discordant pararhyme, red/rid. The simultaneous intensity and cool dis-
tance persists into the next line, too, where ‘the hurt of the colour of
blood’ does not quite exorcise the ghost of the younger Owen, the would-
be dandy in his purple slippers, wincing at the wrong shade of red.
Indeed, such self-adoring sensitivity is what Owen undercuts with an
incontrovertible reason for pain, but even to describe the traumatic in
terms of the aesthetic is risky. Rather than deny the aesthetic, Owen insists
upon its importance, but in such a way as to render him simultaneously
shockingly detached and embarrassingly interested, in the Kantian sense.
Owen’s term for this mixture was ‘pity’, and exploring this term and its
background involves more of the third area of conflict in Owen’s life
which remained hidden for so long, his sexuality.
pity and sexuality‘Insensibility’ ends with a curse on the insensible that is also a plea for a
particular kind of interested sensibility:
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever moans in man
Before the last sea and the helpless stars;
Whatever moans when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.
Pity, then, would be the opposite of unfeeling, and recalls Owen’s
famous Preface, that ‘the Poetry is in the Pity’. In the light of the evidence
for Owen’s unmistakable interest in the aesthetic, therefore, it might be
better to see this statement not as a disparagement of poetry but a
resituation of it. Owen has not rejected poetry, only Poetry as an end in
itself; poetry is now included within pity, which places his aesthetic in a
peculiar nexus of interested feelings to do with art, compassion and
sexuality.
James Najarian has helpfully drawn attention to the sexual element in
Owen’s ‘pity’, glossing the word as ‘erotic sympathy’ and deriving this
balance of sympathy and sexuality from Owen’s reading of Keats, in
whom the sensuous means a forgetting of the borders of self, which is a
prerequisite for sympathy.^17 By the 1890 s, however, the sensuality Keats
represented – where Beauty was Truth and that was all you needed to
know – had become more than a generally erotic sentiment, for its
Pateresque overtones had made the author something of an icon for the
The passions of Wilfred Owen 193