SECOND LIEUTENANT DOUGLAS TOWRY FARRIER
ROYAL GARRISON ARTILLERY
1ST OCTOBER 1917 AGE 29
BURIED: VOORMEZEELE ENCLOSURES NO.1 AND NO.2, BELGIUM
This declaration of eternal grief comes from Swinburne's Itylus, based on the Greek legend of Aedon who accidentally kills her young daughter, Itylus, and is stricken with grief and remorse. The gods take pity on her and turn her into a nightingale. In Swinburne's poem, a nightingale sorrowfully contrasts a swallow's carefree existence, its ability to carry on its life as if nothing has happened, with its own unending heartbreak.
Many of the bereaved must have felt the same - how could the world carry on as though nothing had happened. John Oxenham (William Arthur Dunckerley 1852-1941) touched on it in his poem, To You Who Have Lost:
I know! I know!
The ceaseless ache, the emptiness, the woe, -
The pang of loss, -
The strength that sinks beneath so sore a cross,
" - Heedless and careless, still the world wags on,
And leaves me broken ... Oh, my son! my son!"
Oxenham's comfort was to tell relations:
He died the noblest death a man may die,
Fighting for God and Right and Liberty; -
And such a death is immortality.
Swinburne's nightingale received no comfort.
Douglas Farrier, the son of a sea captain, had been a Bank Clerk in civilian life. In December 1915 he married Netta Jemima Beale, it was she who chose his inscription.