simultaneously, this connotes sacrifice, killing, offering to God, all the
things Owen protests against in ‘The Parable of the Old Men and the
Young’ and elsewhere. Similarly, the bathos of ‘though they were foul’
encompasses possibilities ranging from ‘seraphic for an hour, though their
owners were revolting’ to ‘seraphic in their bestiality’ to, simply, ‘they were
muddy’. In this moment of ‘exultation’, Owen’s poetry registers contempt,
repulsion, pity, sympathy, blasphemy, orthodoxy, all at once. The emo-
tional onslaught continues in a swipe at Gunston’s poem ‘L’Amour’: love is
not the ‘binding of fair lips’ but:
Wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips
Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong.
The last line is restrained, but the curious mixture of balladnaı ̈vete ́and
gothicism of the ‘arm that drips’ does not share its balance, deliberately. It
is the pun on ‘wound’ that provokes its disharmony: love is winding
together and wounding together, and so the phrase ‘arm that drips’ is both
sincere and knowingly tasteless, deliberately revolting the Gunstons and
insisting that the revolting is true. When Merryn Williams complains of
the rhyme of ‘beauty’ and ‘duty’ in the next stanza, she is missing the point
of the whole poem: to align opposites, the earnest and the provocative, the
hatred of war and its celebration, disgust for the men and love for them.^7
styleSuch a conflict of feelings is inseparable from Owen’s extraordinary
stylistic conflicts. Jon Stallworthy’s edition of the poems notes that
Owen’s ‘Apologia’ is indebted to Shelley’sDefence of Poetry, which claims
that ‘poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful what is distorted... it
marries exultation and horror’. Evidently it is a marriage made in ‘the
sorrowful dark of Hell’, but the reference is a helpful reminder that Owen
is defending his own poetry rather than his own actions or feelings. His
tactic to defend his poems’ ugliness, however, was not to reject beauty
outright, but redefine it. ‘I have perceived much beauty / In the hoarse
oaths that kept our courage straight’, and the question of who is swearing
indicates how the question of beauty itself is caught up with Owen’s
problems with his own agency in the war. It is not only that he finds
beauty in ugliness: rather, the beauty of keeping one’s courage straight is
both comradely solidarityandthe spine-stiffening resolve demanded by
the army in sending its men out to get killed, resolve which it was Owen’s
The passions of Wilfred Owen 187