Empty Chapel

Poems by J.R.R. Tolkien
Empty Chapel
Poem Information
Written	Between July and September of 1915
Published	The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien
Subject(s)	Army life, World War I

Empty Chapel is an unfinished war poem that was written by J.R.R. Tolkien about a lone soldier "in a silent empty chapel" who hears drums and the marching of feet coming from the forest outside.

Poem excerpt

Lo, war is in your nostrils and your heart
And burning with just anger as of old
Though stunted in dark places far from God
Though cheated and deluded and oppressed
Arise you, O ye blind and dumb to war
Come open your eyes and glorify your God
Come sing a hymn of honour to your Queen.

Background

Sometime "between late July and early September" of 1915, Tolkien likely attempted to write a poem about his early experience of army life. He wrote it in one of his poetry notebooks on four pages between The Swallow, and the Traveller on the Plains and The Pines of Aryador.

In 2024, the most significant of the fragments were published in September as entry 36 of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. According to an interview conducted by Dalya Alberge of The Guardian, Christina Scull, one of the editors of the collection, found the poem to be "very affecting".

In the introduction to The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, Empty Chapel is described as "a haunting work with a Pre-Raphaelite air" to it. In their Addenda and Corrigenda, Hammond and Scull associated the mood of the poem "with Arthurian poetry and Pre-Raphaelite art", but choose not to write this in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.

On 8 October, Joe Hoffman noted in his blog that lines 3-9 of fragment D seem to echo Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est.