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 When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver at the back of the mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The Persians, Agincourt, Chevy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. -- _______ ____________ E-mail: [email protected] ,,/\/ / \/ // / / \ http://darkshadows.org/~skyhawk =\\\\\\\============================- #define QUESTION ((bb) || !(bb)) ``\ \ \\ \ \ /\ \ / ----- ------------ --- --

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