Category: poetry

In Vietnam (at last)
he did not even realise
how foolish his words.

I just found a marvellous new source for Wilfred Owen’s war poetry, thanks to Oxford University. It lets you view multiple manuscript versions of these poems.

And today’s poem is…

Insensibility

1

Happy are men who yet before they are killed

Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion fleers

Or makes their feet

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

The front line withers,

But they are troops who fade, not flowers,

For poets’ tearful fooling:

Men, gaps for filling:

Losses, who might have fought

Longer; but no one bothers.

2

And some cease feeling

Even themselves or for themselves.

Dullness best solves

The tease and doubt of shelling,

And Chance’s strange arithmetic

Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.

They keep no check on armies’ decimation.

3

Happy are these who lose imagination:

They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Their spirit drags no pack.

Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.

Having seen all things red,

Their eyes are rid

Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.

And terror’s first constriction over,

Their hearts remain small-drawn.

Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle

Now long since ironed,

Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.

4

Happy the soldier home, with not a notion

How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,

And many sighs are drained.

Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:

His days are worth forgetting more than not.

He sings along the march

Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,

The long, forlorn, relentless trend

From larger day to huger night.

5

We wise, who with a thought besmirch

Blood over all our soul,

How should we see our task

But through his blunt and lashless eyes?

Alive, he is not vital overmuch;

Dying,* not mortal overmuch;

Nor sad, nor proud,

Nor curious at all.

He cannot tell

Old men’s placidity from his.

6

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones.

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever moans in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears.

Manuscript Sources

OEFL,
Fasc T, f328r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f329r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f330r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f328v |
BL,
MS 43720, f19a |
BL,
MS 43720, f20a |

---

* In the original text taken from the Oxford website, this was written “Drying”. But sense and a tiny bit of detective work in the ms. sources (see Comments) indicate alike that it should be “Dying”.

Down in the lengthy Gallipoli discussion commenter Friendly Fire has posted a favorite poem of his, a rather thoughtful piece of war remembrance, “Poppies of war”, by E.M. Warnock.
I’ve always been struck by another British poet of World War 1, myself: Wilfred Owen. That site there says, rather coyly that:

Owen was injured in March 1917 and sent home; he was fit for duty in August, 1918, and returned to the front. November 4, just seven days before the Armistice, he was caught in a German machine gun attack and killed. He was twenty-five when he died.
The bells were ringing on November 11, 1918, in Shrewsbury to celebrate the Armistice when the doorbell rang at his parent’s home, bringing them the telegram telling them their son was dead.

Well, “injured” in 1917– yes. The guy had a raging case of shell shock. The condition that was later “discovered” by the Yanks as PTSD.
He was sent to the British military hospital at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh, where numerous other shell-shocked British warrior-poets were also gathered. (Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, etc.)
The main doctor figure there who seemed vaguely to have an idea what was going on was Dr. William Rivers Rivers. If you haven’t read Pat Barker’s brilliant “Regeneration” trilogy of novels about that convergence of tortured souls, you should.
I seem to recall that in her account, even Rivers– the most humane of the docs there– was certain that the “best” thing for his patients was to get them back to the front. Something to do with “manhood”, as I recall? Of course, issues of homosexuality barely repressed or not repressed at all were enormous at Craiglockhart, as they were throughout the entire history of the British Empire…
By the way, that latter site I linked to is one I just discovered: “The Heritage of the Great War” a bilingual, Dutch-English site with material written by a Rob Ruggenberg. He even has a little slideshow of photos of the Gallipoli battles there…
Anyway, back to Wilfred Owen. Here’s the first of my picks for today:

Parable of the Old Men and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretch\ed forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son. . . .

Powerful, huh?
Now you’ll have to click on “continue” to read the next one:

Continue reading “Wilfred Owen’s gut-socking words”

I read this in The New Yorker, and was moved by it:

Now, when the waters are pressing mightily
by Yehuda Amichai

Now, when the waters are pressing mightily
on the walls of the dams,
now, when the white storks, returning,
are transformed in the middle of the firmament
into fleets of jet planes,
we will feel again how strong are the ribs
and how vigorous is the warm air in the lungs
and how much daring is needed to love on the exposed plain,
when the great dangers are arched above,
and how much love is required
to fill all the empty vessels
and the watches that stopped telling time,
and how much breath,
a whirlwind of breath,
to sing the small song of spring.

Translated from the Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier.