Edmund Blunden

'So November is at an end, and I discover that I have been quite outrun by this aged month...'

Edmund Blunden is an undeservedly forgotten Great War poet and writer, who wrote some excellent landscape books. His war memoirs 'Undertones of War' are superb. 'Cricket Country' is a slow journey around fields and pitches and cricketing stories which even I enjoyed - like Arthur Ransome's 'Rod & Line' which is about angling it is more about the mood, the landscapes and the participants than the sport itself. He lived until the early 1970s and had a successful literary career, publishing, editing, producing anthologies and teaching for many years in Tokyo. His book 'The Face of England' is an account of a series of journeys through England in the 1920s, a country he revels in for its gentle pastoral landscapes but a country he feels is irreparably scarred by the Great War; gradually of course the reader realises it is the author who is most affected by the recent war. I found this passage recently which made me think I should re-read the whole book.

The pale light of a mild winter afternoon, which touches a forlorn scene so aptly in its true condition, has rested on many ruins, and identified them with us in a strange degree. It may be merely fancy, or an accident of associations; but I would trace a relation between this spirit, rather than light, and the decline of places. In this sympathetic crystal, so transient, I look at this grove that was once a house, and naturally find the scene transformed into far-off wounded towers, and ramparts, and colonnades of trees, and red loopholed roofs, standing alone aong unpeopled marshy plains, towards the winter evening of their friendly and intimate lives.