Wilfred Owen

1

WILFRED OWEN! This is a name that has gathered a continual accretion of fire. It glows. It lives clothed in flame. ... On the day when at last the news came that the Second World War was over, under circumstances so terrible and portentous as to overshadow any feeling of happiness; in that strange desert of a holiday created for public rejoicing in which there yet could exist no feeling of joy, certain lines drifted into my mind: —

For an instant, I could not remember who had written them, and then, with the shock that comes when one recognizes another of the distorted repetitions of history, I identified them, and in consequence today take up my pen to salute, across the intervening gap of over thirty years, the genius of a poet killed at the end of the First World War. So long ago: yet it was just such a summer day as this when I last saw him.

I did not know Wilfred Owen for long, hardly for more than a year, I suppose, but the friendships we possessed in common, notably with Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Ross, and the fact that we were deeply in sympathy in our views concerning the war and its conduct soon matured our relationship.

He was swift to seize the point and character of those with whom he came in contact, and eager, further, that glory should crown all whom he met in this world fresh to him, into which he had been introduced by Siegfried Sassoon, whose poetry he admired no less than the courage, physical and moral, and in two opposite respects, with which Sassoon had faced the war. And here we approach one of the characteristics that distinguished Owen. He manifested a tremendous capacity for admiration, for reverence; a quality which perhaps every poet, however much of a rebel he may be in other directions, must needs possess. It showed in his conduct towards contemporaries and elders no less than in his attitude towards the great who had gone before. It sounds from much of his early verse; in the last stanza, for example, of the poem he wrote in the summer of 1912, when he was nineteen, “On Seeing a Lock of Keats’ Hair.”

It seems, then, only just that in return we should show reverence to, and exalt the memory of, this great poet, and those of us fortunate enough to have known him can best accomplish this by sifting our recollections of him, and by trying to describe him as he was, even superficially, how he looked, how he talked — a task all the more necessary because his surviving friends daily grow fewer. Indeed that I have not brought myself to the portraying of him before is because the cruelty of Fate, which deprived England of a poet of such stature when he was twenty-five, prevented me for many years from wishing to look back in that particular direction.

The quality of greatness that differentiates him from other war poets is in the truth both of his poetry and of his response to war. If he can be properly called a War Poet — since, greater than that, he was a Poet — he may be the only writer who answers truly to that description; the first, as he may be the last, for the very phrase War Poet indicates a strange twentieth-century phenomenon, the attempt to combine two incompatibles. There had been no War Poets in the Peninsular, Crimean, or Boer wars. But war had suddenly become transformed by the effort of scientist and mechanician into something so infernal, so inhuman, that it was recognized that only their natural enemy, the poet, could pierce through the armor of horror with which they were encased, to the pity at the human core; only the poet could steadily contemplate the struggle at the level of tragedy. . . . The invention of the atomic bomb again changed these values: for war has once more altered its character, and an Atomic-Bomb Poet is one not to be thought of. . . .

No, Owen was a poet — a War Poet only because the brief span of his maturity coincided with a war of hitherto unparalleled sweep, viciousness, and stupidity. Alone of contemporary poets he fused, without confusing, the thoughts and emotions of war; but his compassionate heart could have been moved by other matters to the same profound and poignant expression.

His feelings about the struggle in which he was involved are stated by implication in his finest poems; they are summarized more forthrightly still in the following passage from a letter he wrote while in hospital in the spring of 1917:—

Already I have comprehended a light which never will filter into the dogma of any national church: namely, that one of Christ’s essential commands was: passivity at any price! Suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed; but do not kill. It may be a chimerical and an ignominious principle, but there it is. It can only be ignored, and I think pulpit professionals are ignoring it very skilfully and successfully indeed. . . . And am I not myself a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience? . . . Christ is literally in “no man’s land.” There men often hear His voice: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend. Is it spoken in English only and French? I do not believe so. Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.

In a document found among his papers—a curious, fragmentary work of genius intended as a preface for his unpublished poems, and composed at the Front in the weeks immediately before he was killed — he writes: —

“The Poetry is in the Pity.” Yes, but it is also, in Owen’s case, in the poetry, It is through the poetry of it that Pity makes her voice heard. All through his poems, even those he wrote when a boy, runs not only the same deeply flowing stream of feeling, but the same individual music, both like and unlike that of the great poets at the beginning of the previous century, of whom he was the heir. As a poet, he advanced, moreover, both in content and technique, by natural degrees from the conventional to the original, instead of beginning, as do so many writers, by being original when young and then lapsing later into the academic. His use of assonances was a profound modification of traditional English verse usage, and found its perfect expression in the most famous and the most moving of his poems, “Strange Meeting,” as great a poem as exists in our tongue. Let us turn then,

What do we hear; what are the young to hear from him?

2

THE material facts of Wilfred Owen’s short life are soon told. He was born at Plas Wilmot, Oswestry, on March 18, 1893. Even in his earliest years, he loved, as we might have presumed, the sound of words: for his mother said, “He was always a very thoughtful, imaginative child—not very robust, and never cared for games. As a little child his greatest pleasure was for me to read to him, even after he could read himself.” He was educated at the Birkenhead Institute across the river from Liverpool, to which city his family had moved. About the age of thirteen or fourteen, he showed a passionate desire for learning, and began to reveal the great power that poetry exercised over him — though a poem he wrote when he was twenty tells us that it had been at Broxton by the Hill, where he went for a holiday when he was ten, that he first felt his boyhood fill

Between his fourteenth and sixteenth years he spent two holidays in France, a country for which he developed a great affection. In 1910, he matriculated at the London University. His early verses, written with the greatest diffidence at this time, reflect his continual reading of Keats, and the adoration he cherished for him. In 1913, a serious illness led to his seeking a more equable winter climate in France, where he accepted an engagement as tutor at Bordeaux — a post he filled for some two years.

This period must have been most important in his development; he was keenly appreciative of the beauty of the mountains; and he was fortunate enough to become acquainted with Laurent Tailhade, the poet. Tailhade, it is clear from the work of both of them, exercised no direct influence upon the young man. Indeed, there is little sign in his work of any influences save those of Shakespeare, the Bible, and Keats — especially Keats: and this is unexpected, because of all the poets of the English Romantic age he was the most perfect, and therefore, you would have presumed, the least likely quarry for others to work; because it is generally the great but incomplete poet who is the father of those to come. This by the way. . . . No doubt Tailhade’s conversation and his knowledge of the French literary world were of the greatest interest to Owen. It was plainly a happy interval, and his poems written at this time show a light and gaiety that events were soon to deny to them forever. In July, 1914, the last month of the last year of the old world, he wrote the poem beginning

During this score of months he grew to understand the French way of thinking, and to learn to talk and write in French; though about this accomplishment he remained typically diffident.

Owen’s professional contract prevented him from returning until 1915, and in that year he came home and joined the Artists’ Rifles; being gazetted later to the Manchester Regiment, He was posted to the Second Battalion on the Somme front, where sharp fighting was already in progress, in January, 1917. His letters of the time present with perfect veracity and consummate skill the life of the infantry officer of those years in France and Flanders. Each war produces its own particular harvest of horrors for the soldier, and those of the 1914-1918 struggle— in addition to such flimsy but none the less abiding troubles as that which the poet notes in the words “Since I set foot on Calais quays I have not had dry feet”— were boredom, mud, and, in especial, No Man’s Land, the space between the enemy trenches and our own. Of this, since it is important to realize out of what suffering the fullness of his poetry was born, I give the following description from one of Owen’s letters:—

It is like the eternal place of gnashing of teeth; the Slough of Despond could be contained in one of its crater-holes; the fires of Sodom and Gomorrah could not light a candle to it — to find the way to Babylon the Fallen. It is pock-marked like a body of foulest disease, and its odour is the breath of cancer. I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air I have perceived it, and in the darkness, felt. . . . No Man’s Land under snow is like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness. . . .

3

AFTER months of hard service and almost intolerable cold — for the winter of 1916–1917 was particularly severe — Owen was taken into No. 1 General Hospital suffering from neurasthenia, and probably from concussion, the result of a fall into a cellar, of being blown up, and of exhaustion. Thence he was sent first to the Welsh Hospital at Netley, and finally to the Craiglockhart War Hospital for nervous cases, near Edinburgh — an establishment housed in a building which he compared to “a decayed hydro.” Here he led an active life, lecturing and editing the hospital magazine, and took lessons in German — no doubt to prepare himself for future intercourse with the Germans, the majority of whom he held to be fellow victims of war — from Mr. Frank Nicholson, the then librarian of Edinburgh University, who gave to Mr. Edmund Blunden a most living account of him as he was at this time. In it he describes how Owen took him out to tea, after one of these lessons, in a café, the only occasion on which they were alone and able to speak freely. He had on him a collection of photographs of mutilated and wounded men which he had made in order to bring home to the unimaginative the horrors that others faced for them. Owen spoke of them to Nicholson, and started to raise his hand to his breast pocket to bring them out, but then, suddenly realizing perhaps that his companion was not one to whom it was necessary to emphasize the horrors of war, refrained.

Later on the same occasion he spoke to Nicholson— and this is important — on the problem of literary form, and how he believed that he had discovered a medium for himself through the substitution of a play of vowels for pure rhyme. (In this connection it must be remarked that quite apart from the mastery in the matter of assonances and dissonances which his work shows, and that can only be the result of long practice, many of his early poems manifest his preoccupation with this technical device.) In a letter to me, Nicholson says:—

What really drew me to him so strongly was the beauty of his personality. I bear a certain grudge against myself for not having, on the occasion to which you refer, pursued the subject of his “new” poetic technique more sympathetically and more intelligently than I did. I fancy he was then more or less feeling his way toward that vowel-music which he made so peculiarly his own and used with such tremendous effect in some of his later war poems. When he spoke to me of enlarging the older traditional rhyme-range of English verse in this fashion I could only think of such freedoms as poets like Tennyson had occasionally indulged in — for example in some of the Lady of Shalott stanzas — and I failed to grasp how immensely different in character Owen’s experiments were. . . .

During the first weeks at Craiglockhart, Owen was depressed. On August 8 he wrote:—

... I am a sick man in hospital, by night; a poet, for quarter of an hour after breakfast; I am whatever and whoever I see while going down to Edinburgh on the train: greengrocer, policeman, shopping lady, errand-boy, paper-boy, blind man, crippled Tommy, bank-clerk, carter, all of these in half an hour; next a German student in earnest. . . .

At this very moment of his life’s lowest ebb there arrived in the same hospital a new patient, Siegfried Sassoon, whose celebrated book of poems, The Old Huntsman, had recently made its appearance. Owen admired the newcomer, his work, and the moral courage of his pacifism which, indeed, was in part responsible for his being in the sanatorium — equally.

The younger man summoned up his courage and called on Sassoon, He showed him some poems, and persuaded him, too, to give some of his work to the hospital magazine, which Owen was editing. The Hydra, as it was called, was thus privileged to publish two famous poets of the war. . . . The friendship that started in this manner gave Owen hope, and a new vision of life, so that from now onward, in the short year that opened up before him, his full stature, which grew continually until the end, was revealed. Within a year, every thing was changed; he now both understood his own capacity and was sure of his strength. Two years before he had written:

To be able to write as I know how to, study is necessary: a period of study, then of intercourse with kindred spirits, then of isolation. My heart is ready, but my brain unprepared, and my hand untrained.

But now, in November, 1917, in a letter to Siegfried Sassoon, he says: —

Know that ... I held you as Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor + Amenophis IV in profile. What’s that mathematically? ... 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....

For all the modesty of demeanor and manner that showed so touchingly when one met him, he possessed, as every poet must possess, his ambitions: in his own words “lesser than Macbeth’s and greater, not so happy but much happier.”... Now they were realized. On the last day of the last year he was to complete 1917—he wrote to his mother:—

And so I have come to the true measure of man. I am not dissatisfied [with| my years. Everything has been done in bouts: Bouts of awful labour at Shrewsbury and Bordeaux; bouts of amazing pleasure in the Pyrenees, and play at Craiglockhart; bouts of religion at Dunsden; bouts of horrible danger on the Somme: bouts of poetry always; of your affection always: of sympathy for the oppressed always. I go out of this year a poet, my dear mother, as which I did not enter it. I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet’s poet. I am started. The tugs have left me; I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon. . . .

(Alas, he sailed the open sea for only a few more months—ten, to be precise — but in that time produced imperishable poems.)

4

THOUGH to Siegfried Sassoon belongs the glory of having discovered Wilfred Owen, and of having helped him and launched him, it was through Robert Ross that I first heard of the new poet. The younger men who would be found at Robbie’s were usually writers and often poets, and he would often ask me to come and meet them. I was not surprised, therefore, when, in September, 1917, he telephoned to me and invited me to come round to his rooms in Half-Moon Street the next evening after dinner. He said it was very important, and when I inquired why, he told me that a newly discovered poet called Wilfred Owen, a friend whom Siegfried had met at Craiglockhart, was dining with him at the Reform, and that he wanted me to meet him. He gave promise of being a remarkable poet, Robert Ross added, and he asked me especially “not to frighten him” for he was the most diffident and sensitive of men.

Accordingly, I went round at the hour named, and there, in the comfortable warmth of Robbie’s sitting room, I saw a young officer of about my age— he was three months younger than myself — of sturdy, medium build, and wearing a khaki uniform. His face was rather broad, and I think its most unusual characteristics were the width of eyes and forehead, and the tawny, rather sanguine skin, which proclaimed, as against the message of his eyes— deep in color, and dark in their meaning— a love of life and a poet’s enjoyment of air and light. His features were mobile but determined, and his hair short and of a soft brown. His whole appearance, in spite of what he had been through, gave the impression of being somewhat young for his age, and, though he seemed perfectly sure of himself, it was easy to perceive that by nature he was shy.

His voice — what does his voice sound like across the years? A soft modulation, even-toned, but with a warmth in it (I almost hear it now), a wellproportioned voice that signified a sense of justice and of compassion. With his contemporaries he talked with ease. Only in the presence of such literary nabobs of the period as Wells and Bennett could he scarcely bring himself to speak; and this silence, apart from being rooted in his natural modesty and good manners, was due, I think, to the immense esteem in which he held literature and those who practiced the profession of author. His residence in France may have deepened this attitude of respect, and almost awe, which had in it nothing of the Englishman’s casual approach to books. To him they were all-important, while poetry was the very crown of life, and constituted its meaning.

His visits to London from Scarborough, whither he had been posted on leaving Craiglockhart at the end of October, 1917, were infrequent. Scarborough was a town I had known intimately since childhood, and to which, a year later, I was to return to stand as parliamentary candidate; and when Owen and I met in London, I would— for I had not been in the North for two or three years past —ask him about the place, what damage the bombardment had done, and what the life in it was like in wartime conditions. It was a place for which he had formed no liking, and in a letter he wrote the following year he says: —

. . . But this morning at 8.20 we heard a boat torpedoed in the bay, about a mile out, they say who saw it. I think only ten lives were saved. I wish the Boche would have the pluck to come right in and make a clean sweep of the pleasure boats, and the promenaders on the Spa, and all the . . . Leeds and Bradford war profiteers now reading John Bull on Scarborough sands.

In July, 1918, Wilfred Owen wrote me the letter which I interpolate here as a good example of his style as letter writer. I had sent him an epigram I had composed on clemenceau, at the time French Premier. Whenever catastrophe threatened to overwhelm the Allied cause, as frequently it did in 1917 and 1918, and whatever the extent of human suffering involved, inevitably in the English papers some such reassuring sentence as this would appear: “On being informed of these happenings Monsieur Clemenceau announced that he was fully satisfied” . . . ”Ill Winds,” as the epigram was called, remained unpublished.

“ It ran—

Up on the Cross, in ugly agony, The Son of Man hung dying — and the roar Of earthquakes rent the solemn sky Already thundering its wrath, and tore The dead from out their tombs. . . . Then Jesus died— But Monsieur Clemenceau is fully satisfied!

I give this poem and the foregoing facts to explain the reference in the letter that follows: —

DEAR OSBERT SITWELL,
I rehearsed your very fine Epigram upon our Mess President — rather a friend of mine. He did not immediately recognise Jesus. The rest of the Mess would not of course know the name of Monsieur Clemenceau. (To my mind this would be no indication of any man’s ignorance of affairs.) May I send “III Winds” to a French youth who might translate and circulate it where it would be appreciated?
Always hoping to find an hour in which to copy out and generally denebulise a few poems acceptable to you either as Editor or—may I not say—friend— I have delayed this letter so long. Tonight there is only time for a tedious brief speech with you before the mind wakes up for its only amusement these days — dreams.
For 14 hours yesterday I was at work teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown: and not to imagine he thirst till after the last halt; I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb and stands at attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.
Last week I broke out of Camp to order Wheels, 1917. Lightfoots refused to stock copies. I persisted so long that the Young Lady loudly declared she knew all along that I was “Osbert himself.”This caused a consternation throughout the crowded shop; but I got the last laugh by — No, Madam; the book is by a friend of mine, Miss Sitwell.” Smith’s people would not order a single copy without deposit!
Is tlie 1918 vol. designed to go on the caterpillar wheels of Siegfried’s Music Hall Tank? It so I might help with the ammunition. Would you like some short War Poems, or what? Please give me a final date for submitting them to you.
I very much look forward to meeting you again, and if it be in Scarborough the pleasure will be that of all snatched joys. I am incarcerated more strictly than you imagine. Westborough is now a weekly ambition. The Spa is beyond my hopes. This is the beginning of decadence. As is proved by my Father’s message on hearing I was G. S.: “gratified to know you are normal again.”
Very sympathetically yours,
W. E. S. OWEN

A little later he sent me the poems of which he spoke; among them his magnificent “Mental Cases": —

The others are “Disabled,” “Parable of the Old Men and the Young,”“The Last Laugh,”“The Last Word,”“Soldiers’ Dreams,”“Arms and the Boy,”and an early poem, untitled, beginning,

“The Last Laugh” and “The Last Word” are very similar versions of the same unpublished poem, and are not among the first rank of his work. The early poem and “Soldiers’ Dreams" also remain unpublished. . . . And each of the rest presents variations from the published text. But this was not unusual with Owen, for many manuscript versions exist of nearly all his poems. The version I possess of “Mental Cases" offers an interesting alternative three lines for the four that appear as the end of the poem in the book The Poems of Wilfred Owen. The published version runs:

whereas in my copy it is: —

The last time I saw Wilfred Owen was on an afternoon of full summer, a Saturday in July, 1918. He had let me know that he was coming to London, and I had been able to arrange to take him and Siegfried Sassoon to hear Violet Gordon Woodhouse play the harpsichord and clavichord, and she made the afternoon stand out as an oasis in the desert of war. For over two hours she played Bach, Mozart, and the early English composers to us, as only she could play them. Wilfred Owen felt deeply the appeal of music, as will be seen from a letter he wrote to his mother in 1914: —

I certainly believe I could make a better musician than many who profess to be, and are accepted as such. Mark, I do not for a moment call myself a musician, nor do I suspect I ever shall be, but there! I love music, with such strength that I have to conceal the passion for fear it be thought weakness. . . . It can be imagined, then, with what rapture he heard this exquisite music rendered as it should be; he was dazed with happiness at the fire and audacity of the player.

After hearing Mrs. Gordon Woodhouse, Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and I went back to my house in Swan Walk — or rather we first sat in the Physic Garden opposite, under the mulberry trees. (This privilege we were only accorded through my friendship with my neighbor, the guardian; for visitors, except members of the Apothecaries’ Society, are not really allowed within the precincts.) We walked across to the house for tea and then returned to sit in the Garden. It was the ideal of a summer afternoon: various shrubs, late-flowering magnolias and the like, were in blossom, there was a shimmer and flutter in the upper leaves, and a perfection of contentment and peacefulness, unusual in the tense atmosphere of a hot day in London, especially during a war, breathed over the scene. So listlessly happy was Owen that he could not bring himself to leave the Garden to go to the station and catch the train he had arranged to take.

That afternoon, so untouched by premonition, was yet full of lamentable fate. Those persons who, thinking he was not yet fit for foreign service, were seeking lo find him a post at home, suddenly desisted. Had they continued, Wilfred Owen might well be alive today; but within a week he was ordered to attend for medical inspection, and knew that he was going out to France again. “I am glad,” he wrote. “ That is I am much gladder to be going out again than afraid. I shall be better able to cry my outcry, playing my part. . . .” A little more than a month later, he embarked once more for France. He rejoined his old battalion, and after winning the Military Cross in October, he was killed in an attempt to cross the Sambre Canal, on November 4, a week before the Armistice was proclaimed.

It was some weeks before his friends heard of his death: he had disappeared into the gray mists of those autumnal regions which had swallowed so many young lives— but never one that could be a greater loss to England than this. His death occurred many years ago now, but it is only a short period since one of his friends wrote to me: “I have found many letters lately of Wilfred Owen’s, and looking back over the time since the last war, I see how much easier all our lives would have been if he had lived. . . .” These words bear true witness, both to his influence on his friends and to their feeling for him.