THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
There is a parallel anger at the sheer waste of human life in ‘Futility’, a poem which denies the reassuring Pauline
associations between the stirring of seeds and the resurrection of the body. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ reverses Roman
assumptions about patriotic sacrifice rather than comfortable Christian ones, by contrasting the ghastliness of death by
mustard gas with the defunct
[p. 504]
Horatian dignity which is damned as an ‘old lie’. ‘Strange Meeting’, often conveniently interpreted as a knowing
epitaph, pictures an escape from battle into ‘some profound dull tunnel’, a granite trench beyond a muddy trench,
somehow a relic of ‘titanic wars’. The poem moves to a meeting of enemies and to a mystic post-mortal reconciliation
of two slaughtered soldiers:
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: 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 ...
Owen was killed on 4 November 1918 before he had an opportunity to finish his poem. It was only a week before the
Armistice which was to end ‘the War to end Wars’.
In 1919 a ‘Victory’ medal was struck in Britain for presentation to all those soldiers who had survived what was
described on its surface as ‘The Great War for Civilization’. As the work of the war poets suggests, ‘Civilization’ had
effectively floundered in the mire of the trenches or had been pitted and holed by the mechanisms and machines of
modern military destruction. If Britain and the British Empire had emerged politically unscathed, the same was not
true of the rest of combatant Europe, nor was it true of the minds and opinions of survivors or of those too young to
fight. When the London-based American poet, Ezra Pound, wrote bitterly in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) of a
human sacrifice in the name of ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth | For a botched civilization’, he was not merely
summing up a hideous end of an era, he was also asserting the rights and privileges of a new literature which would
attempt to sever itself from the traditions, and the ‘traditional sanctities’, of the old botched civilization.
[end of Chapter 8]
[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]
[p. 505]
9
Modernism and its Alternatives: Literature 1920-1945
WHEN the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens visited the battlefields of north-eastern France in July 1917 in order to
investigate the need for permanent memorials to the vast numbers of British and Empire war-dead, he described in a
tone of horrified amazement the strange interaction of man and nature he had witnessed. ‘What humanity can endure
and suffer is beyond belief’, he told his wife, ‘the battlefields — the obliteration of all human endeavour and
achievement and the human achievement of destruction is bettered by the poppies and wild flowers that are as friendly
to an unexploded shell as they are to the leg of a garden seat in Surrey.’ For the moment, the only monument he could
envisage as appropriate was ‘a solid ball of bronze’. Lutyens’s ambiguity concerning what he had seen as a noncombatant
on the Western Front proved typical of the future reactions of those remembering or contemplating the