santanu das
How is the sense experience of the trenches translated into the sensuousness of
poeticform—depending on available contemporary models of literary language
and genre—and what are the pleasures and dangers of such a process? The war poets
refashioned lyric poetry as political testimony, yet poeticizing can also introduce
ethical problems, something that made Plato exclude poets from the republic. But
there is also a strong tradition of art as therapy, something that made Owen’s
doctor Arthur Brock encourage his shell-shocked patient to write, and to edit
Hydraat Craiglockhart: in an atmosphere where the senses are ‘charred’, verse
may provide a space at once to soothe and rekindle the senses and wrest form
out of the formless. I shall examine some of these issues by looking at the works
of two soldier-poets: Wilfred Owen, the young aesthete turned officer-poet, and
Isaac Rosenberg, the Jewish East Ender painter-poet turned private soldier. In the
foreword to Rosenberg’sCollected Works, Sassoon, singling out ‘Break of Day in the
Trenches’ for special praise, notes, ‘Sensuous frontline existence is there, hateful
and repellent, unforgettable and inescapable.’^23 With reference to both poets, I shall
explore this ‘sensuous frontline existence’ and how, in their works, it is evolved into
a complex relation between perception, emotion, and language.
Owen: Limit Experiences
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••In a ‘queer, ironic’^24 tale by D. H. Lawrence entitled ‘The Blind Man’, the blind
but robust war veteran Maurice encounters hiswife’s civilian friend Bertie in the
darkness of the barn. Suddenly inspired by the ‘passion of friendship’, the blind
man stretches out his ‘naked’ hand and feels Bertie’s face—‘touching the small
nose and the nostrils, the rough, short moustache, the mouth, the rather strong
chin’—‘in the soft travelling grasp’.^25 He finally takes Bertie’s fingers, pressing them
on his own war-blinded eye sockets, ‘trembling in every fibre’. Tenderness, eros,
and violence are combined in the scene, all mediated through the rhythmic beat of
Lawrence’s prose. For that moment in the text, the four bodies—of Maurice and
Bertie as well as of the narrator and of the reader—are compacted through an act
of visceral tightening.
Such responses often characterize our reading of the poetry of Owen as he
repeatedly dwells on similar moments of perilous intimacy that go beyond his
(^23) Sassoon, ‘Foreword’, inThe Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Ian Parsons (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1984), p. ix.
(^24) D. H. Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield, 5 Dec. 1918, inThe Letters of D. H. Lawrence, iii:October
1916–June 1921, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), 303.
(^25) Lawrence, ‘The Blind Man’, inEngland, My England(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 61–2.