Ivor Gurney fought at the Front in 1916, was wounded on Good Friday 1917, and after a spell at Rouen Hospital was gassed at Passchendaele. He was sent to a number of war hospitals where, deprived of the friendship of his fellow soldiers, he suffered increasing mood swings. He threatened suicide in June 1918, was discharged from the army a month before the Armistice, and returned to Gloucester. His first book of poems, Severn and Somme (1917), published during the war, was followed by War’s Embers (1919). While writing poetry, he continued to compose, and published two Housman cycles, Ludlow and Teme and The Western Playland, in 1919. His mind soon gave way; his family first committed him in 1922 to Barnwood House Asylum and then to the City of London Mental Hospital in Dartford. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the City of London Mental Hospital in 1937. Black Stitchel (1920) is the most successful of his nine settings of the poems of Wilfred Gibson, the Northumberland poet who moved to London in 1912, where he rented a room above Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop. Each of the four stanzas mentions a different wind: South wind for happiness, West wind for love, North wind for wrath, East wind for pity. The pastoral mood of the first two stanzas turns dark in the third by means of restless, più animato harmonies, and the music of the final lines is perhaps the most plaintive in all Gurney.

from notes by Richard Stokes © 2019