Last British WWI Poet Recalls Gaiety, Heartbreak : Literature: London’s Imperial War Museum honored Geoffrey Dearmer when he turned 100. His verse was read among old tanks, guns and biplanes.

BIRCHINGTON-ON-SEA, England —  Geoffrey Dearmer is Britain’s last surviving poet of World War I, a veteran of Gallipoli and the Somme.

That war, so terrible in loss of life, led to a brilliant flowering of English poetry in works by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg and others.

“I didn’t know I was the last survivor until I was told,” Dearmer said in his retirement apartment on the north Kent coast as his 100th birthday approached.

“I suppose I became the last when Graves died in 1985. There was often a poem or two of mine in anthologies so my name was known, but I think everyone was sure I was dead.

“I met Graves once. I went to see him. We talked about the war. I knew none of the others.”

In mid-March, the Imperial War Museum in London held a reception in Dearmer’s honor. His poems were read to an audience among the old tanks, guns and biplanes of 1914-1918--”the war that will end war,” as H. G. Wells said.

On March 21, Dearmer’s 100th birthday, a selection of his poems called “A Pilgrim’s Song” was published. A photograph of him on the dust jacket shows him as he was in that war long ago, sturdy and confident in his lieutenant’s uniform of the Royal Fusiliers.

Jon Stallworthy, professor of English literature at Oxford University and biographer of Wilfred Owen, writes in the foreword: “ . . . It is an honor and a pleasure to salute one of the oldest of our old soldiers and the oldest of our old poets.”

Dearmer, a widower, still looks strong, although he has arthritis and moves with a walker. He is alert, likes to meet people, reads The Times of London every day and has piles of books of all kinds in front of him at Birchington-on-Sea, 70 miles east of London.

All through World War I, the guns in Flanders fields were heard on this coast, “a constant rumble” when the wind was in the right direction across the Straits of Dover, Dearmer said.

The new book is dedicated to his brother, Christopher, killed at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli in 1915.

Unlike Geoffrey, Christopher didn’t get a commission immediately. When they visited their parents, the brothers had to walk on opposite sides of the road as an officer was not to be seen walking with a private.

“Brooke was the best known of us,” Dearmer said. “He was bitten by an insect on the way to Gallipoli and died. We got five miles inland at Suvla Bay, thanks to the Australians.

“I saw one Turkish soldier, alive. He was moving about like a maniac. I saw one man dead, not in uniform, the most handsome face I ever saw. He made me think of Christ as the Roman soldier saw him at Calvary: ‘Truly this was the Son of God.’ I wrote ‘The Dead Turk’ about him.”

And what of the Western Front?

“The trenches on the Somme were much the same but much wider and longer. I was near Amiens. The whole country was devastated. We all got used to the shelling. It was very dull, sitting there all day, armies staring at each other.”

He reached into his memory for a quotation, its source forgotten: “ . . . taut, listening armies staring through the dark.”

Dearmer’s first book, “Poems” (1918), was reprinted. His second, “The Day’s Delight” (1923), sold only 300 copies.

But in 1989, when he privately issued a selection of his poems, Dearmer wrote delightedly that “The Song of the Whale,” which is part of his poem “Blue Whale,” had been “sung all over the world by Hoagy Carmichael.”

“I realized I’d got a gift for poetry and learned the business,” he said.

“Over the years my poetry improved, but there was no money in it. Brooke and Graves sold well and one or two others.”

Dearmer was paid as much as $15 for poems published in newspapers and magazines, and once $50.

Now he charges $1.43 a line for reprinted poems in anthologies. “It’s very little.”

Asked about his favorite among the war poets, he said it was Owen, who was killed just before the armistice and whose birth centennial is being marked this year.

Why did the first war produce so much fine poetry and the second so little?

“There was a gaiety about the first war and a certain exhilaration,” Dearmer said.

The second war brought a feeling of deja vu . Everyone had the determination to destroy Hitler, but there was little romance in the feeling.

Dearmer was also an examiner of plays for the Lord Chamberlain, a strange task of censorship, now abolished. “And a good thing too. It should never have been started,” he said.

He only banned one play, one in which Jesus Christ returns as a Communist. “You weren’t supposed to put biblical characters on the stage, and the play wasn’t any good anyway,” he said.

Dearmer’s regular job was with the British Broadcasting Corp., editing radio programs for children.

During the interview a friend telephoned Dearmer to report the burglary of his home near Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Dearmer related: “He said the burglar entered through a window, pinched 20 ($31) in cash and found the key to let himself out of the front door. Then he put the key through the letter box. You see, people can’t be so bad. There’s always a reason.”