[Carl Copeland]

Whether they died by the hundreds or died one by one is matter of perspective, I’d say, but we can always rewrite it: “And then mowed half the seed of Europe down.”

[Mark McDonnell]

Of course, that Owen poem makes no sense. Again him and I are "at war". What does this mean:

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

As I know of it: the first world war did not kill any son one by one, but massacred them from entrenched weapons of annihilation. How disfiguring it is to those dead soldiers to twist their truth into a rhyme-driven couplet!

"The pity is in the poetry", — ughhhh!

I thought those Geoffrey Hill lectures were brilliant, Cameron, but I admit to feeling a little "at war" with him here. Owen clearly was concerned with poetry, as well as pity, whatever he wrote in his preface, a preface which he had no knowledge would ever be published, let alone become so famous. I think to characterise him as the “pity-poet” is reductive. Hill himself notes examples of where he uses that word in a more ironic or cynical sense. He may not be your, or Hill’s, favourite war poet but the care he took with the poems, written under the most extraordinary circumstances, belies the forgiveable emotional hyperbole of the preface and it certainly isn't Owen's fault if the message has been taken to heart by subsequent poets who favour emotional "truth telling" over craft and language.

I also think Hill's criticism of the couplet as merely rhyme-driven is slightly ungenerous. Certainly, it may not be factually accurate but it has a deliberate rhetorical power, a poetic truth, in its image of a cold, calculating slaughter. It also emphasises each soldier as an individual.

[Yves S L]

You lot talking about Geoffrey Hill?

[W T Clark]

Mass-slaughter is a matter of perspective? Poetic truth means untruth?

[Carl Copeland]

We’re used to thinking in terms of collective killers and mass slaughter and may lose sight of the fact that each victim had a name and a world that ended with them. Modern war is dehumanizing, but that’s not the only truth of war, and Owen doesn’t go that way in his poem.

[Joe Crocker]

Originally Posted by W T Clark

How can the pity-poet be "perfectly calculated" when he lies in his very couplet. It may reflect the sound of a rifle, but it does not reflect the truth. Machine guns killed soldiers by the hundreds, not "one by one".

I really don’t understand where your irritation comes from Cameron. Is it because a poem about World War 1 horror ends in a rhyming couplet? I don't want to put words in your mouth but does that mean it’s twee, forced, cynical, that the need to rhyme distorts the truth? I think rhymed couplets can be all those things but I also think this one is extraordinarily powerful. It is the only rhyme in the poem and it is set apart at the end. The rhyme gives the poem an unforgettable and dreadful finality. I hear it as a sharp nail being hammered into a coffin, or the bolt action of a Lee Enfield ready for the next shot.

Is it the son/one rhyme that bothers you? Do you feel it is forced and leads Owen to misdescribe the nature of trench warfare? I think there are plenty of other rhymes Owen could have used that would have been more factually accurate – son/gun is an obvious one. But it seems clear to me that he chose “one by one” very deliberately. The poem describes the bible story of the intended sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abram. It is a shocking, intimate testimony. In the bible, God rewards Abram by sending an angel to the rescue. In Owen’s version, Abram ignores the angel, carries out the execution and then goes on to repeat it, individually, on thousands of other sons. That makes it so much more affecting, gut-wrenching, than the abstract, statistical horror that the casualty lists enumerate.

Neither Abram, nor Isaac, nor angels were present in the WW1 trenches. (So the poem is lying?) Owen is asking us to imagine the biblical sacrifice was not interrupted by an angel but fully carried out in modern times and to imagine all the young soldiers as individual sons sent to their individual deaths by individual old men.

ps. Sorry Glenn for hijacking your thread

pps. Cross-posted with Carl, who makes a similar point

[David Callin]

Originally Posted by Joe Crocker

ps. Sorry Glenn for hijacking your thread

As it happens, I am, in my conventional way, on the same side of this argument as Carl and Joe, but it does seem unfair on Glenn's poem to be made the site for it. Perhaps it's time to take it outside? (Not to a car park but to one of the more general forums.)

Some moderation required?

David

[John Riley]

I feel I need to say that none of my comments were about the details of the Abraham-Issac story. My goal was to point out the poem fails because there is no suggestion of an ending adequate to the story. A poem about one of the most profound stories in the Western world ends with the conclusion God did things this way and poor Abraham couldn’t understand “the moral we learn in church.” That is such a facile conclusion to the story. I read now the ending isn’t supposed to be about the Christian message, although it explicitly draws that comparison

I thought pointing out the weaknesses in the poem was helpful. I suggested Kierkegaard as an example of someone developing a thesis worthy of the story. I’m not a Bible scholar. What I said in the comment still seems obvious and I offered it to help it eventually developing into a convincing poem. Why that continued to be resisted is not on me but I should have stopped after the initial post. That’s on me.