We’ve
visited London for vacation each of the last three years, and each year, some
major event was happening in the city.
In
2012, we caught the very end of the Olympics and Paralympics, and waved our British
flags during the parade to honor the athletes decreed by the Queen.
In
2013, it was the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.
And
this year, it was the 100th anniversary of World War I. The city was
filled with commemorations – the fantastic display of ceramic red poppies at the
Tower of London and the
sobering
World War I exhibition at the Imperial War Museum were just two of many. And
there were books, books about the war, the poets and poetry of the war, the art
of the war, and memoirs of the war.
As
my wife will tell you, I like books.
In
September, the Bodleian Library, Oxford published Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life by Jane Potter.
Owen (1893-1918) has
been the subject of `six recent biographies (not to mention others less recent).
With Rupert Brooke, Owen is at the
front of the line of the groups known collectively as the “World War I poets.”
He is one of 16 World War I poets commemorated with a memorial stone in
Westminster Abbey.
Potter’s
illustrated history of his life is deceptively simple looking, almost like the
kind of biography you might find in a middle school library. But it is
carefully crafted, extraordinarily well researched, and engagingly written,
drawing upon the extensive correspondence he maintained with his mother, his
poetry, and a considerable number of sources and photographs from the English
Language Faculty at Oxford.
The
oldest of four children, he was the son of a railway clerk who had dreamed of
settling in India and a mother who was decidedly evangelical. As he matured, he
was undecided (or indecisive) about a profession or line of work, until the war
intervened. He also had been writing poetry.
Owen
didn’t enlist in the British Army until 1915. In 1917, suffering from what was
then called shell shock (and what we today call Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder,
or PTSD), he was sent to Craiglockhart, a hospital in Scotland specializing in
shell shock cases. There he met Siegfried
Sassoon,
who had been sent to the hospital for a very different reason – to avoid a
court-martial for a letter he wrote opposing the war (I posted an article on
Sassoon’s The War Poems this week at Tweetspeak
Poetry).
The
friendship with Sassoon was pivotal for Owen’s poetry. Manuscripts of his poems
with Sassoon’s emendations still exist (one is on display at the Imperial War
Museum). His poetry changed and grew. It began to be noticed, and published.
Potter
walks us through each phase of Owen’s short life, using pictures of childhood,
family, friends and the military. Each section includes his poems at the end,
adding a poignancy to the text. You look at the pictures of the young, the hope
and expectancy in his face, and read his poems, and in a few short pages see a
life of promise cut short.
One
of his best known poems is this one:
Anthem for Doomed Youth
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 now for them; no
prayers nor bells;
Nor
any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of
wailing shells;
And
bugles calling for 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
goodbyes.
The
pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of
patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of
blinds.
Owen
almost survived the war. On Nov. 4, 1918, he was shot and killed by enemy fire
alongside a canal. A week later, on
Armistice Day, his parents were informed of his death.
And bugles calling for them from sad
shires.
