Every soldier's very finest remembrancer
See just this Post & Comments / 0 Comments so far / Post a Comment / Home
Up, Down.
Every soldier's very finest remembrancer, Rex Murphy, from Saturday's Globe and Mail.
The First World War was not, as the idealists of its bitter day so fervently hoped, the war to end all wars. A war to end all wars was always a dream too large, idealism tripping over into hubris. Conflict and fanaticism are wired into our kind as inextricably as their more generous opposites, the impulses of tolerance and intelligent open-mindedness.
The First World War was, however, the great pivot in the romantic attitude toward war, the gloss of unstinted nobility, heroism and chivalry that has coated the accounts of conflict as long as there have been poets, bards and balladeers to celebrate them. The scale of the slaughter was just too vast, the squalid horrors and brutality of trench warfare too profoundly grim for the old templates to sustain.
The old and tired tropes of always brilliant commanders, always ardent warriors and perfectly noble causes could not survive the near infinite squalor and waste of the murderous stalemate of the Western Front.
Of all the warrior witnesses of the First World War, none caught this great shift more keenly than the poet Wilfred Owen. His story itself has its often-noted irony. He demonstrated conspicuous heroism, suffered the torments of what that harsh time called shell shock, was awarded the Military Cross, and was killed a bare seven days before the war ended.
But he was a real talent. He is not remembered just because of what today we call his story, the young poet wasted in the last week of the conflict to which he gave the most signature voice. He is remembered because of that signature voice. Until Wilfred Owen, English poetry treated war as a background for dalliance or a misty fable. Think of the Cavalier poets of the English Civil War with their dainty addresses to Lucasta or Corinna as, in full plume, they went off to the fight. ( “I could not love thee, Dear, so much,/ Loved I not Honour more.”) Or any lines of Tennyson's almost narcotically melancholy Morte d'Arthur.
There is nothing narcotic or dainty about Owen:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
These are the first lines of Anthem for Doomed Youth. The title itself tells us we have left the “fields of glory” school of war poetry. Nor is it written calmly in the detached comfort of the non-participant's study. No “recollection in tranquillity” here. It is the soldier's view, the first powerful voicing of the viewpoint of the common man in warfare. The scales have fallen from his eyes or, rather, blasted away by sheer horror. Owen's poetry comes from some fierce depth of his heart. It rejects the conventional, or stylized, tributes to those lost in war as being, insufficient to what they've suffered:
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
It is an amazing gift on display, to take the whine and clamour of artillery bombardment and image it as a choir – a “shrill, demented choir” but a choir nonetheless, lamenting those it has obliterated, and to blend it with the perfect pathos of the “bugles calling … from sad shires.”
Elsewhere, he pushed the physical pain of war, the suffering of the individual soldier in grim description:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue ...
“Blood-shod” is a bitter snarl even in this entirely dark, hard poem, his most famous, that wore the desperately ironic title Dulce et Decorum Est – it is sweet and proper.
Owen was bitter from the best of considerations, from a sense of utter sympathy and profoundest camaraderie with the “ordinary” soldier.
It is from that splendid sympathy that his muse caught its fire. He didn't write for the pardonable vanity of being a poet. It went much deeper. He was emphatic on this point: “Above all, I am not concerned with poetry. My subject is war and the pity of war.”
He is the very finest remembrancer of every soldier who has been in battle and, as we approach Nov. 11, there is no voice more kindly tuned to the memory of all who have fallen in any war than the man who wrote that
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime ...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
8 October 1917 - March, 1918
Two versions, slightly different ... oh well.
See also in this blog: bugles calling from sad shires.
Down.
Every soldier's very finest remembrancer, Rex Murphy, from Saturday's Globe and Mail.
The First World War was not, as the idealists of its bitter day so fervently hoped, the war to end all wars. A war to end all wars was always a dream too large, idealism tripping over into hubris. Conflict and fanaticism are wired into our kind as inextricably as their more generous opposites, the impulses of tolerance and intelligent open-mindedness.
The First World War was, however, the great pivot in the romantic attitude toward war, the gloss of unstinted nobility, heroism and chivalry that has coated the accounts of conflict as long as there have been poets, bards and balladeers to celebrate them. The scale of the slaughter was just too vast, the squalid horrors and brutality of trench warfare too profoundly grim for the old templates to sustain.
The old and tired tropes of always brilliant commanders, always ardent warriors and perfectly noble causes could not survive the near infinite squalor and waste of the murderous stalemate of the Western Front.
Of all the warrior witnesses of the First World War, none caught this great shift more keenly than the poet Wilfred Owen. His story itself has its often-noted irony. He demonstrated conspicuous heroism, suffered the torments of what that harsh time called shell shock, was awarded the Military Cross, and was killed a bare seven days before the war ended.
But he was a real talent. He is not remembered just because of what today we call his story, the young poet wasted in the last week of the conflict to which he gave the most signature voice. He is remembered because of that signature voice. Until Wilfred Owen, English poetry treated war as a background for dalliance or a misty fable. Think of the Cavalier poets of the English Civil War with their dainty addresses to Lucasta or Corinna as, in full plume, they went off to the fight. ( “I could not love thee, Dear, so much,/ Loved I not Honour more.”) Or any lines of Tennyson's almost narcotically melancholy Morte d'Arthur.
There is nothing narcotic or dainty about Owen:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
These are the first lines of Anthem for Doomed Youth. The title itself tells us we have left the “fields of glory” school of war poetry. Nor is it written calmly in the detached comfort of the non-participant's study. No “recollection in tranquillity” here. It is the soldier's view, the first powerful voicing of the viewpoint of the common man in warfare. The scales have fallen from his eyes or, rather, blasted away by sheer horror. Owen's poetry comes from some fierce depth of his heart. It rejects the conventional, or stylized, tributes to those lost in war as being, insufficient to what they've suffered:
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
It is an amazing gift on display, to take the whine and clamour of artillery bombardment and image it as a choir – a “shrill, demented choir” but a choir nonetheless, lamenting those it has obliterated, and to blend it with the perfect pathos of the “bugles calling … from sad shires.”
Elsewhere, he pushed the physical pain of war, the suffering of the individual soldier in grim description:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue ...
“Blood-shod” is a bitter snarl even in this entirely dark, hard poem, his most famous, that wore the desperately ironic title Dulce et Decorum Est – it is sweet and proper.
Owen was bitter from the best of considerations, from a sense of utter sympathy and profoundest camaraderie with the “ordinary” soldier.
It is from that splendid sympathy that his muse caught its fire. He didn't write for the pardonable vanity of being a poet. It went much deeper. He was emphatic on this point: “Above all, I am not concerned with poetry. My subject is war and the pity of war.”
He is the very finest remembrancer of every soldier who has been in battle and, as we approach Nov. 11, there is no voice more kindly tuned to the memory of all who have fallen in any war than the man who wrote that
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime ...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
8 October 1917 - March, 1918
Two versions, slightly different ... oh well.
See also in this blog: bugles calling from sad shires.
Down.
