santanu das
an hour’. He goes on to elaborate: ‘Catalogue? Photograph? Can you photograph
thecrimson-hot iron as it cools from the smelting? This is what Jones’s blood looked
like, and felt like. My senses are charred.’^3 Owen here struggles with the paradoxical
notion of sense experience: on the one hand, it is intensely private and stubbornly
resists translation, and on the other hand, for it to be shared and communicated, it
has to create a retrospective narrative. In order to evoke the judder of the moment,
he has recourse here to certain literary devices: images, alliteration, and metaphor.
The process carries historical traces too: the word ‘crimson’ points to the world of
fin-de-si`ecleliterature as one decadent aesthete writes to another, both well versed
in Wilde and Swinburne. Owen at once invokes and throws away the allusion to
photography, showing his essential differencefrom his ‘visually submissive’ friend
and mentor; instead, it is the imagined bodily contact with the ‘crimson-hot iron’
that for him captures the moment, bringing in its wake the phrase ‘My senses are
charred’. What does Owen mean here, and what implications does it have for poetry
which not only partakes in the realm of the senses but aims to produce, as one of
its most influential Romantic practitioners noted, ‘excitement in co-existence with
an over-balance of pleasure’?^4
If the shadow of John Keats looms over much trench poetry, his craving for a
‘life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts’^5 seems to have achieved its perverse
validation in the world of the trenches. ‘Our youth’, recalled Robert Graves,
‘became all-flesh and waived the mind.’^6 Thetrenchexperiencewasoneofthemost
sustained and systematic shattering of the human sensorium: it stripped man of
the protective layers of civilization andthrust his naked, fragile body between the
ravages of industrial modernity, on the one hand, and the chaos of formless matter,
on the other. Consider the following two extracts from the Imperial War Museum
archives, suggesting the range of sensory devastation:
The shell came and killed the chap on my left & wounded the other on my right & it blew
up [?] overhead. It shook me up terrible & we had orders to run in twos to the finished
dugout. So we went & as I went round the corner I put my hands in poor G. Kentish brains.
I may add that his head was completely off his body. As we arrived at the dugout another
shell came over & killed 2 Lon [?] Irish Rifles.^7
Now the mud at Passchendaele was very viscous indeed, very tenacious, it stuck to you.
Your puttees were solid mud anyway. When you took your puttees off you scraped them
and hoped for the best.... It got into the bottom of your trousers, you were covered with
(^3) Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon, 10 Oct. 1918, in Wilfred Owen,Collected Letters,ed.Harold
Owen and John Bell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 581. 4
William Wordsworth, ‘Preface toLyrical Ballads’ (1802), inWilliam Wordsworth,ed.StephenGill
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 609.
(^5) John Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817, inThe Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 37.
(^6) Robert Graves, ‘Recalling War’, inThe Complete Poems of Robert Graves, ed. Beryl Graves and
Dunstan Ward (London: Penguin, 2003), 359. 7
C. T. Abbot, entry for war diary, 29 June 1917, Imperial War Museum, 83/31/1.