wilfred owen able to recognize it). The distance which separated the civilian from the soldier—a
failureof imagination, of responsibility—is turned into the privileged remoteness
of a realm which is at once traumatic and enchanted. While the former is in
practice often recoded by readers as an index of their own separation from bellicist
ideologies, the latter does not fit into binary schemes of war and civility. We can
chart this development of a poetry which locates positive value in ‘the inwardness
of war’,^49 as Owen called it in 1918, towards his last poem, ‘Spring Offensive’, via
the poem which has been presented as hissumma, ‘Strange Meeting’.
John Bayley once observed of Owen’s bearding of his readers for their obtuseness,
‘Amazing how it works, for nothing is more tiresome than to be told that one
is utterly deficient in feeling for and understanding of something which one was
not there to understand.’^50 We may recognize Bayley’s experience, also that of the
wedding guest in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, but few of Owen’s poems
directly defy or affront the reader in this way. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is one, and it
wishes on its addressee ‘some smothering dreams’, like the nightmare about a gassed
soldier it has just re-enacted. This desire to inflict battle trauma on those who have
never been there approximates to the Sassoonian curse (the tank-in-the-music-hall
fantasy of ‘Blighters’), but its primary meaning is an unsatisfied condition for truth
telling, the condition that the addressee, ‘my friend’, evidently fails to fulfil for as
long as they repeat ‘The old Lie’.^51 But the poem had earlier been addressed not
to a reader but a writer, the poet Jessie Pope, who had imagined the infantry ‘on
tour’:
They’ll take the Kaiser’s middle wicket
And smash it by clean British Cricket.^52Owenrejectedtwoepigraphs—‘ToJessiePope,etc.’,then‘ToaCertainPoetess’—to
leave the identity of those whose sleep is uninterrupted by war dreams unspecified.^53
But it is debatable how many readers feel themselves arraigned in this coda, rather
than identifying with the poem’s hostility to a jingoism which corrupts children
(with ‘incurable sores on innocent tongues’).
‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, with its dogmatic insistence that because you
do not ‘share’ in hell you are fit to be abased, supplies a pattern, but it is, in
confirmation of Spender’s observation of Owen’s difference from himself, one
which goes unrepeated:
You shall not hear their mirth:
You shall not come to think them well content(^49) Owen to Susan Owen, 31 Mar. 1918, inCollected Letters, 543.
(^50) John Bayley, ‘But for Beaumont Hamel...’,The Spectator, 4 Oct. 1963, 419.
(^51) Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, inComplete Poems and Fragments,. 140.
(^52) Jessie Pope, ‘Cricket’, in Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (eds.),Poetry of the Great War: An
Anthology 53 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1986), 58.
See Owen’s drafts for ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, ii. 294 and 296.