The British War Poets

Ivor Gurney

"The First Time In"

This poem reminds me of "Man's Search for Meaning," a book written by holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.  As a psychologist, Frankl developed logo-therapy.  Unlike Adler's "will to power" and Freud's "will to pleasure," Frankl believed that finding meaning in one's life is the main driving force.  Frankl used his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp as anecdotal evidence.  He described how people seemed to become numb to the atrocities of the camps.  To Frankl, this wasn't a numbing effect at work but was due to the driving force to extract some meaning from one's experiences.  Utilizing this trait, people are often capable of coping with unimaginable trauma.  This theme is evident in "The First Time In" in which Gurney describes the joyful experiences of camaraderie in war and the sounds of the Welsh soldiers singing their songs to cope beneath the sounds of firing weapons.
Gurney recounts that:
"...boys gave us kind welcome,
So that we looked out as from the edge of home,
Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions
To human hopeful things.  And the next day's guns
Nor any line-pangs ever quite could blow out
That strangely beautiful entry to war's rout;"

In the throes of tremendous fear and violence, Gurney was able to find some solace in simple joys.
The poem is seventeen lines long in a single stanza.  The rhyming scheme is as follows;
A
A
B
B
C
C
D
D
and so on.
This scheme fragments the poem into a series of quick two-line rhymes when read aloud.  This is not a lyrical structure or traditional.  His word choice and use of grammar and punctuation are quite casual; as of someone writing a letter home to his mother.