How Accurately Owen Depicts the First World War in His Poems - Essay Example

Investigate how accurately Owen depicts the First World War in his poems. This work should study how history of WWI is reflected in Owen’s writing. Introduction It is now almost one hundred years since the First World War /The Great War began. Hardly anyone is alive today who can remember it, except from the point of view of being a small child. We do of course have official records, grainy bits of film or stiff, faded photographs. We also have correspondence from those involved, as in Arthur’s ‘Collection of letters from the Front’ ( Arthur, editor, 2005, pages 37 -98.). These are personal letters though, often addressed to only one person. Owen for his part had written to his mother almost all his life. Stallworthy ( 1974, page 14) quotes from what seems to have been the very first of these in 1898, and others are used by biographers to add comments to his poems. The War Poetry web site has a long list of poets from the Great War who were aiming at a much wider audience than Owen. It includes names such as Rudyard Kipling, Vera Brittain, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, as well as a number of others less well known. One of the most famous of these poets , someone whose words echo down the years, is Wilfred Owen, and his poetry, especially works such as ‘Dulce et Decorum’ evoke the horror of the war in almost every line, a horror which gave him nightmares night after night. . Wilfred Owen, born in Oswestry,Shropshire in 1893, was a devout Christian. Despite this he was not a conscientious objector, in fact being mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Military Cross , although he would later throw the medal into the river ( Poetry Foundation , undated).The citation read :- For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the attack on the Fonsomme Line on October 1st/2nd, 1918. On the company commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack. He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.( The London Gazette, [ supplement 31183, page 2378, 29th July,1919]). Owen had worked in France from 1913 as a language tutor, but when war began he felt pressured by government propaganda to become a soldier, rather than become a priest as his mother wished ( Saxon Books, 1999). He is described in a concert program of 2003 ( The Poetry is in the Pity, Introduction) as a ‘victim of the machines of politics , war and social custom, and the recipient of an amazing and compelling gift of language and poetry.’ Almost all his great poetry was written in just one 15th month period. Until 1917 he did not express or describe his own significant experiences and the developing convictions that were the result, except in letters home to his brother, and in particular to his mother Susan Owen. His biographer describes how, on first joining up in 1915, he was full of ‘boyish high spirits’ ( Saxon Books, 1999). In a letter to his mother he wrote ‘There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France.’ Poetry Foundation, undated) so, at least for a time, he was idealistic, a feeling which did not last very long when faced with reality. Landing in France in late December 1916. By the 6th of January 1917 he was complaining of ‘The awful state of the roads, and the enormous weight carried was too much for scores of men.’ A few days later he was wading through trenches filled with two feet or more of water, and was living only feet from a howitzer, which was fired every minute round the clock ( Poetry Foundation, undated). Owen said :- I came out in order to help these boys--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 leader can. I have done the first. ( Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918, undated) . To help was not however his only motivation. Fenton (2007) includes another reason, citing how Owen had said in December 1914 that “the only thing that would keep him going in battle would be the thought that he was fighting for the language that Keats and the rest of them wrote.” Yet he was basically a pacifist , a man of peace, even though in October 1917 he wrote ‘I hate washy pacifists.’ (Roberts, 2013). Yet it seems it was more or less his own decision to return to the war front after his illness , rather than campaign at home ( Poetry Foundation , undated). Dying at only twenty-five, only days before the end of the First World War, Wilfred Owen represents a generation of young men dead because of the ideas and conflicts of the older men, especially the politicians and generals who were in control. A poet who lived to see a very few of his poems published (Stallworthy, notes on abbreviations, 1974), yet whose works are still read almost a century after they were written. Owen’s biographer quotes him as saying of the war :- While it is true that the guns will effect a little useful weeding, I am furious with chagrin to think that the Minds which were to have excelled the civilization of ten thousand years are being annihilated - and bodies, the product of aeons of Natural Selection, melted down to pay for political statues. ( quoted by Stalllworthy, 1994, page xxiv) Within only a few days he was under gas attack, constantly having to wade through murky water, and breathing in the miasma of the rotting dead who surrounded him. He was blown up, suffered concussion and also shell shock. He ended up in a psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh, but eventually returned to the battle, and even won the Military Cross. A few days before the Armistice though, on the 4th of November 1918, he was finally shot and killed. The news reached his home as the bells were ringing in celebration of the end of the conflict. How the War was described by Owen in his poetry How accurate were Owen’s description of events? He was fond of fairy tales according to Stallworthy (1974, page 19). The same biographer goes on to describe how he would dramatize his environment , making it a setting for the imaginative stories he knew, exaggerating its negative aspects ( Stallworthy, 1974, page 20). Owen has been quoted as having said “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”( Wilfred Owen ,1893-1918, undated ). While a patient at Craiglockhart, a psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh, his psychiatrist, Doctor Arthur Brock, had encouraged Owen to write about his experiences, specifically those he frequently relived in his nightmares and dreams, in poetic form ( Craddock , 2012). Again it must be asked were the dreams showing the reality, or had imagination taken over? As awful as the scenes depicted in the poems are, Owen is very much concerned with the reality of the War. He doesn’t describe how it originated, or say much about who was to blame. Instead there are very vivid descriptions of the everyday horrors he experienced, horrors which eventually resulted in his incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, which is where his poem ‘The Sentry’ was begun. Some of the language used is almost childish as when describes the ‘whiz bang’ which blinded his comrade. Like so much of Owen’s work ‘The Sentry’ poem describers a particular incident and the fate of one soldier. The scene is a ‘Boche dugout’(Owen, 1917 line 1). They have taken the dugout, but not without reprisals. The weather is horrific and adds its own horrors to the incident, including waist deep slush. Today France is thought of as bright and sunny, but wasn’t often so it seems in the war years. In ‘MacBeth’ Shakespeare has Lady MacBeth describe hell as ‘murky’when trying to clean her hands of blood and guilt. ( Act 5 , scene 1. Owen uses similar imagery here (1917, line 7). He also uses breaks in the regular iambic metre to suggest the disturbance going on all around, and even (Owen,1917, line10) includes a break in line which makes readers pause, much as the men involved must have paused to take a breath. There is a vivid picture in this poem of a man’s despair at his injuries, but Owen also uses onomatopoeic words to bring his readers even closer to the activity Owen had seen, heard and experienced, as when he uses ‘Thud, flump, thud’, ‘thumping ‘ and ‘slushing’ ( Owen ,1917, lines 14 and 15). Even the smells are evoked, ‘air remained stank and sour with fumes of whiz-bangs and the smell of men who’d lived there for years.’ (Owen 1917, lines 7-9). He uses both direct and indirect speech, as well as plain description to relate his horrific story. Yet it could be argued that to some extent Owen spares his readers. He does not for instance describe the smell of rotting bodies, or how rats would be seen eating the bodies of fallen , unburied bodies, although he described this in a letter to his mother ( Craddock, 2012). The final lines have the sentry trying to put on a brave face, as so many did’ I can see your lights.’ but his fellows know that those lights have long since been dowsed. This epitomizes the false hopes this war provoked. Things were so awful that people couldn’t help but try to come up with more positive alternatives as in the well-known saying of the time ‘It’ll all be over by Christmas.’ (Haine, cited First World War Centenary, 2013) which emerged, despite the views of those in command, as when Earl Haig wrote in August 1914:- At the Council of War on August 5th 1914, he (Haig) had pointed out that since Great Britain and Germany were fighting for their existence the war would inevitably be a prolonged struggle, and would require the development of the full force of the British Empire to achieve success. The poem’s imagery can be backed up by the words of a letter Owen wrote to his mother ( 16th January 1917). One of Owen’s most famous poems is probably ‘Dulce et Ducorum est’( Owen 1917). It is based upon an incident which took place on the 6th January 1917, within days of Owen’s landing in France, ( Poetry Foundation , undated) although he was writing some poetry before the war ( Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2008). The title is an abbreviated version of the title of an ode by Horace, the Roman writer : Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. This can be translated as ‘It is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honor to fight and die for your country.’ ( Roberts, 2011). Owen uses the language of exhaustion. ‘We cursed through sludge…men marched asleep… limped on, blood shod.’ which describes how the war and its awfulness continued without any seeming end in view. There is also panic as men are trying to get their helmets on as quickly as possible in order to, hopefully, preserve their lives:- Gas! Gas! Quick boys! – an ectasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time. ( Owen, 1917, lines 9,10). In the fourth stanza the language can be described as anti-heroic – ‘Watch the white eyes writhing in his face’, ‘the blood comes gargling from the froth corrupting lungs’, yet Owen does not condemns those at home. He simply informs. This was not a rushed poem. It was written as a form of therapy. He sent a draft to his mother, Susan Owen, but there were many revisions and much rewriting before Owen died in 1918. It was not published until 1920 (Craddock, 2012) so did nothing to affect the ideas of those who continued the war. In the concluding lines of the poem the title is repeated, but this time in full ‘Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patri Mori. This time however it is ironic , the poet having in the body of the poem described the horrors of lungs destroyed by gas which cause the lungs to fill with fluid. The result is that the person drowns slowly from their own secretions, as evoked in the underwater imagery in lines 13, 14. The green sky; the sores which will never heal are typical of a gas attack. Owen tells us how he really feels by describing the phrase of his title as a lie. This was war in a new , ever more horrific form and for it Owen invents a new rhyming scheme, end rhyming ABAB ACAC DEDEFD, a distinctive form of sonnet all his own, before going on into stanza three. The poem needs some explanation for those who know little of war and its particular language– flares – the bright lights used to show up the men and make better targets; five –nines – a type of large caliber shell; helmets – the inadequate gas masks of the period. They offered little resistance to gas or lime attacks, as both these were absorbed through the skin. Yet even without knowing these things one can still perceive the desperate situation in which the troops were placed, without choice, far from home or even safety and rest , and all for the sake of an ideal they probably no longer believed in. This poem describes an incident which took place in the winter of 1917. Three months later, in April, Owen and his men were still sleeping in the snow. He claimed that he kept alive ‘on brandy and the fear of death.’ ( Poetry Foundation, undated). He writes a letter to his mother with a rare complaint against those back home ‘who might relieve us , but who will not.’( Poetry Foundation, undated). Another of Owen’s better known poems is ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. In this work once again the young men have no choice, but are rather ‘those who die as cattle’. The fields of France became a gigantic abattoir. Others are making the decisions and can be said to be choosing how and when these young men will die, just as the farmers and slaughter men decide the fate of the cattle in their charge. The alliteration of the third line ‘the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ lets the listener enter into the field of war. They can imagine exactly the sound being described. The sound and fury, the noise of battle, are found here. In the second part of the poem the mood changes. There are echoes of religious services, fitting remembrances for their lives in the pale faces of the girls they left behind, and funerals these boys will never have, as their bodies are blasted into non-existence. The whistle of shells replaces choirs, the shine of their eyes instead of candles. The poet uses the things associated with funerals such as prayers, pall, flowers and each is assigned to something present on the battle field. The final line ‘Every dusk a drawing down of blinds’ shows that this killing of young men wasn’t just an occasional occurrence, but happened each and every day. It was the custom to lower blinds at a time of mourning. So for both the young men, and for their families, the lights are dimmed, and the sun light can no longer be enjoyed. Owen used some unusual effects in order to get his message across , as when he uses pararhymes in ‘Strange Meeting’ ( Owen 1918) where he half rhymes using the same sets of consonants, but with a variation in the vowels used.:- And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall By his dead smile I knew we stood in hell ( Owen, 1918, lines Owen was half Welsh and lived for much of his life on the Welsh border, and Welsh cynganhedd poetry used similar pararhymes, and seems to have had an influence. Owen returned to the front after his illness, and so did not arrange for publication. While in Edinburgh though he met his fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, who arrived in the Edinburgh hospital only a few weeks after Owen, (Poetry Foundation, undated) and it was Sassoon who made efforts to get some twenty poems published in 1920, although Edith Sitwell had published some in her magazine ‘Wheels’. Sitwell tried to work with Sassoon to get more of the poems published quickly, but was thwarted:- I wrote to Captain Sassoon, to ask him if he could help me about them. He came to see me; and told me it would have been your son's wish that (Sassoon) should see to the publication of the poems, because they were such friends. In the circumstances I could do nothing but offer to hand them over to him. ( Sitwell, letter to Susan Owen, 3rd October 1919, Lehmann and Parker, 1970, page 20) So honest , and with so much to teach the generations which followed, are Owen’s descriptions, that in 1962 Benjamin Britten used nine of them to form the base for his ‘War Requiem’ ( The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia 2004). War poetry tends to fall into one of two camps , that is those works which deliberately glorify war, possibly to encourage young people to join up, and those which describe it much more honestly. Owen falls firmly into the second group. His work is so honest and in complete contrast to the idealistic works of poets such as Rupert Brooke as in Brooke’s poem ‘Peace’, written in 1914, in which he writes:- Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,. These young men depicted by Brooke were glad to be of an age to be able to join up, and proud to fight for king and country. These early poems glorified England and the idea of dying as a patriotic act. Yet, according to an extract from ‘Out in the Dark- Poetry of the First World War ( undated ) there was in Brooke’s own mind "resentment that he might have to volunteer for military training and service," and ,at the same time, he "vaguely imagined a series of heroic feats, vast enterprise, and the applause of crowds.” It took a later poet, Owen, to strip away any ideas of military glory, even in victory, and to reveal the awful results of such bellicose idealism. A young man, Owen must have seen himself and his fellows as in control of the older generation. This is clear in his poem ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young ( Owen, July 1918) where he retells the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. In the original ( Bible , Genesis 22) God provides a ram for the sacrifice, but in Owen’s version , although the ram is there, caught in the thicket and therefore an easy solution, the man ignores God and his provision , but, as Owen concludes he chooses to offer the Ram of Pride instead, ‘the old man would not do so , but slew his son, and half the seed of Europe one by one.’ (The Poetry is in the Pity, 2003, page 5). The former Poet Laureate C.Day.Lewis, who, born in 1904, was a child at the time of Owen’s poems, and 35 when the Second World War began, is quoted in 1963, in an introduction to a collection of Owen’s work, as having said:- The subject made the poet: the poet made poems which radically changed our attitude towards war. The front-line poets who were Owen's contemporaries - Sassoon, Rosenberg, Graves, Blunden, Osbert Sitwell--played a most honourable part, too, in showing us what modern war was really like; but it is Owen, I believe, whose poetry came home deepest to my own generation, so that we could never again think of war as anything but a vile, if necessary evil. Despite the horrors he saw and endured Owen’s faith in Christ remained. In ‘At a Calgary Near the Ancre’ this is clear. In the poem he describes a dead soldier hanging , with disciples hiding, as they did at the original crucifixion. He describes those who stand by, described as priests, as ‘marked by the Beast’ These ‘priests’ he says were ‘denied by Christ’ so this reflects on the attitude of Owen to the official church. He concludes ‘But they who love the greater love Lay down their life; they do not hate.’ Jeremy Paxman ( 2007) says that Owen reinvented poetry. It was a necessary reinvention., in order to reach into the minds of his readers. But despite it Owen saw that his time at war was futile, as it was for millions of others. He even entitled one of his poems, ‘Futility’ (Owen, May 1918). Owen wrote great and enduring poetry, but he wasn’t satisfied with his efforts:- I suppose I am doing in poetry what the advanced composers are doing in music. I am not satisfied with either. ( Owen, letter to Susan Owen, January 1918). Conclusion Owen did not paint the big picture, but detail after detail which build up to give a true insight into what had happened. His poems tell us little even of particular battles and their results . There is no attempt to describe more extensive campaigns. We don’t read the opinions of the media, or of the generals in command. It is rare that it is possible to even vaguely date or place the incidents described. Yet his images are honest and accurate from a man who not only witnessed the incidents described, but who was haunted by them for the rest of his life. His descriptions are not only accurate, but allow succeeding generations to have some experience, if at a distance, of the sights , the sounds, even the smells of total war in the early 20th century. We read too his opinions about its futility and waste. Owen did not however, as far as can be ascertained ever directly speak up for surrender. Despite this no thinking and feeling person could read these poems and get caught up in a false glorification and government promoted jingoism of war, as indicated by earlier War poets such as Brooke. Yet Owen can be said to have failed in his objective, if it really was to change minds, rather than just use his poetry as a form of therapy. This failure can be clearly seen when one considers what happened in 1939. As in 1914, young men when marched away to war smiling and singing , urged on by a national air of jingoism, so the next generation also did so only 25 years later, when a new war is declared in September 1939. Once again young men, as well as women, were soon rushing to recruiting centers and enrolling before they were even called up. 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