Owen's Haunting Flares

With any and every encounter, it seems, Owen's poems get emblazoned in my consciousness. I'm always moved so deeply by those bugles "calling ... from sad shires" and by that "drawing-down of blinds" at "each slow dusk" in "Anthem for Doomed Youth." How poignant it is, too, to see this postcard Owen wrote to his mom to let her know (in code) that he was about to be transferred to the front lines. And then "Dulce et Decorum est," wow. Fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon noted that "it was Owen who revealed how, out of realistic horror and scorn, poetry might be made." That's an interesting notion: how does one take such gritty realism, such disturbing imagery and detail, such "sludge," "fatigue" and "cud," and make elevated poetry out of it? What an utterly compelling and haunting depiction of exhaustion and weariness at the beginning of "Dulce," isn't it? -- with that herd-like movement of the men who no longer have eyes to see what's around them (and, indeed, the reference to them being "all blind" -- figuratively, certainly, but maybe almost literally, too (as I think Brittani mentioned at one point) -- might make us think of Marlow's lost vision amidst the fog in Heart of Darkness). The fatigue is so palpable that even the "Five-Nines," the artillery shells fired by the Germans at the fleeing soldiers, are themselves "tired" and "outstripped" (l.8). And then those frantic wake-up calls of "Gas! Gas!" as the reality of war's violence reaches a new stage with the gas attack in the second stanza.

Speaking of the reality of war's violence, it was hoped that the new phenomenon in war poetry -- its graphic, gruesome, and utterly realistic qualities -- would somehow have a practical effect in changing our behavior (remember the God of "Channel Firing" indicting humankind for making "red war yet redder"). I always think of Randall Jarrell's (1914-1965) tiny but potent war poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." It's a brilliant poem about the airmen who would hang out of B52 bombers to provide cover fire for bombing runs. The protest is more compacted and subtle than it is in Owen's poem, but it's assuredly there (e.g., "I fell into the State" -- like leaving the protective womb of the mother and being claimed by the machinery and institutional power of the State, only to become utterly expendable and dehumanized, a nameless casualty of war who callously gets "washed ... out of the turret with a hose").The painful callousness in the last line ("When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose") captures the grim reality that one didn't tend to survive more than a couple weeks in this role before they had to wipe down the plane and get the next guy in there.

I think, too, of the soldiers writing poems and letters and journals out in those deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's obviously important that the general public reads this kind of testimony. Being able to write in this way and to turn the experience into art may be a way, at least partially, for some soldiers and veterans to transmute their trauma and other difficult emotions into something more manageable. 

I remember a very powerful and moving article in the New Yorker some years ago (2006, I think), called "Soldiers' Stories," that assembled a selection of letters, emails, journal entries, personal essays etc. from soldiers in Iraq (in fact, I keep a photocopy of part of the article in my Wilfred Owen notes for class). One soldier writes to his mother thusly:

"The worst thing here is not the searing heat or the cold nights. It’s the waiting. Waiting for the wind to stop blowing and the sand to quit grinding against your skin. Waiting for a moment of privacy in a tent packed with seventy other men, in a camp packed with seven hundred other tents, in a base packed with fifteen thousand soldiers, all looking for a clean place to go to the bathroom… Waiting for the bone-rattling coughs from dust finer than powdered sugar to stop attacking you lungs. Waiting for the generals to order the battalion to move north, toward Tikrit, where others—Iraqis—are also waiting; waiting for us."

All of this traces back to Wilfred Owen, as do the lyrics to a song like Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." We are only recently removed from the one-hundred year anniversary of the action of the Great War, the war to end all wars (or so it was hoped at the time). You might want to look at this recent article in The Economist, which reflects on WW I as "the defining event of the twentieth century." We'll return to the Great War in the middle section ("Time Passes") of To the Lighthouse, which turns the novel, unexpectedly, into an unconventional war novel.