the trauma of meter 157
appears again in the wake of inconsolability through the popular First World
War marching song, “We’re Here Because We’re Here.” The song is an example
of the foot-beat rhythm growing almost maddeningly repetitive, to the tune
of “Auld Lang Syne”—a song about past joyous times that ironically refers to
those times being brought back into the present again and again, as well as the
tune to which popular histories of England were sung (as I discussed in chap-
ter 1). Here, “let auld acquaintance be forgot,” becomes a more apt subtext for
the song’s proliferation of nonmovement. There is no mention of “there,” the
home where old acquaintances await, and sung on the march, the song erases
each new place the soldier lays his feet; he is at once ‘here’ and ‘here’ and ‘here,’
a veritable nowhere. The song : “We’re here / Because / We’re here / Because /
We’re here / Because we’re here” enacts the trap of progression within no pro-
gression as well as the feeling of being “nowhere” at all on the larger scale of
the theater of war. The war is “here” and “everywhere,” just as the soldier’s tune
demands no beginning or past, and no end or future.^23
Though both Owen and Graves considered their poetry to be a patriotic
contribution to the national language, Graves’s early poem comments on
meter and militaristic discipline and violence, and his prose about war com-
ments on the way sing-song verse meant to comfort can quickly turn sinister.
Owen’s letters foreshadow his breakdown when he imagines that an idea of
Keats could “hold him together” on the battlefield and his subtle awareness in
the poem “On my Songs” that the “throb” of poetry, at times, “holds nothing”
for him is evidence of a latent disillusionment that would become manifest in
the Craiglockhart War Hospital. There is much in both Owen’s letters and
poems and Graves’s poems and memoir about the intermingling of military
forms and musical and metrical forms. On a typewritten copy of Graves’s
poem “Free Verse,” Owen copied out another poem from Over the Brazier:
“Sorley’s Weather”:
When outside the icy rain
Comes leaping helter-skelter,
Shall I tie my restive brain
Snugly under shelter?Shall I make a gentle song, 5
Here in my firelit study?
When outside the winds blow strong
And the lanes are muddy?With old wine and drowsy meats
Am I to fill my belly? 10
Shall I glutton here with Keats?
Shall I drink with Shelley?