the trauma of meter 171
the writing is so poor it causes one to fall sleep, but also because the fact of
writing might help the process of expressing the repressed memories that cause
the nightmares. The impossible ticket, the dream of every soldier, was the
“ticket” that meant official discharge from the army, especially for medical rea-
sons, before the full period of service was up. To “work one’s ticket” was to at-
tempt, through scheming, bribing, or malingering, to get out of the army, and
came to be known as a genial and facetious suggestion that a man was mentally
defective. Despite the jovial tone, we see Owen’s interpretation of the intoler-
ability of waiting until dawn, of the dreams that double-back to memories, of
the trap of trauma. In this article, we see the physical staggering of the tired
soldier forced to march transformed into a soldier whose symptoms prevent
him from moving forward in time. The arbitrariness of the military exercise is
also a sly reference to the arbitrariness of writing under the auspices of
rehabilitation.
Bent-Double
At Craiglockhart, officers who were unable to imagine themselves outside the
traumatic “stopped time” of neurasthenic trauma were sometimes able to piece
together a functional relation to time’s movement through writing poetry,
though their recovery meant an inevitable return to battle. As Brock’s success-
ful Anteaus, Owen learned to manipulate the complex relationships between
his feet and his head, action and expression, and returned willingly to the front
where he continued to write with an increased self-awareness. Re-reading
Owen within the larger contexts of English national meters and the metrical-
ity of therapeutic healing, we can see how his poems try to reconcile the empty
patriotic promises of prewar poetry and militarism. Indeed, with this in mind,
Owen’s habit of scanning below a poem seems particularly evocative, as if the
marks do not need the letters beneath them to provide some form of comfort.
His poems often contain metrical marks, and revisions show him trying to
think through the complexities of metrical form.^48 However, in the poems he
writes at Craiglockhart and after, Owen critiques the dangers of following rote
militaristic feet and struggles with the question of how poetic form’s future
possibilities for meaning might be always determined by its inability to pre-
serve, comfort, or even endure.
Owen composed a fragment in his last months at Craiglockhart (dated
August–September 1917) titled, “All Sounds Have Been as Music.” The 18-
line poem begins: “All sounds have been as music to my listening : / Pacific
lamentation of slow bells, / The crunch of boots on blue snow rosy-glisten-
ing, / Shuffle of autumn leaves; and all farewells.” The poem continues on to
name country bells clamoring and a host of other traditionally pastoral im-
ages, but the fourth stanza includes “startled clarions” and “drums, rumbling
and rolling thunderous.” Here, the crunch of boots is swept up in the idealized