santanu das
of indigestion makes him fantasize that he is being strangled by the ‘tightening
handof Pain’ and pricked by ‘Torture’s needles in the flesh’.^36 If pain, as Elaine
Scarry has argued inThe Body in Pain, is a condition that defies ‘objectification
in language’,^37 this was a crisis that Owen had learnt to overcome quite early in
his life. Even in the letters, there is a strong urge to communicate the experiences
through linguistic experiments (‘It was the Enter: I—tis I that killed it’) or little
diagrams to describe that ‘dervishy vertigo’ or a headache:^38 it is in this context that
the above illustrated extract has to be understood rather than as a straightforward
case of ‘sadomasochistic’ aesthetic. The strange combination of an over-articulate
sensuousness and a latent masochistic impulse reaches its fruition in his war poetry,
where these twin impulses facilitate an acute—almost visceral—empathy with the
body in pain. ‘I shall stay in you, friend, for some few hours|You’ll feel my heavy
spirit chill your chest,|And climb your throat, on sobs...’, notes the mutilated
soldier-narrator in ‘Wild with All Regrets’.^39
‘Sounds and colours’, Sassoon writes about Owen’s verse, ‘were mulled and mod-
ulated to a subdued magnificence of sensuous harmonies and this was noticeable
even in his everyday speaking.’^40 Sound and colour were fundamental to Sassoon’s
imagination; Owen’s affinities are more with Keats, in that in both, there is an
overriding concern with touch and texture, a palpable intimacy with the body. An
unfettered lyric gift and physical empathy constitute the body in pain in Owen’s
poetry, hovering around moments when we no longer know where theisends and
thewasbegins. Are they men or shadows, asks the first line of ‘Mental Cases’. But
instead of the irony of Sassoon’s ‘Repression of War Experience’ or the delicate
pathos of Gurney’s ‘Strange Hells’—two other poems on neurasthenia—what we
have in Owen is an obsessively corporeal imagination:
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.^41Like Keats, he immerses himself—and his readers—in the sensuous world of
his subjects, but in the context of war, an over-investment in the senses at once
produces poetry and madness: while it enables him to transmit the paroxysm of
pain, it also creates a fevered consciousness. Synaesthesia and neurasthenia are
combined in lines such as ‘on their sense|Sunlight seems a blood-smear’; or, in
(^36) Owen, ‘Lines Written on my Nineteenth Birthday’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 12.
(^37) Elaine Scarry,The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 5.
(^38) Owen to Susan Owen, 16 Nov. 1913, inCollected Letters, 212; Owen to Susan Owen, 20 May
1912, ibid. 137; Owen to Mary Owen, 16 Nov. 1912, ibid. 169. 39
40 Owen, ‘Wild with All Regrets’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 356.
Siegfried Sassoon,Siegfried’s Journey,1916–1920(London: Faber, 1945), 62.
(^41) Owen, ‘Mental Cases’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 169.