STRANGE MEETING - WILFRED OWEN

STRANGE MEETING - Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918)

Poem:

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined,

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With thousand pains that vision’s face was grained;

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,

‘Strange friend’, I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’

‘None,’ said the other, ‘save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

Was my life also; I went hunting wild

After the wildest beauty in the world,

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

But mocks the steady running of the hour,

And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

For by my glee might many men have laughed,

And of my weeping something had been left,

Which must die now, I mean the truth untold,

Which must die now, I mean the truth untold,

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled.

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery,

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;

To miss the march of this retreating world

Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I am he 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….’

Summary of the poem:

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jobbed and killed

Sings Wilfred Owen in the poem Strange Meeting striking the core of human pathos of killing man by man in terms of war. As a solider, his experience of unrelenting weather and fierce fighting was turned to creative account in poems in the trenches of warfront such as Strange Meeting, Exposure, No Man’s Land and Asleep trying to instruct the idea of grim war which brings death to the mankind.

My subject is war and the pity of war writes in the preface to his volume of poems and adds All a poet can do today is warn, sounds a grim warning of war.

Owen heralds from the period of transition from Romantic and Victorian to Modern modes of poetry is one on the fundamental shifts in the history of literature. As a admirer of Keats, wrote poems in imitation of Keats and as soldier, he illustrated many poems on theme of war filled with pity and indignation.

Strange Meeting is excellent illustration of what Owen said in the preface of his volume of poems. If the reader is brought closer to the poem by the romantic diction, it enables the poet himself to maintain a certain aesthetic distance from the subject by the unique qualities of his new-found realism with traditional qualities of imagination and expression.

Strange Meeting which envisions an eerie encounter in the world between two dead soldiers precisely killer and victim and proceeds the dialogue in the sullen hall of Hopelessness (hell). The two dead souls further speak on how the war could have drawn them to fight and kill though they do not each other before.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled.

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

War is unwanted and it is only political exploitations for nothing. If some are not satisfied with the blood shed, their blood will boil; they will shed their blood or shed others’ blood. Politicians flatter the people as well as soldiers war is mode of progress in a systematic discipline and it will be systematic retreat away from the real progress.

Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels.

The soldier had the courage and wisdom, the divine knowledge and the strength of mind, to break away from the nations in their stupid march away from the sacred values of life. But they are retreating into what they consider impregnable citadels. And he proceeds to tell the war reality – when the soldiers had shed much blood their own and their enemies’ would check the chariot wheels by clogging – the wheel of progress.

The soldier, however, asserted that he did not want to join in the war once again if he had rebirth on earth but he would serve the people those who wounded on the Battle-Front by giving sweet waters of Peace and Love.

The two dead souls virtually are the mouth piece of the poet, where the poet himself an Army Officer who led his soldiers like cattle to a slaughter house and he too killed just a week before Armistice. He did not see at least the publication of his book to which he wrote preface.

The poem Strange Meeting illustrates as an excellent piece of war theme, but unfortunately he did remain to see his book in print.

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SELF – DEPENDENCE - Matthew Arnold

SELF – DEPENDENCE - Matthew Arnold

General survey of Matthew Arnold as a classicist.

Matthew Arnold is almost a classicist in his insistence on a code of conduct for the poet. It is stated thus in the preface to the Poems that the object of poetry is to make men happy. That its subjects are actions rather than thoughts, and that the style is but a means to achieve these objects rather than an end in itself, as with the Romantics, since his Victorians/ Victorian Age was prevailingly romantic, it was impossible for him to follow this ideal completely. While the spirit of his work is classical its form is romantic. He is neither an extreme classicist, nor an extreme romanticist.

His Melancholy:

Added to his incapacity to find a solution for the ills of the age was the loss of faith. Melancholy therefore is the prevailing not of his poetry. In fact, it inspires some of his best verse. The loss of religious faith made him aware of yet another, and a vaster, danger that the Universe itself was without any direction, that:

We are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by nights!

                                                --- Dover Beach.

His treatment of Nature:

Nature in his poems is what it is in life, with little added to it from the poet’s own mind. In the accuracy of his observation and in its precise rendering in words he is even superior to Tennyson. Arnold believed too that constituted as the world was, Nature was a fellow-sufferer with man and that what in her pleasant aspects she offered was not joy, as the poets fondly believed, but peace. The objects of Nature, he says in Resignation.

If I might lend their life a voice,

Seem to bear rather than rejoice.

The Poem: The Self-dependence

Matthew Arnold believed that in future literature would take the place of religion in giving man comfort and sustenance. His literary and social criticism is informed by lofty moral considerations and his poetry has an exquisitely elegiac and plaintive tone.

Arnold expresses his favourite idea of the permanence and calm of nature as opposed to the ‘weariness, the fever and the fret’ of human life in his poem Self-Dependence. The spiritual unrest of the Victorians came in the wake of scientific discoveries, and this conflict is poignantly felt and clearly expressed by poets like Tennyson and Arnold.

Weary of myself, and sick of asking

What I am, and what I ought to be,

At this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me

Forwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.

The very opening lines of the poem are striking the note of melancholic mood of the poet, metaphorically describing as a voyage through a mysterious sea standing at prow of the vessel symbolically of his life.

The poet entreats the stars, eternal and never changing, to quiet the tumultuous beatings of his heart with passionate desire and to give him peace and solace to his mind.

Ye who from my childhood up have calm’s me,

Calm me, ah, compose me to the end!

He fervently requesting the stars and Nature which passionately influencing his conscience and mind and quell the agitation of his mind.

The stars and sea used to have a magic influence on his heart in bringing him peace and joy. He now implores them to suppress the fluttering of his heart and to give him a serene tranquility of mind.

Unaffrighted by the silence round them,

Undistracted by the sights they see,

These demand not that the things without them

Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.

The stars and the sky are not frightened of their loneliness of confused by what they see around them; they do not demand that they should be given love, amusement or sympathy. So too man who is lonely in spiritual life should not be frightened of that loneliness. He should not be disturbed by what he sees around him; he should pursue his self-appointed path without asking for love or sympathy or amusement.

Resolve to be thyself; and know that he,

Who finds himself, loses his misery!

The stars and sea fulfil their great task by pouring into their attention and all their energy without distracting themselves by what others are doing.

In the concluding lines of the poem poet gives the message is the corner stone of Indian philosophy on Self-Dependence- be true to yourself. He, who realizes himself, loses his misery. With self-realization comes calm of mind.

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THE CARPENTER'S SON - A E HOUSMAN

The Carpenter's Son - A. E. Housman

Alfred Edward Housman usually known as A E Housman was an English classical scholar and poet, best known for his ‘A Shropshire Lad’ poems. He established his reputation publishing as a private scholar and, on the strength and quality of his work, was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and later at Cambridge. His publications of ‘Juvenal’, ‘Manilius’ and ‘Lucan’ are still considered authoritative.

‘The Carpenter’s Son’, Housman uses imagery to reflect upon Jesus Christ’s last few hours as he dies uopon a cross. Careful examination of this poem, one can feel of Housman’s satirical toward this event. However, before delving into the symbolic nature of this poem, some background information is a great aid in deciphering its meaning and theme

On March 26, 1859, Alfred Edward Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestorshire, England. He was born into an ancient family of farmers and preachers. His family was very religious, and this was mostly because his paternal great-grandfather was an evangelical preacher. Housman continued to live a pious life until the death of his mother. Apparently, Housman prayed for weeks, asking the god to spare his mother from a sickness. However, when she died on his twelfth birthday, he slowly began to reject his church ad the religion affiliated with it.

B. J. Leggett suggests that Housman’s rejection of the church and the other troubles he had endured during his life played a major role in the creation of his poem, The Carpenter’s Son. It is due in part to these reasons, Housman’s writings relate to the “unhappy and painful experiences serve as a defensive function”. By creating a satire of a specific painful concept – that the death of Jesus Christ provides mercy and salvation for all – Housman is able “to deal in imagination with this situation which might cause pain, and thus strengthen his ability to cope with it.”

The careful perusal of the poem, one can see that Housman is writing about Christ’s crucifixion.  The title refers to the son of a carpenter, and Biblical records show that Saint Joseph, Jesus Christ’s human father, was indeed a Carpenter. In his poem, Housman describes Christ as a common man being hung, and to do this he assumes the persona of the Lord and speaks in first person.

In the past, men guilty of crimes were hung for their transgressions. Within the first stanza, Housman introduces the central theme of his poem. He tells his readers,

“Fare you well, for ill fare I;

Live, lads, and I will die.”

This is repeated later in the final stanza. This is a direct allusion to Jesus Christ’s sacrifice of himself to provide everlasting life for all who followed him. The Bible teaches that He died on a cross to save all from sin. In this first stanza, the hangman shoving Jesus on a cross comes to mind. Jesus tells His followers, who are his best friends, hat his end will bring eternal life to them all. However, Housman satirizes this scene by giving his readers the impression that Jesus is regretting what has brought him to this end. By regarding the Lord as a mere carpenter’s son, and not as the Son of Man, Housman suggests that all of Christ’s work was in vain, Again, this relates back to his frustration with the Church itself.

In the second stanza, Housman creates an image of Christ lamenting his misfortune. Christ considers what would have happened had He become an apprentice to his father. He wishes that He had “stuck to plane and adze,” the wood and tool used in the trade of a carpenter. He says that He would not have been lost, had He simply followed his father’s example. However, He now knows that he will be crucified for His rejection of a passive stance in life. Here, one may draw a parallel between Housman and Christ. Both men regret their faith and contemplate other paths that they may have chosen, in Housman’s case, the path which led toward atheism.

In the third stanza, Christ laments that if he had become a woodworker Himself,

                                          ‘Then I “might have built perhaps

                                           Gallows-trees for other chaps,

Never dangled on my own,  

Had I but left ill alone.”

Again, satire shows through as Christ questions his actions. Housman has the Lord wishing that He had abandoned his cause to escape the pain through which He had to go.

In the fourth stanza, Christ continues speaking to his followers. He tells them about how his hanging brings many spectators. Again, Housman makes it obvious that Christ was not well liked among his neighbours in his time. He claims,

And the people passing by

Stop to shake their fists and curse.

These lines bring to mind the treatment Jesus received on his way to Calvary and as he was nailed to his cross. According to the Bible, spectators would spit at Jesus, slap him, and throw refuse across his path on his way to his death. He was treated even more terribly in his dying than he had been treated during his lifetime. Here, Housman takes this into account: “So ’tis come from ill to worse.” In saying this, the poem shows its satiric edge once again as Christ doubts his actions.

In the fifth stanza, Housman illustrates the scene after Jesus Christ has been nailed to his cross. The Bible explains, “When they came to the place called the skull, they crucified Him and the criminals there, one on His right, the other on His left” (Luke 24:33) While all three will die in the same way, their crimes are very different. At this point, Housman compares their plight, as he says,

   Two poor fellows hang for the theft.

     Though the midmost hangs for love.

Later on, Housamn continues with his satirical tone. In the voice of Jesus, he tells his friends to live a normal life, implying that they should not tamper with the norms of society. The Christian faith teaches that its followers should do just the opposite, that they should do what is good and just. Jesus tells his to walk away from him, without looking at him, to….

                                                         Walk henceforth in other ways;

See my neck and save your own:

Comrades all, leave all alone.

This is yet another reflection of his denunciation of religion.

In the final stanza of “The Carpenter’s Son” Housamn continues his instruction towards Christ’s followers. He tells them to avoid his fate, and “Make some day a decent end” instead of ending up as He does. In conclusion, He says goodbye once again, and asks them to live their lives as they have before as he dies.

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FAIRIES SIEGE - RUDYARD KIPLING

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Fairies Siege - Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling is a Novelist, short story writer and a poet born in 1865 in Bombay. He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story writing. His children’s books are known to be enduring classics in children’s literature. In 1907, he was awarded the most covetous Nobel Prize for his literary contributions.

The poem ‘Fairies’ Siege’ is about a faithful warrior who surrenders his master’s castle ‘The Herald of God’.

Summary of the subject matter:

The poet says himself that he was given the charge of the place (castle) to keep and he wanted to keep it without any alterations. Protecting the place is a different game to him because he was playing with strife all the time. He assures that he is not ready to fight with the swords which cannot be seen and spears which cannot be viewed. But he wanted to be a faithful warrior to his master who has given the charge of the place and he desires to hand over him the keys of the place on his knees with great submission. The surrendering of the castle to his master is a dream of a dreamer whose dreams have come true.

 He says that once the terms of the master are accepted that he never be flinched from the guns because it is a different show he is doing. He is not ready to fight with ‘Herald of God’ but advises to open the gate and let him enter the place (castle) in state. Again the poet refrains ‘It’s the Dreamer whose dreams come true!’

 He says he would not give way for an emperor but hold his road for a king.   He would not bow down to the Triple Crown (Pope, the religious head). He says he is not ready to fight with the Powers of Air. As a sentry he passes through allowing Draw Bridge fall to enter the lord of all.  As a protector, it is his dream of a dreamer whose dreams have come true.

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