Conscious
His fingers wake, and flutter up the bed.
His eyes come open with a pull of will,
Helped by the yellow may-flowers by his head.
A blind-cord drawls across the window-sill...
How smooth the floor of the ward is! what a rug!
And who's that talking, somewhere out of sight?
Why are they laughing? What's inside that jug?
"Nurse! Doctor!" "Yes; all right, all right."
But sudden dusk bewilders all the air --
There seems no time to want a drink of water.
Nurse looks so far away. And everywhere
Music and roses burnt through crimson slaughter.
Cold; cold; he's cold; and yet so hot:
And there's no light to see the voices by --
No time to dream, and ask -- he knows not what.
Wilred Owen
Note:
William Butler Yeats in his selection of poems for The Oxford Book of Modern
Verse did not include any poems of Wilred Owen, who was born March 18, 1893.
Yeats did not make this omission lightly. He devoted a section of his
introduction to his reasoning. Yeats's conclusion may be right, but his
rationale rings false; it is the argument of a civilian.
Yeats' reasoning --
"I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war;
they are in all anthologies, but I have substituted Herbert Read's End of a War
written long after. The writers of these poems were invariably officers of
exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly selected for dangerous
work, all, I think, had the Military Cross; their letters are vivid and
humorous, they were not without joy -- for all skill is joyful -- but felt
bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In
poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they
made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason
that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive
suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a
joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has
withdrawn into the quicksilver at the back of the mirror no great event becomes
luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The Persians,
Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side
of the road -- that is all. If war is necessary, or necessary in our time and
place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever,
remembering our comfort at midinght when our temperature fell, or as we forget
the worst moments of more painful disease. Florence Farr returning third class
from Ireland found herself among the Connaught Rangers just returned from the
Boer War who described an incident over and over, and always with loud
laughter; an unpopular sergeant struck by a shell turned round and round like a
dancer wound in his own entrails. That too may be a right way of seeing war,
if war is necessry; the way of the Cockney slums, of Patrick Street, of the
Kilmainham Minut, of Johnny I hardly knew ye, or the medieval Dance of Death."
Owen's own defence of his poems -- not polished like Yeats's prose, because it
was reconstructed after his death from hand-written notes -- is, I think, more
human and more soldierly.
Owen's defence --
Note: this Preface was found, in an unfinished condition, among Wilfred
Owen's papers.
"Preface
This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak
of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour,
dominion or power,
except War.
Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.
The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are not to this generation,
This is in no sense consolatory.
They may be to the next.
All the poet can do to-day is to warn.
That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
If I thought the letter of this book would last,
I might have used proper names; but if the spirit of it survives Prussia, --
my ambition and those names will be content; for they will have
achieved themselves fresher fields than Flanders."
It is hard to believe that Yeats, who included the poems of two of his lovers
in the anthology, did not recognize the skill Owens showed in such poems as
today's sonnet, Conscious.
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◆ From: 61.216.23.96
※ 編輯: skyhawk 來自: 61.216.23.96 (04/02 22:40)
※ 編輯: skyhawk 來自: 61.216.23.96 (04/02 22:40)
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