For love is not the binding of fair lips With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,. I have perceived much beauty In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight; Heard music in the silentness of duty; Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate. Nevertheless, except you share With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell, Whose world is but the trembling of a flare And heaven but as the highway for a shell,.
You shall not hear their mirth: You shall not come to think them well content By any jest of mine. These men are worth Your tears. Poetry 1. Apologia Pro Poemate Meo I, too, saw God through mud,— The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled, War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.
I, too, have dropped off Fear— Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon, And sailed my spirit surging light and clear Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn; And witnessed exultation— Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl, Shine and lift up with passion of oblation, Seraphic for an hour; though they were foul. Nevertheless, except you share With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell, Whose world is but the trembling of a flare And heaven but as the highway for a shell, You shall not hear their mirth: You shall not come to think them well content By any jest of mine.
Owen, Wilfred. In he returned to England to enlist in the army and was commissioned into the Manchester Regiment. After spending the remainder of the year training in England, he left for the western front early in January After experiencing heavy fighting, he was diagnosed with shellshock. There he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who already had a reputation as a poet and shared Owen's views.
Sassoon agreed to look over Owen's poems, gave him encouragement and introduced him to literary figures such as Robert Graves. That church bells could toll to mark the death of men of his generation was a belief that had abandoned Owen well before his passing.
He had been an ardent believer since his early childhood, his faith in a harmonious world order tying him by a seemingly unbreakable cord to a benevolent god. He gave Bible lessons to poor villagers, led them at prayers, and offered them what help he could in their hour of distress. Be bulled, be outraged, be killed: but do not kill.
Words such as these do not come out of blind, unreasoning faith, for they point to a highly evolved moral sense. He had also loved poetry ever since he was a child, reading the great English 19th -century romantics over and over again, as his mother recalled, and as his own poetry, the early more than the more mature work, provides copious testimony of.
Dulce et… is indeed the perfect foil to this early Ballad , and Owen quite clearly intended it to be so. It was with bitter irony that he was re-visiting in Dulce et. Defeated in battle and dead beat, a regiment wades aimlessly through slush, mud and corpse-heaps when it is caught in a deadly gas attack by the enemy. The poem is about these men who are condemned to die the most violent death imaginable:.
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,. He no longer dreaded death, nor shrank from inflicting it on others, because he had found true friendship while in the line of fire, indeed only then. He tells his mother that the horrors of the war no longer managed to affect him. This is why he detested the proclaimed pacifist, believing that the call to abjure all association with war when the war was already on was mere wish fulfilment.
Hence his view of himself as a conscientious objector, a man who with his eyes wide open participated in the war and denounced it from within , so to speak. He had also come to believe that only when he had personally proved himself in the war, as a fearless combatant, that he would be credible as a conscientious objector. He and Sassoon were almost alone in their opposition to the war, and in Owen went further, working out a unique position and writing poems that have no parallel.
Our website makes use of cookies. To find out more please read our privacy policy.
0コメント