wilfred owen us sleep now...’Crucially, the ‘truth untold’ remains unsaid, the oracular vision
cannot be brought back. ‘Strange Meeting’ does not so much describe war as escape
it (as Blunden or Sassoon, in their memoirs, always remark when leaving the line
for rear areas; only their destination is bucolic, and this is hell). The poem’s central
concern is the fate of the poetic vision, which is here to be interred far from mortal
sight (compare the buried ‘voices’ of the coal in ‘Miners’).
‘Spring Offensive’ reconfigures this myth of the ‘truth untold’ in the context of
rapine soldiers rather than poets, thus developing the dialectic between the figures
in ‘Strange Meeting’:
But what say such as from existence’ brink
Ventured but drave too swift to sink,
The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,
And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames—
And crawling slowly back, have by degrees
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder—
Whyspeaknottheyofcomradesthatwentunder?^67These overmen are survivors, and unlike the dreamer and many of their fellow
soldiers, they have made it back. Why do they not speak? Well, they are not poets.
But like the soldier-newspaper-readers of ‘Smile, Smile, Smile’, they are conspirators
in silence, guardians of a knowledge that cannot be communicated.
The distance between Owen’s ‘war poetry’ and the works in which he attempts
to find ways of expressing the poetry in war may be measured in a comparison
of ‘The Show’, drafted at the end of 1917 and drawing on Henri Barbusse’s novel
Le Feu(1916), and the landscape of war in ‘Spring Offensive’. The former is
transitional, already departing from psychologistic and documentary frameworks
for war experience and, like ‘Strange Meeting’, employing the device of distance
from the battlefield: here, ‘My soul looked down from a vague height.’^68 The
poem is an experiment in representing the repellent—from on high the battlefield
looks like a corpse covered in insects (another motif that Douglas revises in
‘Vergissmeinnicht’), and the movements of these ramping caterpillars—‘I saw
their bitten backs curve, loop, andstraighten’—are a disturbing reversal of the
pathetic fallacy (more commonly the image of the human swarm is associated with
right-wing authoritarian discourses on war).^69 The vision is completed with Death
showing the speaker his face on the severed head of such a ‘worm’ with ‘the feet
of many men’. ‘Spring Offensive’ transforms the ‘slimy’ battlefield with its ‘foul
openings’ into a different kind of space. (Back in the 1930s, I. M. Parsons drew
(^67) Owen, ‘Spring Offensive’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 193.
(^68) Owen, ‘The Show’, ibid. 155.
(^69) See Klaus Theweleit,Male Fantasies, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Polity, 1987–9); and Mark Rawlinson,
British Writing of the Second World War(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 64 and 192.