AUTUMN BOOKS

But for Beaumont-Hamel . . • BY JOHN BAYLEY .-r swain a theme and sought for it in vain'

. the opening line of Yeats's poem is the candid cry of the professional bard, and it con- tains the real reason for Yeats's antipathy to Wilfred Owen. Owen's theme was thrust upon him by the war, which he could not absorb or surround with the hard pearly shell of poetic egotism. 'Tennyson was a great child,' he wrote, 'so should I have been but for Beaumont-Hamel.' It is unjust, but its injustice reveals a basic an- tagonism which—between poets as between other human beings—divides beyond the reach of sympathy and understanding. This division, be- tween Us who have had the experience and You who have not, was deeply and terribly apprehended in the First War, overriding all national feelings, and its comparative absence in Hitler's war perhaps accounts for the absence there of the kind of war poetry to which Yeats so strongly objected. It also accounts for the alienation in the inter-war period between the young poets, spellbound by Owen, and an audi- ence who resented being told that the poetry they loved was not fit to speak and that they themselves were not fit to hear.

For Yeats. has a shrewd point. Hieratic manipulator of his own experience as he is, that experience still remains unexclusive and avail- able: he does not cut himself off from us. Terrible and unimaginable as it was, the war trauma that cut off its victims from us also produced its discharge of cant, hysteria and self- pity—the 'blood, dirt, and sucked sugar-stick' that repelled Yeats. He had not the generosity to sympathise on the human level with what repelled him wsthetically; he could not see that that dangerous phrase, 'the poetry is in the pity,' Which would be cant in most poets, is miracu- lously true in Owen. The most remarkable thing in all Owen's great range of poetic weight and fulfilment is his ability to make permanently sublime sentiments which in any other poet would become localised, dated, shrill.

Nevertheless, except you share

With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell, Whose world is but the trembling of a flare, And heaven but as the highway for a shell,

You shall not hear their mirth. . . .

Heart, you were never hot Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot. . . .

Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not Amazing how it works; for nothing is more tire- some than to be told that one is utterly deficient in feeling for and understanding of something which one was not there to understand. Yet there IS no element here of the historically curious, of the powerful localised satire of Sassoon, I'd like to see a tank come down the stalls Lurching to rag-time tunes or Home Sweet Home, And there'd be no more jokes in music halls To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume. .

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WILFRED OWEN. Edited by C. Day Lewis, (Chatto, 21s.) nort of Owen, the rather priggish young officer, who wrote to his brother-1 deliberately tell you all this to educate you to the actualities of war'—and who proclaimed, 'All a poet can do today is warn.' Many bad poets after him—and a few good ones—were to be obediently, but not very effectively, minatory.

`Hearts made great with shoe—that is the clue to the great and permanent stature of Owen. Like Tolstoy and Shakespeare, he celebrates with majestic understanding that enlargement of the human spirit which makes (or has made) even out of war a value, like the value of love. And like them he is able to do this only because he came to a full comprehension of its misery, and of the misery of the human situation which made such injustices possible. 'Miners' is as., moving as any of the war poems, and one of the most haunting of all, 'The Send-Off,' seems both to contain and transcend all the muted terrors to which this century has since accus- tomed us—trains of deportees, hidden outrage, guilt, the desire not to know.

So, secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went. They were not ours: We never heard to which front these were sent.

But in transcending it cannot but lay a kind of benediction. Owen knew this. 'These elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next.' It is the truest and most perceptive comment in his preface. The effect of distancing is remarkable.. .. 'It seemed that out of battle I escaped.' (Strange Meeting,' however, is by no means Owen's best poem: too much a Georgian frontal assault and lacking the oblique compressed originality of 'The Send- Off' or

Men remember alien ardours As the dusk unearths old mournful odours.

In the garden unborn child souls wail

And the dead scribble on walls.)

But his sublime effects are sometimes weirdly simple, as in the very immature poem 'Storm':

Glorious will shine the opening of my heart: The land shall freshen that was under gloom.

His effects of diction arc extremely personal and don't depend on the vocabulary of a war- poet—stick-bombs, five-nines and so forth. Sig- nificantly he says of a poem that does: 'I wrote something in Sassoon's style' (he worshipped Sassoon) and he was anxious that the ordinary soldier should not think him arty ('Above all I am not concerned with poetry), but in fact he is as dependent as Keats on an idiom worked out of literature. Continually we find him revising out the emphases of war. The marvellous line, 'And finished fields of autumns that are old .. originally ended with 'of wire-serags rusty-old.'

Cecil Day Lewis's Collected Editions of the poems, with variants and revisions, enables us to pick out this kind of thing: and also contains all the surviving juvenilia. It is an immense ad- vance on the Blunden edition and it also con- tains as a postscript Blunden's excellent memoir. Mr. Day Lewis's own introduction is full of the illumination that one would expect from a poet who followed Owen. He seems to have discovered in a letter of 1916 Owen's first use of

assonance: 'I was isolated scouting—felt like scooting.' This suggests to me that the device

was not so much technical as a part of the natural movement of Owen's mind, facetious- ness turning under the pressure of feeling into

effects of pathos and calm, lopsided horror. It is this verbal personality, sometimes clumsy— They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

—sometimes what used to be called 'mawkish,' but always iptensely and disconcertingly charac- teristic, whibh most connects Owen with his

admired Keats. Keats, too, has a verbal odour which many (I suspect Yeats was one) find a

bit repellent, too close to the real and shape- less yearnings and tears of living, but it is surely this aspect of Keats, rather than his more ob- viously romantic side, which is most fulfilled in Owen. Assonance„is alive in him, not one of the artifices of eternity. The Keats who writes of 'close bosom-friend of the maturing sun' and of lips 'warm with dew at ooze from living blood' is very close to Owen, though Owen's sexual admirations were obviously different: consider his relation to the 'strange friend' in 'Strange Meeting,' a poem like 'Three rompers run together . . .,' or the very remarkable 'Maundy Thursday,' written before the war and I think published here for the first time. In it

Owen describes with astonishing skill the ,ways in which a congregation kiss the silver crucifix 'between the brown hands of a server-lad': Above the crucifix 1 bent my head: The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead: And yet I bowed, yea, kissed—my lips did cling (I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing). It is a poem full of gentleness and humour as

well as, I suppose, sex, and it certainly does not reject Christianity: we see from the war poems how much the figure of Christ (as opposed to God) meant to Owen. All this in him may seem muddled and distasteful, but the point is that in Keats and Owen sex is important—as in Owen war is supremely important—as the focus to generalise and reverberate human sympathy. Keats and Owen are much more appealing figures than D. H. Lawrence, but it would not be absurd to see the three of them as represent-

ing something unique and admirable in English life, decent, unclassed, intelligent-hearted and refusing (almost unwittingly in Keats's and Owen's case) to endorse the current forms and

decorums of war, love and language.

Owen's brother Harold would no doubt re- main unmoved by this eulogy and might even produce a quiet grin. His autobiographyt de- setves more space than a footnote to his brother's

t JOURNEY FROM 0 BSCURI1 Y : WILFRED OWEN 1893-1918. MEMOIRS OF TI IE OWEN FAMILY. By

Harold Owen. (0.U.P., 30s.)

poems, but as this is only the first instalment there is time for justice to be done. It is, very properly, about himself and his ambition to be a painter, and its total lack of retrospective fraternal reverence is delightful ('the next morn- ing Wilfred was back to his stuffy old self, lethargic and inclined to snappishness'). But there is not much about Wilfred; he is merely one of the family, and his brother gives a re- markable and true picture of how the members of such a family combined affection for each other with a proper lack of interest: after Owen as poet, and the Blunden memoir, the change of viewpoint is almost Proustian. Owen's mother appears placid and inert, quite unaware of the strength of his devotion to her and pleased when he thought of going into the Church—the . mother behind Eng. Lit. (one thinks of Keats and Lawrence again, and Owen uses the verb 'mothered' with metaphorical richness twice in his poetry) is not always herself a powerful figure. Even if it had no connection with the poet, this would be a work of great fascination, and it also makes one wonder in what kind of light Keats or Lawrence would have appeared if Tom or George or Fred had happened to write an autobiography.