152 chapter 5
“low crooning,” a meaningless comfort. His poem is made of “weird reveries”
and the metrical “throb” of his own composition might translate his “sob” into
a “song” that he will call “his,” and the poem, though it hopes to “lend ease” to
a future reader, enacts its own potential inability to comfort an audience.^13
Though Owen subtly considers the difference between reading and writing
poetry here, he finds diversion, at least, in composing a poem in a traditional
metrical form. After writing a roundel about Hercules in 1914, he explains to
his cousin Leslie Gunston that “I find it exceedingly easy to write one without
having either emotion or ideas.”^14 We can trace how Owen clearly values po-
etry as a means of uncensored expression at the same time as he finds it de-
lightful that he can compose easily in a fixed form—a dual awareness that pre-
dates his enlistment.
Two months after the declaration of war, Owen was in France working his
way toward rationalizing a reason to enlist. Though he wouldn’t join the Art-
ists’ Rifles until November 1915, he was indecisive about his “duty” to defend
England and its language versus his “duty” toward writing poetry. On Novem-
ber 6, 1914 he wrote to his mother: “Now I may be led into enlisting when I
get home: so familiarize yourself with the idea! It is a sad sign if I do: for it
means that I shall consider the continuation of my life of no use to England.
And if once my fears are roused for the perpetuity and supremacy of my
mother-tongue, in the world — I would not hesitate, as I hesitate now — to
enlist” (295).
Owen considers his sacrifice particularly great in the context of language
and poetry, since it is possible that the “continuation” of his life might lead to
important poetic contributions to the mother tongue. The idea of a “mother”
country and “mother tongue” surfaces in a letter to his own mother—who was
far away when he was living in France and working as a tutor in Bordeaux—
and carries multiple ties to the communities of home: national, literary, and
familial. Nearly a month later, he honed his argument, seeing himself as Keats’s
direct disciple, one in a long line of important poets:
The Daily Mail speaks very movingly about the ‘duties shirked’ by En-
glish young men. I suffer a good deal of shame. But while those ten thou-
sand lusty louts go on playing football I shall go on playing with my lit-
tle axiom: — that my life is worth more than my death to Englishmen.
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The
sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest
of them wrote! I do not know in what else England is greatly superior,
or dearer to me, than another land and people. (300)^Owen’s idea of what could “hold him together” in combat is shaped by his re-
lation to the community of “English poets,” of which he sees himself a part.^15
By 1915, he was reading Servitude et Grandeur Militaires by Alfred de Vigny