Geoffrey Dearmer

Geoffrey Dearmer Poems

Geoffrey Dearmer Biography

Geoffrey Dearmer LVO (21 March 1893 – 18 August 1996) was a British poet. He was the son of Anglican liturgist and hymnologist Percy Dearmer. During World War I, Dearmer was commissioned and served with the London Regiment at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Many of his poems dealt with the overall brutality of war and violence, to which he was a direct eyewitness. His brother Christopher, a pilot with RNAS, died of wounds in 1915, and his mother Mabel died the same year while serving with an ambulance unit in Serbia. One of his most famous poems is "The Turkish Trench Dog". He was appointed a Lieutenant in the Royal Victorian Order (LVO). Dearmer died at the age of 103. The Geoffrey Dearmer Award for new poets was founded in his memory in 1997.)

The Best Poem Of Geoffrey Dearmer

The Turkish Trench Dog

Night held me as I crawled and scrambled near
The Turkish lines. Above, the mocking stars
Silvered the curving parapet, and clear
Cloud-latticed beams o'erflecked the land with bars;
I, crouching, lay between
Tense-listening armies peering through the night,
Twin giants bound by tentacles unseen
Here in dim-shadowed light
I saw him, as a sudden movement turned
His eyes towards me, glowing eyes that burned
A moment ere his snuffling muzzle found
My trail; and then as serpents mesmerise
He chained me with those unrelenting eyes,
That muscle-sliding rhythm, knit and bound
In spare-limbed symmetry, those perfect jaws
And soft-approaching pitter-patter paws.
Nearer and nearer like a wolf he crept —
That moment had my swift revolver leapt —
But terror seized me, terror born of shame
Brought flooding revelation. For he came
As one who offers comradeship deserved,
An open ally of the human race,
And sniffling at my prostrate form unnerved
He licked my face!

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