“I timidi fiori del cuore e della mente”: Verses of a V.A.D.

Vera Brittain’s Verses of a V.A.D. belongs to the war poetry genre, a predominantly male domain, and presents the reader with the thoughts of a volunteer nurse during the First World War. Not only have the emotions evoked by the verbal images of the poems in this collection marked the life of the British writer, but they also represent the feelings of many women who found themselves in similar situations and could not or did not know how to give voice to their sorrow. Through the selection of some poems, also translated in Italian, the present paper aims to explore a woman’s experience during the Great War. The dialectic life/death is reflected in the verses of the author who uses the art of poetry as a tool for mourning when deprived of her loved ones. Through poems characterized by an essential style, a simple vocabulary and brief verses, Vera Brittain puts on paper her sorrow in “shy flowers of the heart and the mind”; poems that bear witness to the passing away of many lives and to the hope to survive in a present burdened with so many losses.