Ivor Gurney wrote “Contrasts” from the trenches of the First World War, and it appeared in his 1917 collection *Severn & Somme*. A poet and composer from Gloucestershire, Gurney belonged to the landscape he names—the Malvern Hills, the Cotswold stone cottages, the Severn riverside at Minsterworth and Framilode. His war poetry is distinctive for the way it lets that landscape enter the soldier’s mind not as simple nostalgia but as a kind of wound: the more beautiful the memory, the more unbearable the present becomes.
The poem opens on a conditional note: “If I were on the High Road / That runs to Malvern Town,” the speaker imagines, he would not need distractions to keep fear at bay. Even watching the clouds and the “shadows dappling” the land would be enough. The word “drown” arrives early, attached to the fear of death, and it leaks into the rhythm—each six-line stanza moves between longer, looser lines and short rhyming ones, as though the poem itself keeps catching its breath. The second, fourth and sixth lines of each stanza chime together, often with a soft, folk-song cadence: Town, drown, down; holes, moles, souls. That musicality is deeply Gurney; he hears the verse as a composer would.
Then the conditional snaps into the present: “But here the shells rush over, / We lie in evil holes.” The men “burrow into darkness / Like rabbits or like moles,” reduced to animal digging. Yet Gurney immediately restores their humanity: “Men that have breathed the Severn air, / Men that have eyes and souls.” The repetition insists on what is being wasted. The rhyme of “moles” and “souls” is quiet but devastating—it links the burrowing body with the thing war cannot entirely bury.
The central paradox arrives mid-poem when the speaker notices that even at the front, on certain days, “the grass runs over / With ripples like the sea.” Men can stand and drink the air, “easy and sweet and free.” But instead of offering relief, such days are “half a curse,” because they make the contrast unbearable. “Beauty troubles me,” Gurney writes, and that single plain sentence is the poem’s emotional core. Beauty is no escape; it is a reminder of all that has been lost.
He then projects himself home with startling specificity. The shadows under the orchards at Minsterworth and Framilode “must be as clear and black” as if the soldiers had all come back to haymaking, tedding, piling the yellow stack. The word “must” matters: he is not seeing these places, he is reasoning his way toward them, rebuilding them from memory. The gardens on the Cotswold hills, the “grey-stone cottage colours,” are “lovely to the sight— / As we were glad for dreams there, / Slept deep at home at night.” The dash after “sight” leaves the comparison hovering between past and present.
The final stanza returns to the here and now: “While here we die a dozen deaths / A score of times a day.” This is not literal death but the repeated terror of it, and the effort of endurance—trying “to keep up heart and not / To give ourselves away.” The poem ends with the hollow promises soldiers pass among themselves: “Two years longer,” “Peace to-morrow,” “Some time yet,” they say! The exclamation mark is not hope but exasperation. What makes “Contrasts” significant is its refusal to let memory console. Gurney’s beloved landscape does not save him; it sharpens the pain of being alive in a place where beauty can still appear but cannot be trusted.