The Ballad of Ensign Joy — Reading Companion

The Ballad Form and Colloquial Voice

Hornung employs a traditional ballad meter—alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines—but infuses it with colloquial, even flippant language. The narrator uses phrases like "sick-keen to be drafted hence" and describes Ensign Joy's letters as "full of gay bloodshed and Old Man Fritz." This blend of formal structure and informal diction mirrors the poem's thematic conflict: the clash between the romanticized notion of war and its gritty reality. The narrator also inserts parenthetical asides, such as "(I would gazette them Second to none / Who faces a gun in Gaul!)" which break the fourth wall and create a conversational intimacy with the reader.

Ermyntrude: The Home Front Perspective

Ermyntrude is portrayed as a product of her environment: "the usual consanguineous squad / Had made her an honest child of God— / And left her to play the game." She reacts to Ensign Joy's letters with discomfort, finding his "tactless truth" and "grim" jokes jarring. When she learns he is wounded, she imagines "the reddening lint, / The drawn damp face and the draggled hair," only to find him "blooming in Grosvenor Square, / With a punctured shin in a splint." This gap between her imagined suffering and his actual experience highlights the disconnect between the front and the home front. Her eventual realization—seeing his name in a list of those awarded a cross—prompts a shift in her perception, as she "sank into her heart instead" of viewing him as a type.

War's Reality vs. Romantic Ideal

The poem repeatedly undercuts heroic expectations. Ensign Joy shows Ermyntrude "the bullet that did the trick" and "the trick, x-ray'd," along with a map made by an airman, but he "never mentioned a certain cross / For his part in the escapade." The narrator later reflects on the fate of young soldiers: "Cut down in his high heyday, / Or ever the Sweets of the Morning cloy, / Or the Green Leaf wither away." The final stanza addresses Ermyntrude and "many a hundred more— / Compact of foibles and fortitude— / Woo'd, won, and widow'd, in War." The poem thus acknowledges the loss and sacrifice while maintaining a tone of gallant resignation, ending with a prayer: "God, keep us gallant and undefiled, / Worthy of Husband, Lover, or —Child..."

Readers should note that the poem's catalog subject is "World War, 1914-1918 -- Poetry," but the excerpts reveal a work more focused on the emotional dynamics between a soldier and a civilian woman than on battle scenes. The poem's voice is deliberately uneven—shifting from patriotic fervor to ironic detachment—and its treatment of Ermyntrude's growth from prude to widow offers a nuanced view of wartime romance. The incomplete text prevents full assessment of the poem's resolution, but the extant stanzas suggest a meditation on the cost of war and the resilience required to bear it.