the trauma of meter 165
demonstrates Owen’s consideration of a possible literary, or heroic, fu-
ture—a perpetuation of life like the perpetuation of the English poetic tra-
dition he imagined for himself as a younger poet. In addition, by sharing
the poem with his cousin Leslie, Owen reached out to his prewar poetic
community.
... How earth herself empowered him with her touch
Gave him the grip and stringency of Winter,
And all the ardour of th’invincible Spring ;
How all the blood of June glutted his heart,
And all the glow of huge autumnal storms
Stirred on his face, and flickered from his eyes. (477)
The sound patterns of this early version of the poem foreshadow Owen’s later
mastery of interwoven sound structures. Each season seems to have its own
sound sown within the line; the “er” sound of line 1; the soft “i” and “n” of line
2; the “ah” and “er” of line 3.^43 These alliterative effects are signaled by metrical
stresses as well, alternating within Owen’s stringent blank verse. The “blood of
June” that “glutted the heart” of Anteaus can be read as a memory of the blood
of June in the battlefield Owen has escaped. These powers, drawn from the
seasons of the earth, are only available to Anteaus when his feet are firmly
planted on the earth, to the roots of words and to their geographies of pho-
nemes and inner structures, not just the metrical forms imposed on language
from without. The “stringency” and discipline of winter must come before the
“ardour” and “invincible” spring of the young and hopeful soldier until finally
the blood of June battles triumphs. In a letter written the same day to his
mother, he quotes a longer excerpt from the beginning of the poem, describing
how Hercules was “baffled” by the strength of his opponent, and fixed his feet
firmly to the earth. The line, “And yet more firmly fixed his graspèd feet,”
shows how the strength of the ten-syllable line is bolstered by the diacritical
mark promoting an artificial second syllable in “graspèd” (in a later version,
Owen revised this word to “grasping” to keep the two syllables and remove the
diacritical mark). The figures in the poem struggle through their feet—Hercu-
les’s feet are “firmly fixed” though the poem’s metrical feet are not, jostling
between iambs and trochees. The poem’s feet are more like Anteaus, pulled
away from the firm ground of English poetic form: “How, too, Poseidon
blessed him fatherly / With wafts of vigor from the keen sea waves, / And with
the subtle coil of currents — / Strange underflows” (477). The word “coil” is
also promoted to two syllables here, expanding a word that means contraction
to arbitrarily lengthen the line to ten syllables. The poet is wrestling with un-
ruly feet themselves, the beginning of a metaphor for time and measure that
appears in many of his later war poems and, most significantly, in his substan-
tial writing for The Hydra.