where the insane histrionics that don't make it into my research notebook live

edmund addressing sass as "my dear protagonist".... EYE

someone PLEASE tell me why walmart of all places carries this book that i can find nowhere else online LMAO

the thought of boys (scarcely men at all!) going into battle carrying childhood teddy bears in their tunic pockets is almost unbearable in its poignancy... like. [gate clattering shut] childhood is over and it's absolutely asphyxiating

the fact that whoever owned this book felt the need to scribble in his middle name..... [hand outstretched to butterfly] is this a soulmate?

"he loved cricket… and played it ardently and very badly."

someone please buy this for me i'm BEGGING.... his lesser-known work is so dreadfully difficult to find i literally hate it here

i'm not weeping i'm just thinking abt how very much sorley admired masefield's poetry and how insanely deep a wound his death left in the larger body of the war poets... I SAID I HATE IT HERE

thinking about how every welsh family was required to send one son to war and hedd wyn went so his younger brother wouldn't have to... pain <3

torn-out notebook page: september 3, 2020

just finished reading the shepherd: and other poems of peace and war and like..... yea that's the love of my life <3 literally made me cry with "the child's grave" but like that's on me king you caught ME slipping <3

also why hasn't anyone written a biography about blunden.... more importantly where are the charles sorley biographies.... like. can someone please write these so i can just READ them instead of having to ponder whether i should do it myself

i'm sorry..... WHY does edmund have an entire ass rose in his boutonniere ????? i'm in love w him ?????

torn-out notebook page: september 10, 2020

ok just finished reading the waggoner: and other poems and um. cried again. edmund blunden wrote "the sick-bed" specifically so he could come into my room and shoot me in the kneecaps with it thanks king

sorley refusing to shut up about hardy is me refusing to shut up about sorley.... omg twins <3

encountering this specific paragraph whilst also reading blunden's war memoir is actually making me go insane

like:

LIKE:

my favorite of edmund's many epithets <3 love u shepherd boy

me in britain circa 1920: pleaseee lady ottoline invite me to your farm i promise i won't take five hundred candid pictures of the great war poet edmund blunden smoking a cigarette and looking stiflingly handsome pleaseee i swear

torn-out notebook page: september 19, 2020

was wandering around the used bookstore + found a copy of owen's collected poems (my dearest sweetpea!) as well as a first edition shepherd & other poems squished between two completely unrelated volumes of prose ?? EDMUND !!! now i can cry on the pages of a physical copy instead of my laptop keyboard !!!

scribblings: september 22, 2020

sunshine / graves / blossoms / sepulchres / wildflowers / war

line-by-line these words bunch up against one another, pushing and shoving, scouring each other raw... edmund seems so caught between the pastoral and the antipastoral (death!), it's quite obviously being done for ironic purposes but also his narrative voice feels so... trapped? unable to loose the fetters of the past? i don't know... he seems to me a sort of literary persephone, being yanked between the verdant earth and the desolate underworld, entirely against his own will

david intended to become a priest..... the layers of symbolism are literally like a crepe cake at this point

bruv he is so baby i'm :"((( also why does sass always look like an inordinately cheeky headmaster who's about to school you on how to write a proper sonnet

so what you're saying is..... he's baby

scribblings: october 17, 2020

is inevitability a kind of hauntology? is doomed-ness a kind of ghost?

i already knew wilfred and i were kindred spirits but like. the exclamation points! the excited outbursts! he's my favorite person !!!

FLEAS HE SAID

edmund interrupting his own narrative to plaintively remember that his friend stole his precious book of john clare.... every time i think i couldn't love him more –

discoveries: october 28, 2020

that feeling when u find five new photographs of ur research subject whom you expected to find zero new pictures of..... live for these days as a historian <3

UPDATE:

landed another one !!! my man keeps me so well fed being photographed THIS many times ?? the handsome devil... guess that's what happens when you're quote one of the most popular young men in town unquote <3

having an aviator for a research subject be like