santanu das
agony (‘My heart aches’^52 )into collective sense experience (‘Our brains ache’). Yet,
like the poem’s world of half-light (‘drooping flares’, ‘flickering gunnery’, ‘sunken
fires’), or its half-rhymes (silent/salient, wearied/worried, snow-dazed/sun-dozed),
or the half-known faces at the end, Owen’s poem is only half in parody of
Keats’s ode. The power of the poem lies in the way it teeters between irony and
sensuousness, nature and nostalgia, sun and snow. This is particularly evident in
stanza 7:
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 blackbird fusses,
—Isitthatwearedying?^53Here, we have a state of bodily extremity but the seductive music—the assonance,
the alliterative ‘f’ woven with the labials and sibilance (perhaps a lesson learnt from
the ‘faery lands forlorn’ of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’), the long lines and the
half-rhymes—turns the experience of being exposed into a long, lingering caress.
A partly cancelled line from a related poem—‘Fastening of feeling fingers on my
wrist’—connects the unknown hands that had been laid on Owen’s arm ‘in the
night, along the Bordeaux streets’ with the sensuous threat of snow in the poem.^54
Is it Owen’s shimmering homoeroticism that colours the experience, or is it one
more example of a decadent aesthete struggling to portray harsh reality through
the Victorian language of sensation? Or is it, like the word ‘ecstasy’ in ‘Dulce et
Decorum Est’, another hint towards the misprision of language often inherent in
the act of retelling which makes possible the history or the poetry of the senses?
Language here can also be said to serve as a carapace against exposure as he relives
the experience, lulling him with the memory of romance. But perception and
hallucination are fused and confused in the stanza quoted above, as the Keatsian
bower with its blossoms and blackbird surfaces not as inappropriate aesthetic from
the poet-narrator but as nostalgia on the part of the soldiers themselves, a reverie
so powerful that it dissolves the surrounding reality and whirls the poem and its
participants into another space, another time. But such a move is politically deeply
troubling—in fact, reprehensible—especially when read in conjunction with the
letter. For, unlike Keats’s ‘vision or a wakingdream’, this is a historical experience
involving extreme hardship and death, a collective experience which is not only
transformed into a fantasy of desire and language but is then projected on to the
(^52) Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, inthe Complete Poems, 346.
(^53) Owen, ‘Exposure’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 185.
(^54) Owen, ‘It was the noiseless hour’, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments, ii:The Manuscripts and
Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University
Press, 1983), 460; Owen to Susan Owen, 14 Feb. 1914, inCollected Letters, 234. For the complex sources
of the poem, see Hibberd, who makes this connection inOwen the Poet, 78; see also Graham’s acute
analysis of the ‘conscious and highly-wrought texture’ of this poem (Truth of War, 57).