174 chapter 5
patterns rather than any traditional military or literary discipline. Line 6, the
longest line of the first octave, is heavy with extra stresses and halts with three
pauses—“But límped ón, // blóod-shód. // Áll went láme; // áll blínd”—as if
this ten-syllable line could be divided into four, two-beat lines (complete with
the pararhyme of “blood” and “blind”). The men’s feet and the metrical feet
limp on, shod in no protective form for the rhythmic beats.
Lines 9 through 12 express metrically the gasping repetition of “Gas! GAS!
Quick, boys!” Quickly, the soldiers move—fumbling, stumbling, and fit-
ting—as the form performs, back into the traditional ten syllables “just in
time.” The stumbling and fumbling of the poem is juxtaposed against the ri-
gidity of lines 11 and 12, which are, like line 4, in exact pentameter, as if tradi-
tion somehow regularizes this chaotic moment; that is, Owen flaunts a mo-
ment of extreme metrical regularity at the chaotic center of the poem. We hear
the iambs again from the middle of line 10—“the clúmsy hélmets júst in
tíme; / But sómeone stíll was yélling oút and stúmbling, / And floúnd’ring líke
a mán in fíre or líme”—with Owen careful to elide the “e” in floundering to
keep the realigned meter regular. The man, “still” in the middle of the chaos, is
caught up in the trudging slumber of the traditional iambs. Instead of a calm,
sleep-ridden march, the meter of this first sonnet is thrown into suspicion.
When called upon, the soldiers who could recover from their stumbling to
move “just in time” were saved from the defeat of the trapped soldier, the
“someone still” of the sestet. But not only is the iambic pentameter of a tradi-
tional sonnet bent and doubled in this poem; the sound structure in the first
sonnet also performs a sort of bent doubling. If the meter of the first sonnet
stumbles, the sound structure stammers—both the metrical and alliterative
effects in the poem manifesting symptoms of trauma in their formal perfor-
mances. In each line in the first octave, the sounds double on either side of a
real or imaginary caesura (bent/beggars, coughed/cursed, til/turned, toward/
trudge, men/many, blood/blind, drunk/deaf ). Some of these sounds gesture
toward Owen’s experiments in pararhyme, taking out the vowel center of a
word and leaving the skeletal structure of the beginning and end consonants,
but these stammering sounds also show how subtle repetition, like the stumble
of metrical feet, coaxes the poem forward to the sound that occurs in the mid-
dle of the line while also demanding that it double back to the sound at the
beginning. These effects fade in the would-be sestet: “still” morphs into the
sounds of “stumbling” in line 11, and “sea” into “saw” in line 14, neither a true
stammer but more a “see-saw” of imbalance to signify the defining feature of
the first sonnet’s movement.
The second sonnet’s movement performs an “about—turn,” presenting its
three quatrains in reverse, beginning with the couplet of “sight” and “drown-
ing,” heralding the theme of the second part of the poem, the sight of endless
drowning from which the now marching soldier cannot look away. The stum-
ble of broken iambic pentameter in the middle of the poem stands out against