Soldier's Dream

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Soldier's Dream Wilfred Owen: Investigating Soldier’s Dream refers to links on www.crossref-it.info Investigating Soldier’s Dream The title of the poem is Soldier’s Dream. Discuss who you think that soldier is who has such a dream. Is this dream Owen’s dream, the dream of one man or the dream of all who serve in wars? Owen based the poem on a fundamental split between God the Father and God the Son. In what way does this poem remind you of The Parable of the Old Man and the Young? Look at how the two poems are different. Investigating language and tone in Soldier’s Dream Soldier’s Soldier’s Owen’s choice of words is important in this poem. His diction when he writes about the war is very different from when he writes about the tension between God and Jesus. Make a list of the details of war. How does the language work in the poem? Make a list of the characteristics of God, Jesus and Michael. How does Owen make us feel about each of them? Investigating structure and versification in Soldier’s Dream Although Jesus destroys weapons both ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ there is a suggestion in the last line that Michael, following God’s command, has seen only to ‘our’ repairs. Is this significant? If so, what was Owen saying about the war in the last line? Investigating imagery and symbolism in Soldier’s Dream Some critics find the poem unconvincing. It is in their view ‘whimsical and quirky’. What is your feeling about the poem? Is there a way in which it ‘jars’ on you? Would you agree that Soldier’s Dream is very much a ‘one off’ poem, that Owen never writes anything else remotely like it? Look at Soldier’s Dream alongside At a Calvary near the Ancre and Le Christianisme. Compare Owen’s use of the figure of Christ in all three of these poems. Soldier’s Dream Investigating themes in Dreams figure in many of Owen’s poems. The real longing for peace in this poem is expressed in a dream. Remind yourself of Strange Meeting which also is about a dream. How different is the message in that lengthy and complex poem to the theme of Soldier’s Dream ? Remind yourself of the poem Exposure in which the soldiers dream of home. How does Owen create the pity and the poetry in each of Soldier’s Dream, Strange Meeting and Exposure ? WilfredOwen: Investigating Dream © 2014 crossref-it.info .
Recommended publications
  • High Zest the Doggerel March
    +,*+=(67 DQG 7+('2**(5(/0$5&+ :LOIUHG2ZHQ±*HQLXVRU6XJDUVWLFN" 6RPH(VVHQWLDO1RWHV IRU7HDFKHUV 3XSLOV 0$5,23(758&&, 7+(%281'63,5$/6HULHV±1XPEHU 5HYLVHG(GLWLRQ 0DULR3HWUXFFLS0 HIGH ZEST and THE DOGGEREL MARCH Mario Petrucci OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY Royal Literary Fund Fellow Poet-in-Residence THE IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM THE BOUND SPIRAL PRESS (2003) 0DULR3HWUXFFLS1 Wilfred Owen – What’s new? There can’t be many poets as squarely identified with ‘war poetry’, or more frequently spotted on the syllabus, as the soldier-poet Wilfred Owen. Why is this? And how important, really, is Owen, or the First World War, to the historical development of poetry in Britain? So much has been written and rewritten about Owen that it’s sometimes difficult to see the pasta for the sauce! I won’t even try to sort that one out here; but the least I can do is offer you a few tasties to chew on, mainly in terms of looking at Owen in a broader context. For a start, even a quick listen to some of Owen’s contemporaries demonstrates just how ‘realistic’ and original Owen was by comparison. E.B. Flenley is fairly typical of what was called the “trade in schoolboy verses” that became widespread in the First World War: Mowing, Mowing in the Sunlight On the windy lawn. Mowing ‘mid the wind and sunshine Mowing since the dawn. Mowing, Mowing. This is (not surprisingly) from a poem called “Mowing” (Fragments by a Schoolboy Now Sleeping in France, 1920). John Oxenham, a celebrated writer of his time, sold something like 175,000 copies of his book in 1915 with verses like this: They died that we might live, - Hail! - And Farewell! - All honour give To those who, nobly striving, nobly fell, That we might live! That extract is taken from a poem called (yes, you guessed it) “Hail! - And Farewell!” Oxenham’s poetry was issued on thousands of cards and posters for schools and Scouts’ clubs to encourage the young to fight.
    [Show full text]
  • Strange Meeting" Again'
    Connotations Vo!. 3.2 (1993/94) "Strange Meeting" Again' DOUGLAS KERR Kenneth Muir's essay "Connotations of 'Strange Meeting''' is a thoughtful and interesting contribution to a discussion that has been going on, in various forms and fora, for the three-quarters of a century since the poem was first published in 1919, the year after Wilfred Owen's death. In the past, "Strange Meeting" has attracted more discussion than any other of Owen's poems (and it remains the only one to have had an entire book written about it).l It is still, arguably, Owen's best-known poem, and from the first it has played a central part in the making and development of Owen's reputation. Prompted by Professor Muir's essay, and to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of this haunting poem's first appearance, I want to sketch here the history of "Strange Meeting" since its publication, and the way the poem has functioned as a focus of debate about Owen and the interpretation of his work. This will bring me back, in a roundabout way, to Professor Muir and some of the points in his essay. A notable absentee from the discussion, unfortunately, is Owen himself. He wrote "Strange Meeting" in the first half of 1918, in that ex- traordinarily creative last year of his life, but there is no mention of the poem in any of his surviving letters. A mere handful of his poems appeared in print in his lifetime, but he had plans for a collection to be called Disabled and Other Poems, and "Strange Meeting" is listed towards the end of two drafts for a table of contents which he drew up in the summer of 1918.2 One of these lists the "motive" of each of the poems he planned to include: the "motive" given for "Strange *Reference: Kenneth Muir, "Connotations of 'Strange Meeting,'" Connotations 3.1 (1993): 26-36.
    [Show full text]
  • Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting" a Critical Analysis
    Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting" A Critical Analysis “Strange Meeting” was the end result of a metamorphosis undergone by Owen and other World War I soldier-poets. They went through many changes as their exposure to the war and trench life increased. Initially they wrote patriotic verse, designed to help build a united front opposing the aggressions of Germany. This quickly changed as they began to realize the grim realities and arbitrariness of war. As their frustrations grew, they lashed out at those they saw as either profiting from the war or misguidedly supporting it. Their final stage reflects the sadness and waste of any war at any time no matter what side the combatants and populace are on. Owen was no exception; “Strange Meeting” is perhaps his most poignant poem and strongest antiwar work, crowning his short list of achievements. Paradoxically enough Owen began writing poetry in the tradition of the romantics with Keats and Shelleyas his models Equipped with a Romantic sensibility, Owen might have written better poetry but circumstances ordained otherwise. The war provided Owen with subject matter, which turned the romantic elegiac strain of his early poems into the deep feelings of sorrow and compassion, which characterize his later poems. The idea of the futility of the soldiers‟ sacrifice is the theme of strange meeting. In fact, it is a poem of visionary dream. The poet soldier imagines that he has escaped from battle and gone to the other regions. As he keeps watching the corpses, one springs up with piteous recognization in fixed eyes‟. The other man in its cadaverous look, who is in fact the enemy soldier, relates the horrors and frustrations accompanying war.
    [Show full text]
  • The Impact of the First World War on the Poetry of Wilfred Owen
    IIUC STUDIES ISSN 1813-7733 Vol. – 4, December 2007 Published in April 2008 (p 25-40) The impact of the First World War on the poetry of Wilfred Owen Mohammad Riaz Mahmud∗ Abstract: In 1914 the First World War broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and the noble pursuit of heroic ideals. This was the world’s first experience of modern mechanized warfare. As the months and years passed, each bringing increasing slaughter and misery, the soldiers became increasingly disillusioned. Many of the strongest protests made against the war were made through the medium of poetry by young men horrified by what they saw. They not only wrote about the physical pain of wounds and deaths, but also the mental pain that were consequences of war. One of these poets was Wilfred Owen. In his poetry we find the feelings of futility, horror, and dehumanization that he encountered in war. World War I broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and noble pursuit of heroic ideals. People were wholly unprepared for the horrors of modern trench warfare, and the Great War wiped out virtually a whole generation of young men and shattered so many illusions and ideals. 1 No other war challenged existing conventions, morals, and ideals in the same way as World War I did. World War I saw the mechanization of weapons (heavy artillery, tanks), the use of poison gas, the long stalemate on the Western Front, and trench warfare, all of which resulted in the massive loss of human life.
    [Show full text]
  • The Processing of Trauma in the War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon
    Pity and Indignation: The Processing of Trauma in the War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon Loren Samons English Faculty Advisor: Dr. James Fowler Of the poets who blossomed between 1914 and 1918, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon produced in British World War I poetry perhaps the best examples of the empathetic connectivity and therapeutic abilities of literature. Owen is often referred to as the “more significant” by literary critics; his verse is more frequently anthologized and seems to enjoy a greater degree of familiarity with general readers than the work of Sassoon (“Biography”). In the poetry of both men, however, shifts in tone and word choice often denote a corresponding shift in emotion or mindset that in turn comments upon the psychological state of the poet. During their respective treatments for shell shock in Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart Hospital, the voice of pity in Owen’s poetry develops in sharp contrast to the voice of indignation in Sassoon’s poetry. Such disparate attitudes not only mark the differences in the personalities of these two men, but also indicate their differing CLA Journal 8 (2020) pp. 237-249 238 psychological progressions in confronting and processing war trauma. Wilfred Owen’s wider appeal among both scholars and general readers is due largely to his retaining a degree of Romantic influence throughout the war and his ability to convey his psychological healing and development through his poetry. Drawing on affect theory, one can explain the lasting appeal of Owen’s poetry through the psychology behind the poetic conflict of a poem like “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Within the context of literature, affect theory, or the study of affect, is the inquiry into the forces or “interior movements” in a work that speak to the reader on an emotional, sensational, aesthetic, or cognitive level and leave a lasting psychological impression (Wehrs 1, 3).
    [Show full text]
  • Mental Cases
    Wilfred Owen: Investigating Mental Cases refers to links on www.crossref-it.info Investigating Mental Cases The horror Owen describes in Mental Cases , the ‘wading sloughs of flesh’ l.13 echoes the corpses and waist-high slush he describes in The Sentry. Both poems dwell on the eyes of the tormented. Note down the references to eyes in both poems. Re-read Dulce et Decorum Est. Notice Owen’s reference to the eyes of the victim of the gas attack. Why are the references to eyes so powerful and effective in Mental Cases, The Sentry and Dulce et Decorum Est ? Owen is using this grim poem to show the horrendous aftermath of war, which he regards as hellish. In the early part of the twentieth century, mental breakdown Mental gained less sympathy than physical injury. What differences do you notice in Owen’s presentation of the men in the poem Mental Cases compared with his description of the man in Disabled ? Compare the way in which Owen creates his image of hell in Mental Cases with the image of hell he gives us in Strange Meeting. Investigating language and tone in Mental Cases Disabled and Mental Cases can be seen as two sides of the same coin, the first dealing with the physically disabled, the second with those whose reason has been shot away. How does Owen capture our pity in both poems? Which is the harshest reality? What do you think Owen felt about the two different states of injury? Investigating structure and versification in Mental Cases In Mental Cases Owen seems to either jettison rhyme altogether or use almost pure predictable rhymes to make his point.
    [Show full text]
  • Political, Moral, and Existential Nihilism in Wilfred Owen's Poem “The Dead-Beat”12
    Goran J. Petrović*1 https://doi.org/10.18485/analiff.2020.32.2.3 University of Belgrade 821.111.09-1Овен В. Faculty of Philology Originalni naučni rad Primljen: 22.07.2020 Prihvaćen: 23.09.2020 POLITICAL, MORAL, AND EXISTENTIAL NIHILISM IN WILFRED OWEN’S POEM “THE DEAD-BEAT”12 This paper analyzes “The Dead-Beat”, a war poem by Wilfred Owen, from the perspective of nihilism, or its three specific kinds (political, moral, and ex- istential nihilism), as Alan Pratt, a theoretician and researcher of nihilistic phi- losophy, categorized this notion. According to Pratt, political nihilism refers to the idea that current political structures are false, moral nihilism means that good and evil are relative categories, whereas existential nihilism means that human life is intrinsically devoid of any higher (teleological) purpose, and as such not worth living. Through the misfortunate demise of “The Dead-Beat’s” protagonist on the WW1 Western Front, the poet advocates all three kinds of nihilism, for, as the paper argues, the poem’s tragic hero does not die of a wound but as a result of his revelation that the existence of an individual human being or soldier, especially if trapped in the trenches of history’s first mechanized war and abandoned by both his state leadership and his closest kin, is meaningless (and it is precisely in this fact that the presence of political, moral, and existential nihilism lies). This paper views “The Dead-Beat’s” nihilism in contrast with the ideology of materialistic progressivism as propounded by both positivist philosophers and liberal theolo- gians of the nineteenth century.
    [Show full text]
  • Wilfred Owen - Poems
    Classic Poetry Series Wilfred Owen - poems - Publication Date: 2004 Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive Wilfred Owen(1893-1918) Wilfred Owen was born near Oswestry, Shropshire, where his father worked on the railway. He was educated at the Birkenhead Institute, Liverpool and Shrewsbury Technical College. He worked as a pupil-teacher in a poor country parish before a shortage of money forced him to drop his hopes of studying at the University of London and take up a teaching post in Bordeaux (1913). He was tutoring in the Pyrenees when war was declared and enlisted as shortly afterwards. In 1917 he suffered severe concussion and 'trench-fever' whilst fighting on the Somme and spent a period recuperating at Craiglockart War Hospital, near Edinburgh. It was he that he met Siegfried Sassoon who read his poems, suggested how they might be improved, and offered him much encouragement. He was posted back to France in 1918 where he won the MC before being killed on the Sombre Canal a week before the Armistice was signed. His poetry owes its beauty to a deep ingrained sense of compassion coupled with grim realism. Owen is also acknowledged as a technically accomplished poet and master of metrical variety. Poems such as 'Dulce Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for doomed Youth' have done much to influence our attitudes towards war. www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 [i Saw His Round Mouth's Crimson] [I saw his round mouth's crimson deepen as it fell], Like a Sun, in his last deep hour; Watched the magnificent recession of farewell, Clouding, half gleam, half glower, And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek.
    [Show full text]
  • DOI: 10.7596/Taksad.V6i3.908 Wilfred Own Re-Visited: a Psychoanalytic
    Journal of History Culture and Art Research (ISSN: 2147-0626) Tarih Kültür ve Sanat Araştırmaları Dergisi Vol. 6, No. 3, June 2017 Revue des Recherches en Histoire Culture et Art Copyright © Karabuk University http://kutaksam.karabuk.edu.tr ﻣﺠﻠﺔ ﺍﻟﺒﺤﻮﺙ ﺍﻟﺘﺎﺭﻳﺨﻴﺔ ﻭﺍﻟﺜﻘﺎﻓﻴﺔ ﻭﺍﻟﻔﻨﻴﺔ DOI: 10.7596/taksad.v6i3.908 Citation: Güneş, A. (2017). Wilfred Own Re-Visited: A Psychoanalytic Reading of War, Memory, and Crisis of Identity in Wilfred Owen’s Poem Mental Cases. Journal of History Culture and Art Research, 6(3), 166-178. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7596/taksad.v6i3.908 Wilfred Own Re-Visited: A Psychoanalytic Reading of War, Memory, and Crisis of Identity in Wilfred Owen’s Poem Mental Cases∗ Ali Güneş1 Abstract This paper focuses upon the psychoanalytic reading of Wilfred Owen’s poem Mental Cases. In so doing, first, the paper examines how the disturbing experiences and feelings of a tragic event such as a war, torture, rape or murder, which the surviving victims, civilians and veteran soldiers store in the realm of their unconscious in the Freudian sense, start annoying their feelings after a while. That is, these memories of the past event continuously come later on in life under the troubling influence of recurring flashbacks of the traumatic events, nightmares, irritability, anxiety, and social withdrawal. Eventually these undesirable traumatic past experiences and memories repressed in the unconscious obviously causes individuals to have a kind of psychological disorder which powerfully affects their daily behaviour, life and identity. Secondly, the paper explores this relationship between conscious and unconscious aspect of life, along with the perception of identity, in Owen’s poem Mental Cases, in which the shell-shocked, war-torn veteran soldiers, who experienced and witnessed the shock of World War I and the death of their fellow soldiers, constantly remember the soldiers and innocent civilians who were brutally killed or whom they brutally killed in World War I.
    [Show full text]
  • Strange Meeting -- Summary 'Strange Meeting' Is One of Wilfred Owen's Greatest Poems. After 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' A
    Strange Meeting -- Summary ‘Strange Meeting’ is one of Wilfred Owen’s greatest poems. After ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ it is one of his most popular and widely studied and analysed. Siegfried Sassoon called ‘Strange Meeting’ Owen’s passport to immortality; it’s certainly true that it’s poems like this that helped to make Owen the definitive English poet of the First World War. As Owen himself put it, the poetry is in the pity. In summary, ‘Strange Meeting’ is narrated by a soldier who dies in battle and finds himself in Hell. There he meets a man whom he identifies as a ‘strange friend’. This other man tells the narrator that they both nurtured similar hopes and dreams, but they have both now died, unable to tell the living how piteous and hopeless war really is. This other soldier then reveals to the narrator that he is the enemy soldier whom the narrator killed in battle yesterday. He tells the narrator that they should sleep now and forget the past. The rhyming couplet is associated in English verse with, among other things, the heroic couplets of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and many other ‘Augustan’ masters of the form. But the First World War, whilst it contained undeniable heroism, was not a heroic war: the mass slaughter of men on an industrial scale was something far removed from the romanticised battles of Homer’s Trojan War or Virgil’s account of Aeneas’ conquest of Rome. Heroic couplets are not appropriate for an unheroic war.
    [Show full text]
  • Ironie Allusion in the Poetry of Wilfred Owen
    Ironie Allusion in the Poetry of Wilfred Owen TIMOTHY O'KEEFFE ACED with the incredible horror of warfare in the trenches, Wilfred Owen sought to find some yardstick with which to F measure its carnage. He had been nurtured on the aes- theticism of the Georgians, of Tennyson, and particularly of Keats, but the irrelevance of poetry of excessive self-pity and beauty to Owen's life on the Western Front became distressingly clear. Thus the poet prefaced his poems with this remark indicat• ing the chasm he saw between a poetry of beauty and a poetry of truth : 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, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.1 Although Owen often echoes the poets he had read in a straightforward manner, many of his more effective poems depend upon ironic allusions not only to past British poets but also to at least two Roman authors and to the Bible. The irony of these allusions consists in the enormous distance between the sense of values of the writers of the past and their naive conception of war and Owen's immediate knowledge of its mindless obscenity. Byron, among the English poets of the past century, had antici• pated Owen with his description of the siege of Ismail in Don J nan.
    [Show full text]
  • The Poetry Is the Pity: the War Requiem and Poetic Consolation Gabrielle Ferrari Southern Methodist University
    Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology Volume 10 Article 4 Issue 1 Current Issue: Volume 10, Issue 1 (2017) The Poetry is the Pity: The War Requiem and Poetic Consolation Gabrielle Ferrari Southern Methodist University Recommended Citation Ferrari, Gabrielle () "The Poetry is the Pity: The War Requiem and Poetic Consolation," Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology: Vol. 10: Iss. 1, Article 4. The Poetry is the Pity: The War Requiem and Poetic Consolation Abstract Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem sets nine of Wilfred Owen’s war poems alongside the words of the Missa pro defunctis, allowing these texts to interrogate and comment on each other. Owen’s poems describe the horrors of trench warfare, and often, harshly indict both church and state for their complicity in war-mongering. Scholars such as Philip Rupprecht, Heather Wiebe, David B. Greene, and George D. Herbert have explored how Owen’s texts work to subvert the text of the Mass, and deny religious and musical consolation. Such readings place the War Requiem in line with Owen’s preface to his Collected Poems, in which he rejects consolatory mourning. This article, however, suggests that moments in the War Requiem work to deconstruct Owen’s preface. Britten’s juxtaposition of Owen’s poems with the text of the Missa pro defunctis, specifically in the Agnus Dei and Libera me, works to undermine Owen’s poetic goals as outlined in the preface, bringing out irony not immediately apparent in Owen’s work. This article closely examines Owen’s poems in the context of Britten’s settings and compares Owen’s poems to their Latin counterparts.
    [Show full text]