the trauma of meter 163
On March 22, 1917 Owen quoted from memory a long passage from Eliza-
beth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, condemning “many tender hearts” for
stringing “their losses on a rhyming thread.” Owen confessed to his sister that
he, too, had perhaps “sow[ed] [his] wild oats in tame verse”; he added, “this
passage winded me, yea wounded me.”^37 In a long letter to his brother one
month later, we see Owen’s reliance on rhythmical form despite a reluctance to
unconditionally endorse the traditional English poetic form haunting his let-
ters. Owen laments the lack of a drumbeat as he describes to his brother the
sensation of “going over the top”:
I kept up a kind of chanting sing-song : Keep the line straight!
Not so fast on the left!
Steady on the Left!
Not so fast! (458)Owen begins “Keep the line straight!” on the same line as the letter, then in-
dents the next three lines into a stanza for a little marching poem. The four
lines, read together, each have three strong beats, but each also wavers with
extra syllables as if to show how difficult it is to keep this line, or any line,
“straight.” He seems to identify corporeally with the rhythmic form, as if by
making the drumbeat himself, in his mind and voice, he will encourage his feet
and those of his men to move forward. Reading the meter of these four, three-
beat lines shows how Owen, himself, broke them as if to indicate how the
“chanting sing-song” was, in his mind, charged with the responsibility of keep-
ing him moving forward. It is clear, however, that the only lines that allow the
quatrain’s movement are those crammed with syllables around the beat; that
is, the iamb and anapest of “Not so fast on the left” lifts the line up and hurries
it through the unaccented syllables of the words “on the” so as to keep time
with the line, just as “Steady on the Left” slows through “Steady,” shaking the
pronunciation of the word so that it becomes unsteady. The three monosylla-
bles that are also, perhaps, three stressed syllables, exclaim “Not so fast!” and
show the poet and the soldier’s inhibitions about moving forward, seeming to
pull the small poem back into itself—a retreat from metrical feet altogether.
Absolving the line from any unstressed syllables, any “sing-song” is a direct
confrontation of that standard metrical culture; a retreat from regularity as
the soldier-poet approaches that other three-syllable space of “no man’s land.”
This small quatrain indicates the simultaneous forward and backward in-
stincts of cresting the top of the trench into no man’s land. But the poet’s em-
ployment and manipulation of, as well as his deviation from, metrical forms
also shows the poet-soldier’s wavering line; Owen cannot keep the line straight,
nor can the (poetic) line keep him (mentally) straight. He composed this