|
The Poems of Wilfred Owen
The review of Owen's poetry which
follows was recently republished by the Guardian in one of their "Centenary"
supplements looking at the 20th century decade by decade as it appeared in the pages of
that newspaper.
Owen is so much enmeshed in the
overall image of the Great War that it is difficult to remember that there was a time when
few people had heard of him. Thus the review published on December 29th, 1920, just over
two years after his death is fascinating as a record of someone's first experience of
reading the poems. I don't yet know who the reviewer "CP" was, but it is not
impossible that he had been through similar experiences to Owen.
Sassoon, who edited the poems
wanted the work to speak for itself, and refused to give any but the briefest details of
the poet; which made him rather like the Unknown Warrior whose image and personality and
identity could change depending on who was talking or thinking about him.
Geoff Dyer, in The
Missing of the Somme, makes a very pertinent point:
To a nation stunned by grief
the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking from the
other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the shadow cast by the dead over
England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the
medium through whom the missing spoke.
Poems. By Wilfred
Owen. London: Chatto and Windus. Pp. ix. 33. 6s. net.
Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, MC., an
officer of the Manchester Regiment, was killed in action on the Sambre Canal a week before
the Armistice, aged 25. The twenty-three poems of this collection are the fruit of
not quite two years' active service, less than half of it in the field. But they are
enough to rank him among the very few war poets whose work has more than a passing value.
Others have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended the roselight and romance of
it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted nor such sternly just and justly
stern judgment on the idyllisers. To him the sight and sound of a man gassed suffice to
give the lie to "dulce et decorum" and the rest of it. The atrophy that he damns
is not that of the men who fought -
having seen all things red,
The eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever;
it is the atrophy of those who
"by choice...made themselves immune from
What ever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.
If he glorifies the soldiers - and he
does, gloriously - it is as victim, not as victor; not as the hero achieving, but as one
whose sacrificial love passes the love of women:
O Live, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead...
Heart, you were never hot,
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot:
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.
His verse, as he says in his preface,
is all of the pity of war, and "except in the pity" there is no poetry. But it
is a heroic exception, for the pity gets itself into poetry in phrases which are not the
elegant chasing of ineffectual silver, but the vital unbeautiful beauty of unwashed gold.
It is the poetry of pain, searing and
piercing to pity; it is the poetry of the Tragic Muse, whose visage, though "marred
more than any man", is yet transfigured in the sorrow of song. He has revealed the
soul of the soldier as no one else has revealed it, not because his vision of the
externals was less vivid and cleaving, but because to that vision he added an imagination
of the heart that tnade him sure of his values:
...except you share
With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare,
And heaven but has the highway for a shell.
You shalt not hear their mirth:
You shall not come to think them well contents
By any jest of mind. These men are worth
Your tears: you are not worth their merriment.
Irony his poetry has, and grim
humour; but the Spirit of the Pities always breathes through the hutnour and the irony and
keeps their bitterness sweet. Sometimes, as in "Mental Cases", the pain is too
poignant even for pity, and moves only to the anger of despair; but more often the anger
gives place to a beneficent impulse, as in "Strange Meeting" the first and one
of the finest of his poems:
Then, when much blood had clogged
their chariot wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
This poem happens also to be a good
example of a technical innovation that is rather puzzling. Enough has been quoted to show
that Owen uses traditional metres and rhymes, but, as here, he also uses, and uses
throughout the poem, a device which is neither rhyme nor assonance. It is not assonance
because the vowels are different, and in any case it could not be rhyme, because the
initial consonants are alike: "spoiled - spilled, "laughed - left",
"grained - ground". It looks like a subtly contrived escape from tonal
completeness, a calculated deflection from the kindred points of heaven and home, which
are rhymes, lest the musical significant should soften the conscious starkness of his
treatment. But the result gain is more than doubtful. The thing affects you as the
baffling elusiveness of a fugitive pun, or the half-foiled meeting of two stanzas of a
sestina; and just because of the baffling and the foiling it fails in its artistic
purpose. It is significant that it is not used in his greatest poems, such as
"Apologia pro Poemate Meo" and "Greater Love"; and one cannot help
feeling that, fine as it is, "Strange Meeting" would have been finer without it.
This trick apart, Owen uses words with the poet's questing instinct for the heart of
things and his homing instinct for the heart of man. His work will not easily die.
 |
You can now hear an account
of Wilfred Owen's death, and the tragic irony of the circumstances
in which his parents received the dreaded telegram, together with
a reading of Strange Meeting - either in RealAudio
or Windows Media format |
Poetry Contents Page
|
Recent Additions
