The Crown of Immortelles
The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Edited by Edmund Blunden. (Chatto and Windus. 6s.) MR. BLUNDEN and Mr. Sassoon, the only War poets, apart from Mr. Robert Graves, whose work may rank with that of Wilfred Owen, have both worked to acclaim the genius of their dead friend. Mr. Sassoon edited the poems in 1920. Since
then the marvellous artistry and emotional force of the work have been more and more appreciated, and a demand has arisen for any additional poems that may possibly have escaped the first edition. Mr. Blunden has undertaken the task, and nobody could have done it better ; for his view of the War, and his theory of the art of poetry, are in the same kind as were Owen's. His scholarly habits are known to all book-lovers, and our readers will be glad to learn that in future he will be able to indulge them fully, since he has been given a Fellowship and a tutorship at Merton College.
Wilfred Owen was born in 1893, and was killed in France on November 4th, 1918. At the age of fourteen he discovered a vocation to become a poet, and by the time he went to the War he had already become an initiate, with a large substance of practice and achievement to his credit. He first took Keats for his master. The fact has some pathos in it, for we see how closely these two creatures of large destiny were associated in their compact with Time, the adversary of human purpose. Owen had even more meagre a .bargain than had Keats ; for though their span was almost the same, Owen spent the latter part of his amongst the inferno of the War. His work there- fore was more uneasy, more preoccupied with one theme, than was that of Keats. In addition he was, as a creature of his Age, less certain of personal and romantic values, and thus had to move about with less assurance amongst the experi- mental modes of verse-forms.
In that wandering he has made some valuable discoveries. Few poets have done more with assonance and broken rhyme than he has. These subtle literary devices have been perfected by him to a use of which one would hardly have suspected them of being adaptable ; that is, to convey the frustration of the battlefields ; the denials ; the horror that became obscene in its intensity ; and the quiet counter-movement of the day- to-day spirit of endurance and comradeship, a tenderness greater than the love between man and wife. These qualities are in Owen's work, not only directly stated, but also by colour, feel, and smell, woven and impregnated into the texture of it. Here is an example :
" 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."
Notice how every vowel is chosen by an elaborate system of echoes ; how rhymes catch together, and carry ghosts of themselves down the stanza : " brothers ; withers ; bothers " how the " o " sounds are threaded through the verse like a mournful consciousness that sets the groundtone of the mood ; as it were an accompaniment of the never-ceasing rub of the battlefield upon the soldier's ears, and the sighing upon his soul of the dead who are grateful for their extinction. That delicate attunement of his senses is what makes Owen in the same kind as Keats, the poet to whom by affinity of temper he was drawn. Even the War could not destroy his delight in minute and scrupulous perception. During the Spring Offensive of 1918 he could watch the troops advancing, and realize :
" Of them who running on that high last place Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up On the hot blast and fury of hell's upsurge, Or plunged and fell away past this world's verge, Some say God caught them even before they fell."
Yet of those same doomed men he could observe with the dis- ciplined detachment of the artist, how :
" Hour after hour they ponder the warm field—
And the far valley behind, whore the buttercup Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up, Where even the little brambles would not yield, But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands."
Such is the paradox of art, that by this touch, half realistic, half a Theocritan echo, whereby we see the flower-pollen pow- dering the soldiers' boots, the terror and the tribute, the horror and the absolution are brought simultaneously into our hearts.
That is the art of Wilfred Owen, a rare poet ; perhaps, like Spenser, a poets' poet, by reason of his craftsmanship. Before the War came he had dedicated himself to this calling, full of the fine arrogance of youth that claims the power of Apollo, regardless of the fate of Marysas. The War taught him to be content with less ; and in the end has given him, more swiftly even than he coveted, the immortality at which he aimed :
" If ever I had dreamed of my dead name High in the heart of London, unsurpassed By Time for ever, and the Fugitive, Fame, There seeking a long sanctuary at last— Or if I onetime hoped to hide its shame, —Shame of success, and sorrow of defeats— Under those holy cypresses, the same That shade always the quiet place of Keats, Now rather thank I God there is no risk Of gravers scoring it with florid screed. Let my inscription be this soldier's disc . . . Wear it, sweet friend, inscribe no date nor deed. But may thy heartbeat kiss it, night and day, Until the name grow blurred and fade away."
Previous page
