158 chapter 5
Tobacco’s pleasant, firelight’s good
Poetry makes both better.
Clay is wet and so is mud, 15
Winter rains are wetter.Yet rest there Shelley, on the sill,
For though the winds come frorely,
I’m away to the rain-blown hill
And the ghost of Sorley.^24Both poems were ostensibly from Graves’s manuscript pages; war poet Charles
Sorley was killed in action in October 1915 and his collection Marlborough
and Other Poems was published posthumously in 1916. Here, Owen and
Graves agree that Shelley and Keats are not useful in the current storm, but
Owen is still thinking about how poetry might make things better. In a poem
Owen wrote at Craiglockhart, called “The Poet in Pain,” he criticizes those
who would write of the horrors of war without experiencing it: “Some men
sing songs of Pain and scarcely guess / Their import, for they never knew her
stress.”^25 It is his task, still imagining the representation of the nation’s great-
ness in its poetry, “to write of health with shaking hands, bone-pale, / Of plea-
sure, having hell in every vein” (ll. 11–12). We could read “to write of health
with shaking hands” as “to write to health”—no longer the health of the larger
nation, but the health of the smaller community of officers who found them-
selves cut off from the poetic and national ideals that led them to enlist in the
first place. Like Tietjens imagining the healthy bodies of his fat, wet letters, the
responsibility to preserve and protect English poetry, and the figure of the
English poet, shifted so that the writing of English poetry became part of the
process of healing the psyches of wounded soldier poets.
Therapeutic Measures
W.H.R. Rivers was among the many medical officers interested in new treat-
ments for neurasthenia or, as Rivers preferred to call it, anxiety and substitu-
tion neurosis. Anxiety neurosis interested Rivers because it required that the
patient attempt to “lift” the repression in his mind through a process of con-
fronting, narrating, and therefore “metabolizing” the memory that, by his
methods, had been “thrust out of [the patient’s] consciousness.”^26 This ability
to renarrate an event in order to recontextualize it was the unique ability of
officers; Rivers expressed boredom with the men of the ranks he had treated at
Maghull War Hospital, recording that “the characteristic of the uneducated
person is that the mental outlook of adult life does not differ appreciably from
that of childhood.”^27 Rivers believed that officers possessed a higher faculty for