Sunday Best

In July​ 1917, shortly after his arrival at Craiglockhart War Hospital for neurasthenic officers on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Wilfred Owen drafted the first of the five poems published during his lifetime. ‘Sing me at dawn,’ it exclaims,

                             but only with your laugh:
Like sprightly Spring that laugheth into leaf;
Like Love, that cannot flute for smiling at Life.

‘Song of Songs’ appeared in the September 1917 issue of the Craiglockhart in-house magazine, the Hydra, of which Owen was the editor, and the following May was awarded a consolation prize in a poetry competition organised by the Bookman. His next poem, ‘Has Your Soul Sipped?’, also makes use of pararhyme, insistent alliteration and languorous, decadent, erotic diction: ‘Sweeter than nocturnes/Of the wild nightingale/Or than love’s nectar/After life’s gall’. A few weeks later, Owen began writing a poem that is about as far as it is possible to get from these melodious lyrics. The first draft of ‘The Dead-Beat’ begins:

He dropped, more sullenly, than wearily,
       Became a lump of stench, a clot of meat,
       And none of us could kick him to his feet.
He blinked at my revolver, blearily.

A subheading notes that this vignette from the trenches is ‘True – in the incidental’.

It’s hard to think of a poet more decisively transformed by meeting another poet than Wilfred Owen by Siegfried Sassoon. As Owen’s star-struck letters frequently acknowledge, the social gulf between them was considerable: six years older than his protégé, and more than a foot taller, Sassoon went to public school, was well connected, wealthy and published. What they had in common was poetry, homosexuality and their time at the front. Sassoon had not been admitted to Craiglockhart for ‘shell-shock’ – often seen as a euphemism for cowardice and especially frowned on when afflicting officers – but for his outspoken opposition to the war: egged on by pacifists such as Ottoline Morrell and Bertrand Russell, in June 1917 he had written a statement that was later read out in Parliament and published in the Times: ‘I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops,’ he declared, ‘and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.’ To limit the scandal, the authorities cannily decided not to court-martial Mad Jack, as he was known because of his reckless bravery, but to hospitalise him instead.

On 18 August Owen finally summoned up the courage to knock on his fellow inmate’s door, clutching several copies of Sassoon’s first book, The Old Huntsman and Other Poems. He found Sassoon cleaning his golf clubs, resplendent in a purple dressing-gown. Along with ‘The Dead-Beat’, ‘Song of Songs’ was one of the poems Owen showed Sassoon at their second meeting, and in a letter to his poetry-writing cousin Leslie Gunston, whose first and only volume, The Nymph and Other Poems, was about to be published, Owen reported that Sassoon was much taken by his lyric, pronouncing it ‘perfect work, absolutely charming, etc. etc. and begged that I would copy it out for him, to show to the powers that be’. To one of the powers that be, however, Sassoon was less enthusiastic, noting under the poem in the copy of the Hydra that he sent to Morrell: ‘The man who wrote this brings me quantities & I have to say kind things. He will improve, I think!’

Owen’s improvement in the annus mirabilis that followed is among the wonders of English poetry, comparable only to that of his greatest poetic hero, John Keats, who inevitably features in the list of luminaries with whom Owen compares Sassoon in a particularly excessive epistolary tribute:

Know that since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door, I held you as Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor + Amenophis IV in profile … If you consider what the above Names have severally done for me, you will know what you are doing. And you have fixed my Life – however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.

The colonel sandwiched between Elijah and Owen’s father-confessor was the old Etonian Noel Luxmoore, an army veteran who had lost a leg in the Boer War. Luxmoore led the battalion in which Owen first saw action in January 1917, and his inclusion in this eclectic pantheon is revealing of Owen’s continuing investment in the values and hierarchies of the military machine. Although exhilarated by Sassoon’s satirical attacks on the top brass, on bald, puffy, port-quaffing majors eager to ‘speed glum heroes up the line to death’, in the main Owen directed his scorn not at his army superiors but at the civilians back home who remained so blithely indifferent to the suffering being endured by those they’d cheerily waved off to war. ‘These men are worth/Your tears,’ he reprimands all who have not shared in the ‘sorrowful dark of hell’ of combat in ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ of late 1917: ‘You are not worth their merriment.’

Much of the power of Owen’s war poetry derives from his creation of an ‘us and them’. This kind of division was common in gay writers of the era, but in Owen’s case it also reflects his upbringing in a lower-middle-class evangelical household, presided over by his often ill but always adored mother, Susan: 554 of the 674 letters of his that survive are to Susan, and while he clearly kept quiet in these about his attraction to men, and rather downplayed the weakening of his faith, the bond between them remained astonishingly resilient. His first letter to her, written at the age of five, ends ‘With love from Wilfred I remain your loving son Wilfred,’ and his last, twenty years later, concludes equally affectionately: ‘I hope you are as warm as I am; as serene in your room as I am here; and that you think of me never in bed as resignedly as I think of you always in bed. Of this I am certain you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.’

Filial love and male comradeship are intricately entwined in this final bulletin dispatched from a smoky billet on 31 October 1918, four days before Owen’s platoon was ordered to construct a floating bridge across the Sambre-Oise canal. Despite a fearsome early morning barrage from British artillery, German machine-guns rained bullets on the advancing Manchesters, and Owen was killed either on the bank or while at work on the bridge in mid-canal. The telegram announcing his death to his family arrived exactly a week later, on the day the armistice was declared.

It was, however, Owen’s experiences during his first spell at the front that gave rise to the poems analysed by almost every GCSE student in the country. He arrived in France at the very end of December 1916, where he was assigned to the 2nd Manchesters and given command of No. 3 Platoon in A Company. ‘Have no anxiety,’ he writes with some bravado and pride to his mother on the eve of his first offensive, ‘I cannot do a better thing or be in a righter place.’ His next letter, of 16 January 1917, reveals that no place could possibly be less right.

I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last 4 days. I have suffered seventh hell.

I have not been at the front.

I have been in front of it.

By this he means that after a night-time sortie across ‘an octopus of sucking clay’, his unit had taken up residence in a German trench beyond no-man’s-land. Here they were subject to wave after wave of bombs, an ordeal described in the opening lines of ‘The Sentry’, which, like ‘The Dead-Beat’, Owen began shortly after he met Sassoon:

We’d found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew,
And gave us hell; for shell on frantic shell
Lit full on top, but never quite burst through.

Until one did. The sentry Owen had stationed at the entrance to the dug-out was blown down the stairs, and the poem brilliantly recreates the victim’s anguish and the officer’s authoritative but futile attempts to comfort him:

‘O sir – my eyes, – I’m blind, – I’m blind, – I’m blind.’
Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
And said if he could see the least blurred light
He was not blind; in time they’d get all right.
‘I can’t,’ he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids’,
Watch my dreams still …

Eyes and eyeballs feature prominently in Owen’s poetic versions of incidents he witnessed at the front or during his recuperation: it is ‘the white eyes writhing in his face’ of the gassed soldier in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ that most haunt him, while in ‘Mental Cases’ shell-shocked combatants are so traumatised that their eyes ‘shrink tormented/Back into their brains, because on their sense/Sunlight seems a blood-smear.’ At the other end of the scale are the eyes of the men in the burying party recalled in the last lines of ‘Exposure’: wielding their picks and shovels in the frozen mud, they ‘pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice.’

Owen’s letters to his mother contain the germs of many of the images he later worked into poems. On 19 January 1917 he attempts to convey to her the horrors of no-man’s-land: ‘It is pockmarked like a body of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer.’ Under snow it is ‘like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness’. This apocalyptic and lunar imagery is redeployed in ‘The Show’, in which he translates the battlefield and its opposed armies into an allegorical panorama of horror and disease: the troops are depicted as uncoiling caterpillars creating slimy paths across ‘a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,/Grey, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,/And pitted with great pocks and scabs of plagues’. It becomes apparent from his graphic and appalled letters home that it was the urge to make his mother, in the first instance, see and feel what the Western Front was really like that drove Owen to mobilise all his literary resources – above all his knowledge of the Bible and of Keats and Shelley – to express what to many seemed inexpressible; later in the year, after meeting Sassoon, he found a way of allowing the same urge to transform his Swinburnian poetic idiom into something radically different.

One can hear a proleptic echo of this metamorphosis in his next letter to Susan, of 4 February, in which he ponders for the first time the bizarre gap between patriotic poetic effusions and the actual experience of the trenches:

Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one’s own mouth (for all are devil ridden) – everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious. But to sit with them all day, all night … and a week later to come back and find them still sitting there, in motionless groups, THAT is what saps the ‘soldierly spirit’.

And yet the ‘soldierly spirit’ that Owen here lightly mocks is also crucial to the emotional effects of his most famous poems. It is the intensity and – although it may sound an odd word in the context of trench warfare – the innocence infusing his depictions of camaraderie that charge the poems and differentiate them from the work of other soldier-poets of the First World War. Like Walt Whitman before him – whom, oddly, he seems never to have come across – Owen fashioned from battlefield carnage a homoerotic sublime. ‘Red lips are not so red/As the stained stones kissed by the English dead’ ‘Greater Love’ begins, and goes on to conjugate a series of parallels between dead or wounded soldiers and the poetic tropes available to an ardent lover. The irony implicit in such a conceit is obvious, but Owen’s absorption in the physical being of the soldiers, his ability to feel and express ‘pity’, to use his own favoured term, banishes whatever satirical intent he may have had: ‘Heart, you were never hot/Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot.’ The us and them division is to the fore in such lines, which on one level seem to present death in war as a high romantic consummation devoutly to be wished; whatever emotions a civilian in love may feel, they can never match those of a soldier making his sacrifice in accordance with 15.13 of St John, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’:

And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail;
       Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

Like Keats when enraptured, Owen at his most fervent moves beyond inhibition and self-consciousness, here boldly evoking both Christ’s Noli me tangere and his crucifixion. Such analogies were commonplace in the iconography of pro-war propaganda, and on occasion, as in ‘Le Christianisme’, were ridiculed by Owen himself, but here they serve to elevate his band of brothers into an Elysium of martyrs united and transfigured by the ‘pity of War’, or at least by the poetry that war inspired in Owen.

On occasion he allows himself the momentary comfort of sharing in rhetoric that would have delighted any Kaiser-hating politician or chief of staff. At the end of January, he and his platoon spent two days and nights without shelter in a snowstorm on Redan Ridge, an ordeal he told his mother was ‘almost wusser’ than constantly being shelled in their Boche dug-out. It was so bitter their water cans froze, so they had nothing to drink. ‘The marvel,’ he wrote home, ‘is that we did not all die of cold.’ ‘We were marooned on a frozen desert,’ he went on. ‘There is not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death. Not a blade of grass, not an insect; once or twice a day the shadow of a big hawk, scenting carrion.’

In the event, only one of his company perished, the country boy elegised in the sonnet ‘Futility’, whose corpse the ‘kind old sun’ is unable to reanimate. The much longer ‘Exposure’ presents an unrelenting account of their desperate vigil, and makes superb use of the off-rhymes with which Owen had begun experimenting as far back as the summer of 1914:

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us …
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent …
Low, drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient …
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
                       But nothing happens.

Military terms such as flares, salient and sentries are interwoven with the battered remnants of the Romantic tradition that first made Owen yearn to be a poet, with Keats’s ‘My heart aches’ here morphing into ‘Our brains ache.’ The letter recounting their time on Redan Ridge suggests it was his feet that hurt:

My feet ached until they could ache no more, and so they temporarily died. I was kept warm by the ardour of Life within me. I forgot hunger in the hunger for Life. The intensity of your Love reached me and kept me living. I thought of you and Mary [his sister] without a break all the time. I cannot say I felt any fear.

In ‘Exposure’ itself the numb, drenched soldiers’ attempt to ignore their plight by thinking of home proves a failure, or so the narrator, more a collective voice than an individual one, records; they get as far as imagining hearth fires and jingling crickets before the vision fades: ‘all closed: on us the doors are closed, – /We turn back to our dying’. But why are they dying?

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
Nor ever sun smile true on child, or field, or fruit.
For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid;
Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,
                       For love of God seems dying.

The only way to make sense of this stanza is as a resurgence of the ‘soldierly spirit’ that must have helped Owen’s platoon survive their fifty hours on this forsaken ridge, where ‘for ten minutes every hour whizz-bangs fell a few yards short of us.’ The belief bonds the beleaguered platoon, however dubious and clichéd its terms and expression, however transparently a fantasy. The transition that follows to shrivelled hands, puckered foreheads and the icy eyes of the burying party leaves this sudden recourse to keep-the-home-fires-burning rhetoric in a vacuum, a symptom of the multiple, inconsistent forms the ‘hunger for Life’ may assume.

Owen spent around thirty days in action during his five months at or near the front line in the first half of 1917. In March he was hospitalised for a week after tumbling in the night into a fifteen-foot hole, possibly a ruined cellar, and suffering concussion. It is not known how long he lay there, since the letter describing this accident has been lost, but it must have formed the basis for the scenario of his most famous poem, which borrowed its title from some lines in Shelley’s Revolt of Islam: ‘and all/Seemed like some brothers on a journey wide/Gone forth, whom now strange meeting did befall/In a strange land.’ Owen’s copy of Henry Cary’s translation of the Divine Comedy indicates that he had read at least cantos X to XV of the Inferno, and it was surely the Dantesque aspects of ‘Strange Meeting’ that drew a belated compliment from T.S. Eliot, who in 1964 described it as ‘not only one of the most moving pieces of verse inspired by the war of 1914-18, but also a technical achievement of great originality’.

As​ in early Eliot, an entire tradition of visionary poetry disintegrates or implodes in the ‘profound dull tunnel’ into which the narrator escapes from battle, there to meet his doppelgänger, the enemy he deprived of a life figured in richly Keatsian terms (‘I went hunting wild/ After the wildest beauty in the world’). Underlying both ‘Strange Meeting’ and The Waste Land is Dante’s appalled exclamation on arriving in Hell: ‘io non averei creduto/che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta,’ or as translated by Eliot, ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’ The prophetic, evangelical strand of Owen’s idiom – his vision of the poet as both soothsayer and martyr – is vividly dramatised in the German soldier’s bitter monologue, but also made wholly hypothetical: biblical, Homeric, Wordsworthian, Shelleyan echoes are tumbled together in a series of fragments not so much shored against ruin as whirled around and broken apart, as if hit by a mortar:

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

It is the ‘cess of war’, however, that enables the astonishingly intimate final lines, in which death and eros formulate a pact that makes ‘Strange Meeting’ almost into a love poem. Here more than anywhere one becomes aware of the peculiar double bind enacted in Owen’s poetry, the thrill and satisfaction that accompany his tableaux of chaos and maiming. It is the ghost of Oscar Wilde, whose loyal confidant Robbie Ross had befriended Owen some months before the drafting of ‘Strange Meeting’, who haunts the violent Liebestod enacted in the poem’s conclusion:

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark, for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now …

‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves,’ as Wilde wrote in ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. Although the contest is asymmetrical, since the German finds himself unable to fight, once his account of their struggle is concluded the poem allows the combatants to drift, as if released for ever from their antagonism, into shared slumber.

Although Owen claimed not to feel ‘at all fuddled’ by the blow to his head, on discharge from hospital he began to show the first signs of shell-shock: ‘My long rest has shaken my nerve,’ he reported to his mother on 4 April, on the way to rejoin his battalion. His next stint of action proved particularly arduous and dangerous and ended in another ghastly entombment. After a shell landed near where he was resting by a railway cutting, Owen spent days stranded ‘in a hole just big enough to lie in, and covered with corrugated iron’, in the close proximity of the body parts of a fellow officer whose corpse had been disinterred by the blast. Relief eventually arrived, but Owen was soon after diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia – the doctor is ‘nervous about my nerves’, as he put it to Susan. His new commander, Major Dempster, seems to have taken a less understanding view, and may even have accused Owen of cowardice, a slur that found its way into Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. But the army should be given credit for the treatment Owen received at hospitals in France and Hampshire, and then at Craiglockhart, where Arthur Brock implemented a regime that he called ‘ergotherapy’, a kind of work-cure, to which the poet responded well, not least because it involved writing poems on themes set by Brock, such as the battle between Hercules and Antaeus: the result was a fine blank verse depiction of two men in close physical combat, as in ‘Strange Meeting’, called ‘The Wrestlers’.

In Craiglockhart Owen also observed, and wrote movingly about, soldiers whose problems were similar to his own, the ‘Mental Cases’, he calls them in the poem of that title, ‘whose minds the dead have ravished’.

– Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
– Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

It’s possible that Owen saw his return to the front as the war neared its end as an opportunity to distance himself from such ‘set-smiling corpses’ as well as to banish suspicions about his own ‘soldierly spirit’. His conspicuous bravery in an attack on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme Line on 1 October earned him the Military Cross, and in the letter telling his mother he recounts shooting a man with his revolver at thirty yards, before adding pointedly: ‘My nerves are in perfect order.’ The citation in the London Gazette suggests that Owen’s exploits in this skirmish could stand comparison with those of Mad Jack: ‘He personally captured an enemy M[achine] G[un] from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.’

In between his two spells of active service Owen composed the poems that, along with Oh, What a Lovely War! and the final series of Blackadder, have shaped the First World War in the British imagination: ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (which Sassoon helped him lick into shape), ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (‘Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,/Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time’), ‘The Send-Off’ (‘So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went’), ‘Disabled’, ‘Spring Offensive’. Owen also began to sense the direction his life might take after demobilisation. Courtesy of his friendships with Sassoon and Ross, by late 1917 he was moving in a circle of gay men that included Osbert Sitwell and C.K. Scott Moncrieff – who would translate Proust and who shared with Owen a love of Alec Waugh’s ardent public school romance, The Loom of Youth (roughly the equivalent of wearing a green carnation). He also met Graves, whose wedding to Nancy Nicholson he attended and who, his Uranian days far behind him, later described Owen as ‘a passive homosexual’ who was in love with Sassoon. Owen’s biographers argue that it was unlikely his relations went beyond flirtation, beyond the exchange of ‘delicious winks’ with men such as Harold Monro, the gay (although twice-married) founder of the Poetry Bookshop.

These must have been heady days for someone of Owen’s class and education, who had been neither to public school nor university, and whose father was a moderately salaried employee of the railway. Edith Sitwell approached him for contributions to Wheels, the anthology that she and Osbert edited, and in June 1918 ‘Futility’ and ‘Hospital Barge’ appeared in the Nation. While literary London was not exactly at his feet, Owen was entitled to feel that he was considered by distinguished writers and editors as a promising young poet, and his work accordingly grew in confidence, range and daring: the question-and-answer poem, ‘Who Is the God of Canongate’, depicts the life of a rent boy, while ‘The Ghost of Shadwell Stair’ is explicitly in dialogue with Wilde’s ‘Impression du Matin’.

It may be that more of Owen’s private life filtered into his correspondence than we will ever know. Before issuing the Collected Letters he co-edited with John Bell in 1967, Owen’s younger brother Harold scissored out certain passages and scored through others in heavy Indian ink. Harold later claimed that most of his obliterations were trivial and were made to avoid offending the families of individuals mentioned. He also tinkered with Owen’s choice of words in order to raise the tone of his brother’s correspondence, eliminating slang terms as well as ‘words with mildly disagreeable associations such as pimples, boils and so on’, although it seems many of these ‘improvements’ were reversed while he and Bell were putting together their edition. Owen could be censorious and priggish, and he was also acutely class-conscious – indeed he might even have commended his brother’s desire to make sure the letters presented him in his Sunday best. Harold’s meddling has been much lamented by Owen scholars, but it seems that archivists at the Owen Collection at the Harry Ransom Centre in Texas have recently been experimenting with modern technology that may allow the redacted passages to be recovered. The introduction to Jane Potter’s excellent new edition of the correspondence carefully assesses the damage done by his brother and presents a fine summation of the contexts and interest of the letters themselves. She includes most of those written after Owen joined the Artists’ Rifles in October 1915 as well as a judicious selection from his prewar years in Dundsen near Reading, where he was the assistant of an evangelical vicar, and in Bordeaux, where he taught English, initially in the Berlitz School, and subsequently to the offspring of wealthy families.

Owen’s return to the front in September 1918 might easily not have happened. Scott Moncrieff began pulling strings to secure him a job in the War Office, and in a letter of mid-June to his mother, Owen presents this prospect as almost certain. In August he failed a medical, his ‘cardiac valves’ being deemed suspect, while his feet remained damaged by the frostbite he suffered on Redan Ridge. But Scott Moncrieff’s manoeuvring backfired, and on 26 August Owen was instructed to report to Folkestone, from where he embarked for France. ‘Impossible to feel depressed,’ he wrote to Susan on arrival in Boulogne. ‘All Auguries are of good fortune. How blessedly different from last year!’ A sense of triumph infused many of his bulletins over the following two months – as if now the front line really was the right place to be. It must have helped that the Allies were steadily advancing. ‘I came out in order to help these boys,’ he wrote home after the Manchesters’ successful attack on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme Line, ‘directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. I have done the first.’ In time it became clear that he had done the second too.