dawn bellamy
scant space in Douglas’s poetry for any consideration of the regenerative power
ofsacrificial offerings. Still, Douglas does not fail to recognize and address the
mythology, if only to voice a denial of the notion of good emerging from evil. In
‘TheOffensive2’heasserts:‘afterthedeathofmanyheroes|evils remain’.^27
Douglas articulates the worthlessness of the heroic death: evil cannot be erad-
icated, even by the sacrifice of so many men. What Douglas discovers moves him
beyond those predecessors whose Christian beliefs were shaken by the realization
that Jesus’s death was not the final sacrifice. Owen’s ‘The Parable of the Old Man
and the Young’, for instance, while based predominantly on the story of Abraham
and Isaac (Genesis 22), depicts the War as a sequence of consecutive ritual killings:
‘the old man...slew his son|And half the seed of Europe, one by one.’^28 Despite
their uncertainty, First World War poets continued to hope that exposing the truth
would act as a warning to future generations. Owen states, in his ‘Preface’, ‘All a
poet can do today is warn.’^29 Douglas, by contrast, suggests in ‘The Offensive 2’ that
others should search for their own answers, choosing experience over didacticism:
‘takeaslongasyouliketofind|all our successes and failures are similar.’
In ‘Landscape with Figures 1’ Douglas addresses the issue of doubt: ‘But you who
like Thomas come...find monuments, and metal posies.’^30 Christ’s presence in the
poetry of the First World War was not necessarily indicative of righteousness and
glory: some soldiers experienced the crisis of doubting their faith in response to the
horrors that they were witnessing. In a letter to Osbert Sitwell in July 1918, Owen
aligns his soldiers with the betrayed and condemned Christ: ‘For 14 hours yesterday
I was at work—teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his
crown; and not to imagine he thirst till after the last halt.’^31 Believing that ‘pure
Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism’,^32 Owen’s religious faith underwent
a profound change during the war. He claimed to ‘have comprehended a light
which will never filter into the dogma of any national church: namely that one of
Christ’s essential commands was: Passivity at any price!’^33 His experiences led him
to question his faith, and although he argued that ‘I am more and more Christian as
I walk the unchristian ways of Christendom,’ the searing of his conscience distilled
his understanding of what Christianity really means.^34 Taking his biblical point
of reference from the aftermath of the Crucifixion, a moment of spiritual doubt,
(^27) Douglas, ‘The Offensive 2’, ibid. 98.
(^28) Owen, ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments,i:
The Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University
Press, 1983), 174.
(^29) Owen, ‘Preface’, inTheCompletePoemsandFragments, ii:The Manuscripts and Fragments,ed.
Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983), 535.
(^30) Douglas, ‘Landscape with Figures 1’, inComplete Poems, 109.
(^31) Owen to Osbert Sitwell,? July 1918, inCollected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (London:
Oxford University Press, 1967), 562. 32
Owen to Susan Owen, [?16] May 1917, ibid. 461.^33 Ibid.
(^34) Ibid. Owen writes: ‘am I not myself a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience?’