santanu das
gets lost in the cascade of sound as the rhymes, assonance, and labials set our spirits,
likethe soldiers in ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, ‘surging light and clear’.^29 The
swinging metre makes the syntax strangely palpable, turning words almost into
things in our mouth and blinding us to the visual horrors. We momentarily forget
that the adjectives (‘large’, ‘full’, ‘great’), the rhyme (‘hot/shot’), and the phrase
‘pale’, occurring in Swinburne’s poem, are all tied to real-life carnage, to knife
wounds, death cramps, and ruptured hearts. Mutilation is the stuff this poem is
made of. Moreover, in a poem initially addressed ‘To any Woman’, what is the
connection between mutilated male flesh and the aroused female body except in
a context of eroticism, on the one hand, and misogyny, on the other? The word
‘trembles’ in fact shows the contradictory impulses at the heart of the poem: it
comes from thefin-de-si`ecleworld of exquisite pain, of Swinburne’s Proserpine
whose ‘breasts tremble with tenderer breath’,^30 but within the more immediate
context, it summons up the whole world of neurasthenia, as in Owen’s description
of ‘50 strong men trembling as with ague, for 50 hours’.^31 This clash of associations,
whether inadvertent or not, is perverse, and the eroticization of violence continues
not only in his decadent poems such as ‘[Has your soul sipped]’, ‘The Rime of the
Youthful Mariner’, and ‘[I saw his round mouth’s crimson]’, but in late mature
work where the language gets leaner. Thus, amidst the satiric realism of a poem
as late as ‘Disabled’, there is a sudden eruption of a lush visual imagination (‘leap
of purple spurted from his thigh’^32 ) that ends up fetishizing an amputation and
mires the anti-war politics in a homoerotic aesthetic. Is this disjunction a result
of his literary inheritance—an overdose of Georgian aestheticism, the lessons of
Swinburne and Wilde filtered through the lens of war—or does it suggest a more
private, morbid sensibility?
Owen’s first encounter with ‘the actualities of war’ occurred in a hospital in
France which he had gone to visit with his friend Doctor Sauvaiture. He writes to
his brother Harold about the experience in striking detail:
First I saw a bullet, like this cut out of a Zouave’s∗leg. Then we did the round
of the wards; and saw some fifty German wretches: all more seriously wounded than the
French. The Doctor picked out those needing surgical attention; and these were brought on
stretchers to the Operating Room; formerly a Class room; with the familiar ink-stains on
floor, walls and ceiling; now a chamber of horrors with blood where the ink was. Think of
it: there were eight men in the room at once, Germans being treated without the slightest
distinction from the French: one scarcely knew which was which. Considering the lack of
appliances—there was only one water-tap in the room—and the crowding—and the fact
that the doctors were working for nothing—and on Germans too—really good works was
(^29) Owen, ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 124.
(^30) Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, inThe Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne,
i (London: Chatto & Windus, 1904), 68.
(^31) Owen to Susan Owen, 19 Jan. 1917, inCollected Letters, 429; see Owen, ‘Asleep’, inComplete
Poems and Fragments, i. 152.
(^32) Owen, ‘Disabled’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 175.