It is a source of sorrow to me that for unforeseeable reasons I have not been able to honour my acceptance two years ago of an extremely kind invitation from the Wilfred Owen Association (France) to attend the commemoration today at Ors (located on the Sambre–Oise Canal) of the poet’s death in action on 4 November 1918. A search of Calderonia on Owen’s name will show what a presence he has been here over the past four years.
As followers will know, I deplore those British historians who believe that our war poetry (which means above all Owen’s) has somehow replaced rigorous historical teaching of World War I in our schools and that we need to ‘come out of Poets Corner’ to see the War in a proper perspective. I know from my own experience that war poetry is often presented simplistically at school, but that does not mean ‘the First World War is taught more as tragic poetry than as history’ (Adrian Gregory). Our war poetry has too often been taught as mere ‘protest poetry’, i.e. verse that protests war is wrong, we were wrong to fight this War, soldiers shouldn’t have been fighting it, they were victims.
If this were all that Sassoon’s, Owen’s or Gurney’s war poetry was, then it would not be poetry. But it is poetry, because it is verbally and morally complex, subtle, ambivalent, multivalent, polyphonic, alive. I’ve written before about how poems of Owen’s have been misunderstood as a result of simplistic reading, e.g. ‘Dulce et Decorum’.
One of the prime reasons that Owen is a great poet is that even as you read a line of his it reveals a range of possible meanings to you and a complexity of thought; it writhes in your brain, as it were, so the poem literally appears to live… Examples that I particularly admire are the last line of ‘Greater Love’ — ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not’ — and the line ‘bugles calling for them from sad shires’ in the sonnet ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. ‘You may weep’ is ambiguous enough, but ‘touch them not’ is searingly so: you cannot touch them literally, physically, because they are dead, but you cannot touch them (their greater love) metaphorically either, in the sense of attain to or equal them (it). Similarly, ‘bugles calling for them’ could mean just ‘in commemoration of them’, or, unbearably, it could mean ‘calling them home but they cannot come’.
Owen cannot come back to the ‘sad shires’ who mourn their dead of the Great War. After hardly any of his poems were published in his lifetime, it was his words that answered the bugles’ calls to return to the land that ‘bore’ and ‘shaped’ them (Rupert Brooke), and it is unthinkable that they will ever be devalued as long as the English language exists.
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears here.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears here on Amazon UK.
I’ve always thought of the bugles calling them home but they cannot come. And yes it is unbearably sad in that reading.
I’m afraid it makes me angry when the way the history of war is taught is misrepresented as either ‘watching videos’ (Blackadder) or ‘tragic poetry’ or some other gross simplification. The way in which war is interpreted in each generation is a nuanced and complex business and needs to be multi-dimensional, with many voices.
Thank you. I absolutely agree with your last sentence. I do not believe that certain academic historians have taken the trouble/had the humility to find out how WW1 is taught as history in our schools, and how the war poetry is taught as poetry. All best wishes.