John Howlett looks at the life and work of Jeffrey Day, the most important poet of air in the First World War
It is easy to see why Jeffrey Day has fallen into obscurity. Although dying when barely out of his second decade did not make him unique amongst War Poets – Charles Hamilton Sorley and Sidney Keyes were younger still at 20 – Day’s output was decidedly slender, consisting of only a dozen poems, published retrospectively as Poems and Rhymes (1919) at the behest of his friend Edward Hilton Young who also contributed a short memoir. To this day the book has never been reprinted and, by the author’s own admission, its contents were formative, ‘full of half-grasped impressions, like a small bag packed tight with young eels.’ Despite some recent local interest surrounding Day and his brother Ivor, he remains therefore a forgotten figure, frequently overlooked in literary accounts and anthologies of the period.
However, what marks Day out as significant in the history of First World War poetry is that unlike his poetic peers who were all infantrymen, he instead served as a pilot in the Royal Naval Air Service. Indeed, he was obsessed with aviation to the point that it was rumoured he composed his verses whilst airborne, and he therefore holds the honour of being the first poet to attempt to capture the sensations of flying. Although others since have staked a claim in the field – Yeats’s ‘Irish Airmen Foresees his Death’ touches on the subject as does some of the work of John Pudney – only John Magee is comparable in crafting verses drawn from his own experiences as a pilot.
Day joined the Royal Navy in 1915 straight from Repton school. He received his Aviator’s Certificate in the same year and became skilled in many of the complexities surrounding the still nascent discipline of piloting. Initially based in Harwich aboard the seaplane carrier Vindex, Day’s ability as an aviator quickly saw him transferred to the light cruiser Casandra as sole airmen and navigator. Following a brief stint on an experimental air station (RNAS Kingsnorth), his wish to see action was granted when he was posted to No. 13 Squadron RNAS based at Dunkirk in December 1917. Over the next two months he scored five victories in his Sopwith Camel, including when on reconnaissance at 18000 feet. Such feats of derring-do earned him a promotion to Flight Commander:
‘…his best pleasure, fine craftsman that he was, was not in the mere animal exhilaration of the fights, it was in the art and craft of them. He dwelt most upon how good it was to have to think in a flash about all the different things that there were to do and to invent in mid-flight new measures for new crises. That was I suppose the hall-mark of his genius as an airman’ (Young in Poems and Rhymes, 24).
Even an airman as skilled and brave as Day was bound however in the end to run out of fortune and, on February 27th, 1918, he was shot down at sea by six German aircraft which he had, typically, engaged singlehandedly. According to his commanding officer:
‘He hit the enemy and they hit his machine, which burst into flames; but, not a bit flurried, he nose-dived, flattened out, and landed perfectly on the water. He climbed out of his machine and waved his fellow-pilots back to their base’ (Ibid, 8).
A search was made for him over the next few hours but, despite a hope that he may have been taken prisoner by a German submarine, no trace of his body was ever found.
Day’s short life was lived in a cavalier and devil-may-care fashion, and it is perhaps therefore surprising that his poetic tastes were far from catholic, with his own poems being clearly indebted to a more conservative Georgian ethic. Stylistically they broke little ground, lacking as they did the Modernist inflections of Rosenburg or the mature ambivalence of Sorley.
Nevertheless, what matters most in respect of Day is his subject matter, notably his attempts to capture the sights and, above all, visceral feelings of being in the air. There was a precedent to this type of writing. Only fifteen years earlier W.E. Henley had written an encomium to the motorcar (‘A Song of Speed’) whose energy he believed was set to usher in a new age of being, with speed being seen as one of the virtues of the incumbent century. Day’s paeans to aviation, whilst equally celebratory, were however infinitely more subtle. For example, although describing ‘a mighty rushing sound’, ‘the sweeping glide’ and ‘the wire’s low hum’, these were not poems written to honour the achievement of flying, still less the brutal beauty of its mechanics. Rather, the plane as Day saw it was a means for transitioning from the terrestrial realm (ground) to the celestial (sky), from the earthly to the Godly, with an exhilaration of experience that had been missing from its more sedate precursor – the hot air balloon.
Within Day there lurked a Romantic yearning for the solace afforded by nature, cut adrift from the corrupting effects of civilization, and he saw flying as a means by which to achieve such a state of isolation:
‘Have you ever sat in crystal space, enjoying the sensations
of an eagle hovered high above the earth,
gazing down on man’s ridiculous and infantile creations
and judging them according to their worth?’ (‘The Call of the Air’, lines 1-4)
In later reducing London to a ‘grey smudge’ and soldiers to ‘khaki maggot[s]’ Day was making clear his own feelings of disdain for the world made by Man and anticipates in the process something of Yeats’s airmen’s ‘lonely tumult of delight’.
For Day the cockpit therefore became a means of escape from earthly bonds and its seclusion enabled him to re-imagine the rural world of his own childhood, much of which had been spent in the small town of St. Ives, Cambridgeshire:
‘There sturdy, sad-eyed fenmen toil,
tilling the heavy, rich-brown soil;
a land where the grey heron breeds,
and wild fowl paddle in the reeds;
a land of molten, golden reds,
of ripening corn, and osier beds.’ (‘An Airman’s Dream’, lines 59-65)
The influence of Rupert Brooke’s earlier poem ‘Grantchester’ is here keenly felt. Memories of his life in St. Ives also provided the backdrop by which Day was to commemorate his brother Ivor, five years older than Jeffery and a talented oarsman whilst at Cambridge, who had been previously killed in 1915. The poem ‘To my Brother’, the latter part of which had been published in The Spectator, is an especially tender piece and perhaps Day’s best, drawing as it did once again upon Day’s recollections of nature, as well as shared boyhood experiences:
‘I’ll wander through the snow-encrusted land,
following the tracks of hare and stoat, and traces
of bird and beast, as delicate as laces,
doing again the things that we held dear,
keeping thy gracious spirit ever near…’ (‘To my Brother’, lines 70-74)
There are two great ironies to Day’s life and work; first, that such closely rendered observations of the world came to him as he soared many hundreds of feet above ground. Second, that the thing most celebrated in his work – the experience of flying – was to be that which ultimately lead to his death.
Before he was killed, Day had made plans to write a book about flying (notes for which were included in the collection of his Poems) and it is likely that he would have made a fine prose writer. By contrast, as a poet his output was (understandably) too slim to mean he can be regarded as anything more than a minor figure and footnote. However, his interest in flying and his exploitation of its technology to give, in all senses, new perspectives – in much the same way as the artist Peter Lanyon was to do forty years later – means he deserves a sympathetic contemporary reading. In that vein, perhaps the last word should reside with the tribute carried by The Spectator upon receiving news of his death:
‘He was born at St. has, Hunts, of a family that has lived for generations by the Ouse, and his boyhood was passed in the company of the river. It was his path into the kingdom of imagination: it led him to poetry through the loveliness and homeliness of its colours, lights, and sounds, by day and night’ (The Spectator, April 6th, 1918).