of war, Owen ends his anti-war protest by setting its spirit against
Prussia, thus neatly stepping back inside military orthodoxy: it is
Prussia that would silence his verses. This may partly be to pre-empt
censorship at home, and partly to suggest that it is truly English to hate
war, but nevertheless the terms are caught inside the very binary of
England/Germany that poems such as ‘Strange Meeting’ do so much
to resist.
Owen’s edgy defence of his own poetry, ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ is
riven with the same difficulty. The first stanza claims that ‘War brought
more glory to their eyes than blood / And gave their laughs more glee than
shakes a child’. What begins as solidarity with the troops becomes en-
tangled straightaway in the militarist message that war brings glory. And
the emotional tone is similarly uncertain, for laughing children are a stock
piece of sentiment which Owen purports to reject in favour of soldiers’
laughs, but in a phrase whose awkwardly monosyllabic solemnity runs
against what he’s claiming – ‘And gave their laughs more glee than shakes
a child’, full stop. This intermingling of the sentimental, the personal and
the portentous continues through the poem, as it is in some respects its
theme; the experience of war forces the utterly serious and the trivial up
next to one another, in the sense that every cigarette may be one’s last, or
then again it may just be another cigarette. ‘For power was on us as we
slashed bones bare’ is epic in its Poundian triple stress (sla ́shed bo ́nes
ba ́re), and only slightly undercut by the lurking of the humbler and
perhaps more honest ‘feel sick’ in the line’s continuation, ‘not to feel
sickness or remorse of murder’, and using the very words ‘slashed’ and
‘murder’ denies at once the remorseless power the speaker is recalling. The
bathetic and the epic stand alongside one another, a complication of
soldier-hero and soldier-sufferer which continues:
I, too, have dropped off Fear –
Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
And sailed my spirit surging light and clear...The dead platoon are sailed over very rapidly, for their officer, but they
return very quickly:
Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,
Shine and lift up with passion of oblation
Seraphic for an hour; though they were foul.Faces become angelic, a gift equated with the lifting up of the sacrament
(‘oblation’ occurs in the Book of Common Prayer’s Eucharistic rite) – yet
186 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism