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THE WHITE CLIFFS
Alice Duer Miller (1874-1942)
This week, as a reflection of my fondness for the English, those ever faithful friends of the United States who are once again fighting and dying side by side with Americans in a foreign land, I thought I'd run excerpts from Alice Duer Miller's classic poem about a war-time romance and marriage between a young American girl and a British aristocrat in the months before he ships out to die in World War I.
This was a reasonably popular work when it was first published in August 22, 1940. In the almost 16 months between its first publication and Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, there were eight printings with a total run of 40,000. After the Japanese attack, sales soared. And by the time my 34th edition was published in August 1944, as the war in Europe raged, the little blue 70-page book with its 1100 lines of poetry had sold over 300,000 copies in the United States and an additional 300,000-plus in "England and the Dominions." In that year, a movie based on the poem was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography. It starred Irene Dunne, Alan Marshall, Frank Morgan, and Peter Lawford. A young Elizabeth Taylor appeared in the film also.
This is a great read. In fact, it is a shame to run just a few lines from it, for it covers a long period in the life of the heroine, from her first sighting of the white cliffs of Dover as a very young American girl just before the outbreak of World War I, her romance, marriage, a tearful good-bye, the birth of a son, the news of the death of her husband, the long, difficult war years living with her husband's mother, and finally sending her son off to World War II, to follow in the footsteps of her long-dead husband.
As the faded dust jacket of my old copy states, quoting from an editorial in the New York Times, dated August 24, 1942, "hundreds of thousands have read [Miller's] verses or heard them broadcast, and as a result have been able more easily to comprehend the emotional and intellectual bonds that tie this country with England." Please enjoy.
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The White Cliffs
I have loved England, dearly and deeply,
Since that first morning, shining and pure,
The white cliffs of Dover I saw rising steeply
Out of the sea that once made her secure.
I had no thought then of husband or lover,
I was a traveller, the guest of a week;
Yet when they pointed 'the white cliffs of Dover',
Startled I found there were tears on my cheek.
I have loved England, and still as a stranger,
Here is my home and I still am alone.
Now in her hour of trial and danger,
Only the English are really her own.
It happened the first evening I was there.
Some one was giving a ball in Belgrave Square . . .
A light blue carpet on the stair
And tall young footmen everywhere,
Tall young men with English faces
Standing rigidly in their places,
Rows and rows of them stiff and staid
In powder and breeches and bright gold braid . . .
Some one beside me turned and smiled,
And looking down at me said: "I fancy,
You're Bertie's Australian cousin Nancy.
He told me to tell you that he'd be late
At the Foreign Office and not to wait
Supper for him, but to go with me,
And try to behave as if I were he."
I should have told him on the spot
That I had no cousin-that I was not
Australian Nancy-that my name
Was Susan Dunne, and that I came
From a small white town on a deep-cut bay
In the smallest state in the U.S.A.
I meant to tell him, but changed my mind-
I needed a friend, and he seemed kind;
So I put my gloved hand into his glove,
And we danced together- and fell in love . . .
The English are frosty
When you're no kith or kin
Of theirs, but how they alter
When once they take you in!
The kindest, the truest,
The best friends ever known,
It's hard to remember
How they froze you to a bone.
They showed me all London,
Johnnie and his friends;
They took me to the country
For long week-ends;
I never was so happy,
I never had such fun,
I stayed many weeks in England
Instead of just one . . .
Johnnie and I were married. England then
Had been a week at war, and all the men
Wore uniform, as English people can,
Unconscious of it. Percy, the best man,
As thin as paper and as smart as paint,
Bade us good-by with admirable restraint,
Went from the church to catch his train to hell;
And died-saving his batman from a shell . . .
We went down to Devon,
In a warm summer rain,
Knowing that our happiness
Might never come again;
I, not forgetting,
'Till death us do part,'
Was outrageously happy
With death in my heart.
Lovers in peacetime
With fifty years to live,
Have time to tease and quarrel
And question what to give;
But lovers in wartime
Better understand
The fullness of living,
With death close at hand . . .
Bad news is not broken,
By kind tactful word;
The message is spoken
Ere the word can be heard.
The eye and the bearing,
The breath make it clear,
And the heart is despairing
Before the ears hear.
I do not remember
The words that they said:
'Killed-Douai-November-'
I knew John was dead.
All done and over-
That day long ago-
The white cliffs of Dover-
Little did I know . . .
And were they not English, our forefathers, never more
English than when they shook the dust of her sod
From their feet for ever, angrily seeking a shore
Where in his own way a man might worship his God.
Never more English than when they dared to be
Rebels against her-that stern intractable sense
Of that which no man can stomach and still be free,
Writing: 'When in the course of human events. . .'
Writing it out so all the world could see
Whence come the powers of all just governments.
The tree of Liberty grew and changed and spread,
But the seed was English.
I am American bred,
I have seen much to hate here- much to forgive,
But in a world where England is finished and dead,
I do not wish to live.
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