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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen

The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Edmund Blunden (Phoenix Library). This is not a new edition, but the only complete collection of the poems of Owen which seems now accessible. When one has read Owen only in anthologies his complete works come as a mild shock; one has come to regard him as a poet of strange but mature talent (or genius, as one’s judgments waver), and suddenly . . . . It is as if one had read only Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and last sonnet, then were obliged to assimilate him in all his floridity. Owen admired Keats; and the influence of Keats, though not so baneful as that of Swinburne for a new-born poet, could not be wholly beneficial. But the war weaned him from dreams and gave him wormwood for suck. Thus happens it that the two greatest war poems, possibly the greatest of a modern age, have bitterness for theme: Rosenberg’s ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’. The first is doom and revolt, the heavinesspage 9 of death lit by the anguish of the poet; thus its irresistible power is that of emotional description . . .

Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie,
The lid over each eye . . .

The element of despair, hell, dantean, which stirs here to subside again, comes to clear fruition in Owen’s less volcanic but more coherent masterpiece:

. . . 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. . . .

He is the true prophet, true because he saw the world in crystal of doom:

Now men will go content with what we spoiled
Or, discontent, boil bloody and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
No one will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Will any deny this the name of true prophecy?

It would seem that a sense of doom must enter into all great poetry. Keats’s ‘Nightingale’ – doom and the revolt of the romantic; Rosenberg’s ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ – doom and the revolt of sensitivity; Auden’s ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love . . .’ – doom and the revolt of the lover. But in ‘Strange Meeting’ the revolt is subdued. Had he lived, it were anti-climax; he was a war poet; his works culminate in one poem; when he had laid bare the core of bitterness, he could do little else but die.

For his other poems. One may compare his sonnet ‘The End’, with Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Dead’, written earlier. Brooke’s may please, but after reading Owen’s one can say little; his power has expanded beyond the relevance of criticism. Much may be said about the debatable ill-effect on Owen of Sassoon’s satirical verse-dialogue; one might quote from ‘Asleep’, ‘Spring Offensive’, or ‘Futility’ to show evidence of his genius. It is needless; none can challenge it; for their cup of criticism falls back shattered from the infrangible forehead. Owen may complete the chapter with a synthesis of his thought:

When I do ask white Age he saith not so;
‘My head hangs weighed with snow.’
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
‘My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
page 10 Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the sea, be dried.’

1944 (8)