A WAR-LOST GENIUS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4219, 4 December 1939, Page 7

A WAR-LOST GENIUS

WILFRED OWEN, POET OF PITY.

It is twenty-one years ago—November 4, 1918—since the broken remnants of the German Imperial Army were fleeing ignominiously back through the Belgium they had '’violated, and twenty-one years since, in those last mad days of victory, England suffered a loss she had yet to realise. For on November 4, 1918, Wilfred Owen, the greatest soldierpoet of the war years, was killed in action on the Sambre Canal. It was not until three years later, when the world was settling down to peace, that Mr Siegfried Sassoon published a small volume of the poems of Wilfred Owen, “and revealed to lovers of poetry and the humanities how great a glory had departed.” It is strange that even now the poems of this twentieth century Keats are accorded little of the recognition they so obviously deserved. The death of Rupert Brooke in 1915 was regarded as a national literary calamity, but the passing of Wilfred Owen seven days before the Armistice was a tragedy known only to a few.

Born in the town of Plas Wilmot, Oswestry, in Wales, in 1893, Owen was reared in an atmosphere which attuned him to the lyrical sadness of the Welsh bards.. His mother said of him: “He was always a very thoughtful, imaginative child, not very robust, and never cared for games. As a little child his great pleasure was for me to read to him, even after he could read himself.”

It is understandable that a boy of Owen’s extreme sensitivity would not be readily welcomed by boys of his own age, and there is little doubt that in early youth he was extremely lonely. His books were his companions, for as yet he had found no kindred spirit. His reading of Keats and Shelley brought to his lips the cry: “I am alone among the unseen voices.” A POET’S PERSONALITY. After a serious illness in 1913 Wilfred Owen went to France, and became a tutor at Bordeaux. M. Laurent Tallhade, the poet, took a lively* interest in the youthful Owen, and assisted him greatly in his constant experiments with verse form. Owen’s vital and passionate nature was such that he was attracted by every form of artistic expression, especially music. He confessed: “I love music with such strength that I have to conceal the passion, for fear it be thought weakness.” Mr Frank Nicholson speaks of the immediate attraction which Owen’s presence exercised upon the group in which they first met. “It was not merely the attraction of youth with comeliness; it was rather, I think, that youth and comeliness were so strongly expressive of the personality behind them. His eyes were, I suppose, what struck one first in his appearance—dark and vivid eyes, flashing now and then a startled look that indicated quickness of apprehension and extreme sensitiveness.” Wilfred Owen had a rare power of inspiring “affection in men and women alike. The sentiment he aroused was one both of tenderness and admiration.”

His overwhelming sense of pity, of the underlying tragedy in the world of his day, is expressed in his war poems. His war experience gave him a philosophy which sometimes burst out as an impassioned plea for improvement of the lot of his generation, sometimes as a statement of bitterness and resignation. In Arms and The Boy he deplores the fate of youth: Let the boy try along this bayonet blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash, And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. Let him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet heads, Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads, Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth, Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death. ■ -Mte- - /KWprW'WKVu" j Owen was one of the few poets of the actual war period to realise the depth of the catastrophe which had engulfed the nations of Europe. Plunged into the abyss of war—war on a scale which men had thought beyond the bounds of possibility—he grasped the exact tenor and significance of the immense drama raging around him. With the faculty of true genius, he found the music in the turmoil, and his poems leave a record of war experience more graphic and touching than any detailed history could ever convey. Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to death; Sat down and eaten with him, cool and blanil— Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand; We’ve sniffed the green thick odor of his breath, Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe. Owen in the later years developed very rapidly. Although intellectually

he must have suffered terribly, his last poems show a maturity of expression hard to realise in one of his years. In Anthem for Doomed Youth he speaks with the beauty of distilled pity.

What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns, Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries for them from prayers or bells, Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs— The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells, And bugles calling them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in. their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of good+byes. The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall, Their flowers the tenderness of silent minds, And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.

In a hastily written preface to a volume of his poems the poet briefly summarises his work. “This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, nor lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all lam not concerned with poetry. My subject is war, and the pity of war; the poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no way consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do to-day is to warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful.” Perhaps, in this dedication of his poems to the war generations of all time, rather than his own. Owen gave the truest indication of the immortality Of his work.