Sorley, Charles Hamilton

(1895-1915)

   Born in Aberdeen, he was the son of William Ritchie Sorley, professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen University, who later became Knightbridge professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University and a fellow of King's College. Charles was educated at Marlborough College, Wiltshire, where he developed the passion for cross-country running. His poetry-which started when he published the poem "The Tempest" at the age of ten, influenced by the work of John Masefield (see entry) and the stunning Wiltshire countryside. One of his most accomplished schoolboy poems is "The River," based on an actual suicide. He enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment and was in France by May 1915. He was killed by a sniper's bullet and buried where he fell. He is memo368 rialized by a stone in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey along with other poets of the First World War. Some of his poems: "A Tale of Two Careers," "Autumn Dawn," "Rooks," "The Seekers," "The Song of the Ungirt Runners," "To Germany," "Two Songs from Ibsen's Dramatic Poems," "Two Sonnets," "Whom Therefore We Ignorantly Worship."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Marlborough and Other Poems of Charles Hamilton Sorley. Cambridge University Press, 1916. Never Such Innocence: A New Antholog y of Great War Verse. Martin Stephen, ed. Buchan and Enright, 1988. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Home Book of Modern Verse. Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed. Henry Holt, 1953. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).