"...the true poets must be truthful." Wilfred Owen

Re: "...the true poets must be truthful." Wilfred
Powerful poem, Endy. It strikes me as being the distilled version of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.

Hello, xprmntr2

Thanks for posting. I'm just sitting here sipping a beer and thought I'd write back.

I've only recently seen the 1979 film version of All Quiet On The Western Front. A gutting ending. The book is on my list, along with several others I know I need to catch up on.

I was brought up on a different perception of war. I actually believed that the films adults showed me were reality... filmed. (John Wayne puffing up a beach, trying to light his cigar type of stuff).
What I sense from Owen when I read Dulce Et Decorum Est, is (amongst other things) polite rage. (An oxymoron if I'm not mistaken.) I think it would make an apt title for a poem in Owen's honour. Polite Rage. Yes, I like it. But you know what? I don't have the courage to try it.

There's a lot of courage gone into Dulce Et Decorum Est

What I can't help wondering is, after 37,466,904* men had become casualties of an unbelievably horrific war, after the evidence of suffering came to light, after Dulce Et Decorum Est, - why would anyone in their right mind want to portray war in such a way as to continue to tell the old lie?

*http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/resources/casdeath_pop.html

Peace,
E

The WWI poets are underrated. Thomas Hardy wrote a poem I like called "Channel Firing," that anticipates the war, though it is not part of the genre. I'm too lazy right now to find it and post it. Sorry.

On Dulce et Decorum est: a professor pointed out how the "ecstasy of fumbling" is a darkly ironic line. It's a romantic line that alludes to what young men would ideally be doing (sex!) in a time of peace, but here the context is quite grim.
A good teacher he was.

The book I tried to read in high school and once or twice later; lethally boring. Recently, though, I saw the first version of the film (from the 40's?), which was really moving (even though in some cases a bit melodramatic, but overall, nonetheless effective).



Go ahead, End, there's a "scratch pad" thread for poetry that E.B. started ("Spontaneous Poems"). Nobody will criticize you there; everybody knows it's a workout area. (You can go see the little ditty I left; nothing to write home about.)

And yes, unlike the "art" of the past 4 decades, where rage simply shrieks across the screen (or the page or the stage), Owen still practices the true craft: forging the rage into a disciplined work.



I don't think they have anymore since 'Nam.

Thanks for the spontaneous Poems tip, xprmntr2. I shall have a look with interest.

You said, "Owen still practices the true craft: forging the rage into a disciplined work."

Well put. I cannot detect any self-pity in Dulce Et Decorum Est. I think that is what makes it so vivid. It's about men struggling to survive - not give up.

Oh, and I think I might cross from my list the book you 'tried to read' in High School (another good tip). Thanks.

Peace,
Endy

Thanks for your post, Gargamel

Found this interesting:

[quote="Gargamel"
On Dulce et Decorum est: a professor pointed out how the "ecstasy of fumbling" is a darkly ironic line. It's a romantic line that alludes to what young men would ideally be doing (sex!) in a time of peace, but here the context is quite grim.
A good teacher he was.[/quote]

I'm no expert of course, but I've always admired Owen's use of the word "ecstasy", and seen it as a way of describing the long, drawn-out moment. "An ecstasy of fumbling". Even the word itself is long and drawn out.
(numb fingers fumbling with straps and webbing, while the body copes with an overdose of adrenaline - making the delicate operation excruciatingly difficult).

Ecstasy is linked to pain, in as much as one can produce the other.
(When in pain, the human body produces natural endorphins to give relief. And you can get high on it.) Also, fear produces similar physical symptoms as ecstasy, such as racing heart and raised adrenaline.

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.

I'm not trying to be clever or prove a point here - I'm new to poetry and open to theory, but given Owen's homosexual tendencies (for which he could have been imprisoned), and the serious subject matter, I can't see it your teacher's way.
Although I can see where the idea might come from:

" An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time"
Does conjure up an image of first attempts at safe sex.

but only since you mentioned it!

:wink:
Peace,
E

I remember this poem well from KS3 English... Hit me pretty hard back then

Me too.

It's a brilliant powerful poem that should be learnt by all boys at school - particularly those that have illusions about what war/the army are like.

Owen died there in that horror along with how many other talents lost?

The Man He Killed

'Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

'But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

'I shot him dead because -
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

'He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like - just as I -
Was out of work - had sold his traps -
No other reason why.

'Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.'

Thomas Hardy

Good one Nick. Here's another Hardy war poem:

Channel Firing

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, "No;
It's gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

"All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

"That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them's a blessed thing,
For if it were they'd have to scour
Hell's floor for so much threatening ....

"Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need)."

So down we lay again. "I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,"
Said one, "than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!"

And many a skeleton shook his head.
"Instead of preaching forty year,"
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
"I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Great contributions.
There is some amazing war poetry around.
Glad to see the old thread being used!

Endy

The Rear-Guard
(HINDENBURG LINE, APRIL 1917)
(from Counter-Attack) - Siegfried Sassoon

GROPING along the tunnel, step by step,
He winked his prying torch with patching glare
From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know;
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;
And he, exploring fifty feet below
The rosy gloom of battle overhead.

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw some one lie
Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,
And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug.
'I'm looking for headquarters.' No reply.
'God blast your neck!' (For days he'd had no sleep,)
'Get up and guide me through this stinking place.'

Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,
And flashed his beam across the livid face
Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore
Agony dying hard ten days before;
And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

Alone he staggered on until he found
Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair
To the dazed, muttering creatures underground
Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.
At last, with sweat of horror in his hair,
He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,
Unloading hell behind him step by step.

Assault on Bellau Wood
by
Frank Schoonover

Does it Matter?
(from Counter-Attack) Siegfried Sassoon

DOES it matter?--losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter?--losing your sight?...
There's such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter?--those dreams from the pit?...
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you're mad;
For they'll know you've fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.

Trench Warfare
by
Otto Dix

Wilfed Owen

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.

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This is a very great poem, in my humble opinion.

The General

'Good-morning; good-morning!' the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
'He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack...
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.


Siegfried Sassoon


***************************************************


Suicide in the Trenches



I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again...
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.


Siegfried Sassoon

***********************************************

Exposure had a big effect on me the first time I read it -
and still does. The last few lines especially.
I'm glad to come back to Wilfred Owen.




Exposure

I

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us...
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent...
Low, drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient...
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
But nothing happens.

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,
Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
What are we doing here?

The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow...
We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray,
But nothing happens.

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.
Less dealy than the air that shudders black with snow,
With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew,
We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,
But nothing happens.

II

Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces -
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow dazed,
deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
Littered with blossoms trickling where the black-bird fusses.

Is it that we are dying?

Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed
With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,
We turn back to our dying.

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.
For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid;
Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,
For love of God seems dying.

Tonight, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,
Shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp,
The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens.


Wilfred Owen


**************************************

In June 1916 Wilfred Owen was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Manchester Regiment, and in late December he was posted to France where he arrived on New year's Day 1917.

In the second week of January he was leading a group of men who were tasked to hold an abandoned enemy dug-out in no-man's land. They were there, up to their knees in mud, for over two days and one of the soldiers on sentry duty was blinded in a shell attack. In May Owen was badly concussed in an explosion. His Commanding Officer ordered him to report to the Battalion Medical Officer who diagnosed Owen as having neurasthenia ('shell shock'). He was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh in June.

The medical staff encouraged him to write poetry, and it was also at Craiglockhart that he met the established poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was impressed by Owen's work and gave him advice. It was at this time that Owen wrote his best-known poem, Dulce et Decorum Est. It is a graphic account of the horrors of trench warfare, and a condemnation of those who know nothing of war but who encourage boys to become "heroes". His experience in the trenches had completely changed his attitude to war.

In June 1918 he was passed fit for service and he rejoined his regiment. When asked to explain his decision to return to the Front Line, he explained:

"I came out in order to help these boys-- directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them."

He returned to France as a company commander and took part in an attack on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme Line at Joncourt, for which he was recommended for the award of a Military Cross. On November 4 he was leading an attempt to take the Sambre-Oise canal when his group came under machine gun fire. Owen was killed. News of his death reached his family in England one week later, on November 11 1918. That same day the armistice ending the war was signed.