Poet in Brief: Wilfred Owen

"All war poetry is antiwar poetry," said Siegfried Sassoon. He was right. As Stefan points out about Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front:

Among those who support the war in Iraq, there is a tendency to dwell on how different it is in character and scale than earlier ones. Sometimes we hear about the Bulge in these arguments; less frequently, thank God, we hear about the Peloponnesian War. The distinctions aren't much to be grateful for. Most soldiers in Iraq today could describe scenes like the ones above. This alone shouldn't force us to oppose the war, but it should force us to remember what it is.

Wilfred Owen was not your typical soldier. Sensitive, obsessed with Keats and then with Sassoon, his mentor on and off the battlefield, Owen wrote the most memorable verses about the First World War. The advent of trenches and the chemical weapon, and how these made death a matter of advanced calculus, never had more poignant expression than from Owen's pen. His death was as dramatic and heart-wrenching as his art: it occurred just a week before the Armistice at the Sambre-Oise Canal, and the only reason Owen returned to the fray after earlier being hospitalized for shell shock was to impress Sassoon, with whom he was almost certainly in love. (Owen spent some quality time with Oscar Wilde's old circle of homosexual friends, including Wilde's estate executor Robbie Ross and that great Proust translator C.K. Scott-Moncrieff.)

His most famous poem is "Dulce et Decorum Est," which was an ironic animadversion of the old Latin saying about the glory of dying for one's country. (To be fair, the Romans also invented the expression about all mothers hating war, proving that a race of centurions and gladiators had their soft sides, too.) But, personally, I think Owen's supplest stanzas are the following, from "The Greater Love":

Red lips are not so red As the stained stones kissed by the English dead. Kindness of wooed and wooer Seems shame to their love pure. O Love, your eyes lose lure When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed, Rolling and rolling there Where God seems not to care; Till the fierce Love they bear Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

Your voice sings not so soft,— Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft,— Your dear voice is not dear, Gentle, and evening clear, As theirs whom none now hear Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

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.

As you can see, the Biblical imagery — complementing the faun-like pastoralia he inherited from that fellow premature corpse, Keats — was never far from his mind either. Nor was the Freudian. If this isn't the most phallic invocation of gunnery ever committed to print, I'm St. Jerome:

Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm, Great gun towering towards Heaven, about to curse; Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse Huge imprecations like a blasting charm! Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm, And beat it down before its sins grow worse; Spend our resentment, cannon,—yea, disburse Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet, for men’s sakes whom thy vast malison Must wither innocent of enmity, Be not withdrawn, dark arm, thy spoilure done, Safe to the bosom of our prosperity. But when thy spell be cast complete and whole, May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!

"Whom thy vast malison / Must with innocent of enmity." That ranks fairly high in any chapbook of English eloquence, I'd say.

Anyway, consider this the first in a new series that will quaintly try to prove that poetry still matters.