the trauma of meter 161
the listening doctor, experiences are involuntarily “reenacted” for the now
livid audience of the dead and are, through their haunting recurrence, per-
formed nightly on the stage of the patient’s neurasthenic psyche.
Time’s collapse was manifest, for many patients, in the inability to control
or adequately manipulate speech—what Sassoon calls “the stammering of dis-
located speech”; though speech is always located “elsewhere,” the metrical grid
provided both spatial and temporal orientation. The metrical aspect of recov-
ery is evident in Sassoon’s 1918 letter to Graves, in which words cram together
nonsensically until the appearance of Dr. Rivers soothes the patient into almost
mocking, yet ordered, double dactyls: “Sleeplessexasperuicide, O Jesu make it
stop! / But yesterday afternoon my reasoning Rivers ran solemnly in, / With
peace in the pools of his spectacled eyes and a wisely omnipotent grin.” Not
only does Rivers’s appearance coincide with dactylic regularity in this line, but
Sassoon, as a patient, transforms his self-loathing into self-appreciation (albeit
ironic) through Rivers’s guidance into the patient’s “grey” unconscious: “And I
fished in that steady grey stream and decided that I / After all am no longer the
Worm that refuses to die. / But a gallant and glorious lyrical soldjer.” A “lyrical
soldjer,” however, who resents how his mind is “crammed with village verses
about Daffodils and Geese” and begs his doctor to free him of his misery: “O
Rivers please take me. And make me / Go back to the war till it break me.”^32
This passage is a case study for Captain Brock’s assessment of speech-disrup-
tion among sufferers of neurasthenic trauma: “The various affections of speech
tend to run into one another; moreover, along with the stammer of the tongue
we not infrequently observe a distinct ‘mental stammer.’”^33 Here, we see how
Sassoon’s writing runs together the unhealthy letters, cramming the dactylic
“sleeplessness,” “exasperate,” and “suicide” into a stammering and traumatic met-
rical and material effect on the page. At once ironic and expressive, the passage
consciously or unconsciously plays out the psychic condition Brock describes.
Brock elaborates on the officer’s unique relationship to disrupted time and
speech in his 1923 book, Health and Conduct:
The shell-shock patient is out of Time altogether. If a “chronological,”
he is at least not a historical being. Except in so far as future or past
may contain some memory or prospect definitely gratifying, or mor-
bidly holding him, he dismisses both. He lives for the moment, on the
surface of things. His memory is weak (amnesia), his will is weak (abou-
lia), he is improvident and devoid of foresight. He is out of Space, too;
he shrinks from his immediate surroundings (geophobia), or at most he
faces only certain aspects of it; he is a specialist à Outrance.^34Brock’s analysis shows how the patient is both immovably moored in time
and space—unable to move forward through language, so repeating sounds
in a loop—and how the patient somehow unconsciously chooses his extreme