wilfred owen open with ‘Miners’, in which posterity’s neglect (conventionally a poet’s jibe at
futurenon-readers) is applied to dead colliers, colliers conscripted to work ‘dark
pits of War’, and soldiers in general. The injunction of the official culture of
remembrance—‘lest we forget’—lay in the future, but it is scorned in advance
with a vision of a ‘soft-chaired’ post-war which complacently fails to recall ‘poor
lads,|Left in the ground’ (the triumphalism of Brooke’s ‘corner of a foreign field’
is bathetically collapsed into household fuel).^40 ‘On Seeing a Piece of Our Heavy
Artillery Brought into Action’ and ‘Arms and the Boy’ draw respectively on Owen’s
nineteenth-century tastes for variations on the sonnet and for decadent eroticism
to elaborate on the theme of ‘the unnaturalness of weapons’. The latter metalizes
desire in the form of bayonet and bullet, ‘famishing for flesh’ and ‘long[ing] to
nuzzle in the hearts of lads’, but the former metamorphoses the ‘Great Gun’ into
a body part—‘long black arm’, ‘dark arm’—which must, once ‘that Arrogance
which needs thy harm’ is beaten down, be cut away.^41
The masculine rhyming couplets of ‘The Chances’ (a poem begun at Craiglock-
hart) underline the colloquial authority of a soldier ‘who was in the know’ about
the kind of things ‘as can happen’ in a show.^42 The cadence is then held up with
a quatrain that concludes on a stark and unhypocritical label for the ‘misfortune’
of being ‘wounded, killed, and pris’ner’: ‘Jim’s mad’. The more recently drafted
‘Mental Cases’, by contrast, dispenses with rhyme in a Dantean extension of the
cosmology of ‘Strange Meeting’: ‘Surely we have perished|Sleeping, and walk hell;
but who these hellish?’^43 In the revised version of ‘The Dead-Beat’, the idea of
being driven mad by the thought of others’ safety is attributed to a private sol-
dier. ‘Mental Cases’ associates its aetiology of madness with a first-person plural
pronoun; we are interpellated as latter-day Virgils and made to walk the wards of
some institutional inferno. The mad are mentally ‘ravished’ by the dead, a verb
that blends the sense of military seizure with connotations of sexualized violence.
This dissolution of categories is the key to the poem’s rhetoric, which is directed at
making us recognize that it was ‘us who dealt them war and madness’. Psychiatric
patients are corpse-like (‘skulls’ teeth’, ‘fretted sockets’). War is remembered as a
phantasmagoria out of Bosch: ‘sloughs of flesh’, ‘treading blood’, ‘flying muscles’.
Nature is irremediably stained by this murder (shades ofMacbeth): ‘Sunlight seems
a blood smear...|Dawn breaks open like a wound’ (the poem further integrates the
conceit in ‘Inspection’, next but one in the contents list, with its play on blood, dirt,
and whitewash). The last distinction to fall in ‘Mental Cases’ is the one preserved by
the readers’ implied illusions of immunity, as the hands of the ‘set-smiling corpses’
come ‘snatching after us who smote them’.
(^40) Owen, ‘Miners’, ibid. 135–6; Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’, inPoetical Works of Rupert Brooke,
ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1960), 23.
(^41) Owen,‘ArmsandtheBoy’,inThe Complete Poems and Fragments, i. 151; ‘On Seeing a Piece of
Our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action’, ibid. 154. 42
Owen, ‘The Chances’, ibid. 171.^43 Owen, ‘Mental Cases’, ibid. 169.