war poetry and the realm of the senses detachment? A psychological explanation hinting at a state in which ecstasy and
horrormeet through extremity may be sought in Owen’s letter where he describes
the exhilaration of going over the top. On the other hand, Freud in one of his
essays on sexuality notes that ‘feelings of apprehension, fright or horror’ have a
‘sexually exciting effect’, and that ‘all comparatively intense affective processes, even
terrifying ones, trench upon sexuality’.^48 Yet, in a poem that explores the complicity
of language in violence—the dangers of Horace’s ‘sweet’ phrase^49 —‘ecstasy’
seems to suggest, almost inadvertently, the perverse narrative impulse itself: poetic
language, asked to describe violence, touches itself instead through alliteration and
echo (ecstasy/clumsy/misty) and experiences exhilaration, replacing real-life horror
with linguistic rapture. Owen, while criticizing the ‘sweetness’ of a particular poetic
tradition, seems to be seduced by the ‘sweetness’ of the lyric form itself: in the
use of ‘ecstasy’, is there an inkling of the central problem of lyric testimony to
violence, as opposed to other forms of writing—particularly when coupled with
a Decadent aesthetic, in poems as late as ‘The Kind Ghosts’? The melody of the
rhyme, interwoven with the labials of the stanza, thralls us, stretching the verbs
beyond their bounds so that an extra foot is left ‘hanging’ at the end of the lines
(fumbling/stumbling/drowning): it creates a diffuse auditory realm analogous to the
spectral space generated around the floundering body by its nervous movements.
However, the compulsive rhyme of the gerundive ‘-ing’ is also highly disturbing,
evoking the classic tense of the trauma victim who, as Freud noted inBeyond the
Pleasure Principle(1920), is doomed to a compulsion to repeat past experiences as
the present.
If ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ shows a disjunction between war realism and an
unchecked lyric impulse, ‘Exposure’ inscribes this problem in the very consciousness
of the participants. The poem is based on Owen’s experiences in the early months of
1917: ‘The marvel is that we did not all die of cold...only one of my party actually
froze to death.’^50 Through eight stanzas, Owen evokes the sensuous geography of
the trenches—winds, gas flares, wire, guns, rain, frost, bullets, mud—but instead
of Sassoon’s realism, or Blunden’s ironic contrast, the war landscape is evolved into
one of the most sustained explorations of the relation between sense experience,
consciousness, and language. If the ‘vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues’ in
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is a rewriting of Keats’s ‘palate fine’,^51 here, through the
very opening phrase, Owen transmutes the quintessential expression of romantic
(^48) Sigmund Freud, ‘Infantile Sexuality’, inThe Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, vii, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 203.
(^49) In the letter describing the poem to his mother, Owen writes, ‘The famous Latin tag [from
Horace,Odes,iii. ii. 13] means of course It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country. Sweet! And
decorous!’; to Susan Owen, 16 Oct. 1917, inCollected Letters, 499–500.
(^50) Owen to Susan Owen, 4 Feb. 1917, inCollected Letters, 430.
(^51) John Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, inThe Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973), 349.