mark rawlinson
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Yourtears. You are not worth their merriment.^54The lack of reserve here is in fact a counterweight in a poem which started out as
an apology for the negativity of his war poems and turned into a risky exhibition of
war’s compensations and thrills.
‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’ might appear to be a deliberate exercise in reversing
the tropes of a Craiglockhart poem such as ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’: the curses of
‘beggars’ are transformed into the ‘glee’ of exultant warriors. Owen had anticipated
this new way of understanding the soldier’s experience, an advance on the broader
ironies ofWipers Times-style black humour of the trenches, in another Craiglock-
hart poem, ‘Insensibility’. Those soldiers who ‘lose imagination’ are released from
entanglements, ‘their spirit drags no pack’, and they can ‘laugh among the dying’.^55
The poem explicitly curses ‘dullards whom no cannon stuns’ for electing a different
kind of insensibility, denial not adaptation—‘By choice they made themselves
immune|To pity’. In contrast, soldiers’ insensibilities are forms of moral and intel-
lectual cauterization—the cessation of compassion, empathy, perspective—which
symbolize the usurpation of their humanity by war: ‘some cease feeling|Even them-
selves or for themselves’. Here, ‘happy’ is the ironic (and Housmanesque) good
hap or fortune of unawareness, a felicity or fitness for circumstance in the loss
of faculties. But this phenomenology of front line duty (compare ‘Exposure’) is
at odds with the way in which Owen’s imagination was animated to create new
conceptions of war experience.
‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’ revalues the passivity (the picture of war stamping
out the autonomous individual) of ‘Insensibility’ into an active glorification of
battle: ‘power was on us as we slashed bones bare’. The poet sails his unencumbered
spirit to enact a new kind of witness, passing out of a landscape of hopes strewn
in the ‘sludge’ (‘Dulce et Decorum Est’) or ‘slime’ (‘The Sentry’^56 )intotherealm
of a spirit (both an aspect of deity and a kind of morale) which shines through
the mud that masks faces. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, whose refusal of the
consolations of Christian culture has been deconstructed many times since Jon
Silkin’s 1972 reading, mimicked a cacophony of military noise which provided an
unmocking music of committal (its plangency drowns out the tones of consolatory
mourning). If Owen is unequal to keeping compensating myths at bay in this
poem,^57 in ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’ he embraces them with weird relish, now
deploying the language of Christian ritual and symbolism to elevate camaraderie
to an almost absurd spiritual plane. Countering the deafening soundings of a
battlefield purified of piety in ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, aesthetic sensation
(^54) Owen, ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 125.
(^55) Owen, ‘Insensibility’, ibid. 145. (^56) Owen, ‘The Sentry’, ibid. 188.
(^57) See Ramazani,Poetry of Mourning, 69–70.