Long before Ivor Gurney’s later confinement in mental hospitals, he was a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment, writing poems and music from the trenches of the First World War. He enlisted in 1915 and served on the Western Front, so the dug-outs, parapets, and sentry duty in “Solace of Men” come directly from lived experience. Yet the poem looks away from shellfire and toward a soldier’s quietest companion: tobacco. Written during the war and shaped by Gurney’s own service, the sonnet treats a small daily habit as a serious means of psychological survival.
The title announces comfort shared among men, and the opening line makes that comfort physical before it becomes emotional: “Sweet smelling, sweet to handle, fair of hue.” Tobacco is praised through scent, touch, and sight. The repeated word “sweet” works like a small comfort in itself, a word the speaker can turn over on the tongue. The soldier takes it “as friend,” whether its smoke rises in a low dug-out or is slipped surreptitiously to the parapet on a frosty night. Those details root the poem in trench routine. Yet the smoke does more than distract; it stays hunger, stills fear, and becomes “the stuff of dreams.” In that dreaming, a man may find “all that was ever sweet to his starved mind.” The central idea is not that tobacco solves anything: it opens a doorway from present deprivation to remembered richness.
The poem is a fourteen-line sonnet, but Gurney keeps its structure supple. The expected iambic pulse carries the lines forward, while the rhyme scheme loosens in the sestet, as though the verse itself drifts with the smoke. Rhymes like “hue,” “blue,” and “anew” bind colour, smoke, and renewal through sound, while the more conversational “everywhere” and “share” keep the diction close to speech. The enjambment at “surreptitiously to / Parapet” half-hides the act in the same way a sentry hides the cigarette. The turn arrives at line nine, “For from that incense grows the stuff of dreams,” where the word “incense” quietly redefines the cigarette as something almost sacred.
Gurney’s imagery moves from close, cramped darkness to a sudden panoramic memory. In the octave, we are inside the dug-out or out on a “rimy night,” where the smoke is a “fragrant wreath” barely visible in cold air. The cold outward setting of sentry duty makes the remembered landscape feel warmer by contrast. Then the sestet opens outward: “dear friends, hills, horses, trees, / Slopes of brown ploughland, sunset’s fading gleams.” The plain list is deliberate, as if memory arrives in simple beloved objects, and the dash before it mimics the moment a drowsing soldier slips from trench reality into home. Words like “starved,” “denied,” and “drowsing” insist that this comfort answers a real hunger—not only for food but for the landscapes and affections war has taken away. The final line balances “bane of care” against “spur to memories,” making tobacco both a relief and an ignition point for remembering.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to treat comfort as trivial. Many war poems confront violence, grief, or patriotic illusion; Gurney instead records how a soldier’s mind survives hour by hour. A cigarette cannot stop the war, but it can keep a man in contact with the self he was before it. By turning smoke into “the spur to memories,” Gurney suggests that memory is not a mere escape but a quiet resistance to the erasing force of the trenches. That small, private act becomes, in his hands, a universal portrait of endurance.