war poetry and the realm of the senses ‘The Sentry’, where vision, through proximity, assumes a threatening physicality:
‘eye-balls,huge-bulged like squids’,|Watch my dreams still’.^42 Similarly, Gurney,
in ‘To His Love’, is haunted by that ‘red wet|Thing’ that he somehow must—and
cannot—‘forget’.^43 On the other extreme lies the anaesthesia, the ‘insensibility’ of
those who ‘cease feeling|Even themselves or for themselves’.^44 One is reminded
of Septimus’s lack of feeling at the time of Evans’s death in Woolf’sMrs Dalloway
(1925), or of Stanhope in Sherriff’sJourney’s End(1929). In the letter narrating
the traumatic death of his servant Jones, Owen momentarily envisages such a
condition—‘I cannot say I suffered anything, having let my brain go dull’—but
soon he adds—‘I shall feel again as soon as I dare’.^45 Here lies the strange double
bind for the war poet: poetry and aesthetics, by their very nature, are mired in feeling
and in the senses, and the soldier-poet thus must at once experience traumatic
reliving and creative ecstasy, retrieving and modifying the original experience
through language. I shall briefly concentrate on three poems in each of which Owen
pushes both sense experience and language to their limits—a gas attack, prolonged
exposure to frost, and finally an offensive.
Consider ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, which he referred to as ‘a gas poem’,^46 the title
intended as an ironic allusion to Horace:
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 lame went; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, out-stripped 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 you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,(^42) Owen, ‘The Sentry’, ibid. 188.
(^43) Ivor Gurney, ‘To His Love’, inCollected Poems, ed. P. J. Kavanagh (Manchester: Carcanet,
2004), 21. 44
45 Owen, ‘Insensibility’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 145.
46 Owen to Siegfried Sassoon, 10 Oct. 1918, inCollected Letters, 581.
Owen to Susan Owen, n.d. [?16 Oct. 1917], inCollected Letters, 499.