border ballad and mediaeval carol. Bold rhythm accompanies an even bolder meaning: the lovers are stripped naked, unconcealed by glamorous nightwear (“silk”) or bedlinen (“sheet”), or any of the civilised trappings and structures which those two powerful nouns call distantly to mind (“silk” for instance might suggest the law: “sheet” evokes pages, sails and winding sheet).
The last line begins with a dactyl and ends with a spondee: “Even our graves meet.” The rhythm is stark and faintly ceremonial. The obvious meaning of this curious and compelling idea, the meeting of two graves, might be that lovers so extraordinarily close in life can’t be separated by death, or by the changes created by death, but the meeting of graves could also be associated with mutual orgasm, if “graves” is read as a euphemism for the “little deaths” of sexual fulfilment. The picture that’s most immediately conjured, though, is of two plots of earth, side by side, soil and grass and flower-roots mixed up as the dust of bodies might be.
The Days That Forced Our Lives Apart is the most perfect of love poems. But, while I see Furse as one of the brightest stars in Powell’s cosmos, the anthology is richer and broader than a single poet or poem could suggest, and the selection reflects a wide range of women’s wartime experiences beside their non-combative or domestic responses.
