the poetry of pain ‘Futility’, Owen turns his attention to a corpse, a body whose anonymity takes
shape,ironically, at the very moment of the poem’s creation, and he offers it what
little he can: the poem’s attention, its solace, its compassion. If this is an elegy,
it is an elegy for the body itself, not for the person, whose history seems to be
slipping away as we read; what remains is the most physical of matter—‘sides|Full
nerved, still warm’—which the poet can, nevertheless, cherish and mourn.^36 He
does so with the most simple of gestures, in the most simple of terms: ‘Move
him into the sun.’ This opening line, whose powerful iambs drum a spare poetic
heartbeat, in essence performs the poem’s wider duty of attending to the corpse,
embalming it with its empathy. If that empathetic cry is one of universal waste
and uselessness (‘O what made fatuous sunbeams toil|To break earth’s sleep at
all?’), the poem’s connection with the corpse remains arresting, as if that first
gesture of solidarity with the still-warm body is never surpassed. Other poems,
too—or even just momentary glances within a poem—look at corpses with a
range of emotions, from sympathy and warmth to horror and disgust, and these
forms of attention at times represent a refusal of both the consolations and the
strictures of mourning conventions. In some cases, the dead body of an enemy
will make for a momentary salute, since the mangled dead of war often seem
distressingly indistinguishable. For Keith Douglas, in ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, the corpse
of a German may not be cause for line-crossing solidarity (‘We see him almost
with content|abased, and seeming to have paid...’), but it does invite reflection.
Considering the ‘dishonoured picture of his girl’ strewn alongside the enemy body,
the speaker meditates:
For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.^37Not exactly an epitaph, these lines nevertheless give the corpse its moment of
meaning and provocation; they make the body matter, so to speak, at least in
passing (literally, as the troops will soon move past the scene).
As Douglas suggests in his depiction of the way death collapses distinctive spheres,
to linger on the corpse invites a confusion and a complication of various categories,
including, above all, the desire to remember, the need to forget. So Ivor Gurney
will ask to be allowed to forget, in a plea which functions as almost the exact
inverse of Owen’s focus in ‘Futility’, on the corpse as an act of defiant grief and
unconventional memorializing:
Cover him, cover him soon!
And with thick-set(^36) Owen, ‘Futility’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 158.
(^37) Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, inComplete Poems, 118.