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country life, and he leaves the last stanza unfinished, taking up these images
and sounds as part of the betrayal he explores in his most famous war poems,
“Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In “The Calls,”
written in May 1918, some six months after his return to service, he begins
each stanza envisioning a world measured by regular sounds, “a dismal fog-
hoarse,” “quick treble bells,” “stern bells,” “gongs hum and buzz,” each occur-
ring at a specific hour (much like his descriptions of military time in his let-
ters). The fourth stanza dramatizes the “clumsiness” of soldiers trying to follow
along in some sort of forced regularity: “A blatant bugle tears my afternoons. /
Out clump the clumsy Tommies by platoons, / Trying to keep in step with rag-
time tunes, / But I sit still; I’ve done my drill.”^49 The manuscript copy shows
that Owen deleted the lines “I’ve had my fill” and “Here I’ve no rime that’s
proper.” Regularized external sounds, then, are allegorized in Owen’s poems as
disciplines or forms aware of and suspicious of their own value while, at the
same time, the internal sounds of the poem, contracting and expanding in his
metrical manipulation, simultaneously support and reject this allegory. “The
Calls” admits that the sounds and forms of military and literary discipline are
necessary, even if he has no “proper” way to express this unfortunate necessity.
Other more blatantly antiwar poems violently question the necessity of mili-
tary and metrical discipline.
There are many examples that demonstrate Owen’s formal reckoning but
few are as effective as his now canonized “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which he
began writing at Craiglockhart in October of 1917.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots 5
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas shells dropping softly behind.Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 10
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.In all of my dreams, before my helpless sight, 15
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.