EXPLORING TRAUMA IN WILFRED OWEN’S WAR VERSE

“My subject is war and the pity of war/ The poetry is in the pity”, wrote Wilfred Owen in the preface
to his war poems. Applewhite writes, “The war reinforced not modernism’s original technical
inventiveness and formal power but rather its penchant for raw materials, intense psychic tensions,
bleak realism, and proclivity towards chaos.” This is not only an apt description of how modernism
as a whole handled the First World War, but of the way Owen’s experiences and struggles with
mental illness became his poetry. Owen explores the trauma of the soldiers affected in the
battlefield in his poems like Spring Offensive, Dulce et Decorum est, Anthem for Doomed Youth,
Strange Meeting and Mental Cases.

The trauma that Owen explores in his poems represented not only the traumatic effects the soldiers
suffered as a consequence of the war but also his own struggle that he witnessed as a soldier. Owen
himself took up this struggle, as he himself ended up making a transition from someone who had
only seen the war, to someone who had both lived and witnessed that war as a soldier. Owen’s time
in a psychiatric hospital being treated for shell shock was vital to his journey into using poetry to
work through his complex emotional relationships and the changes he had undergone. While being
treated, Owen came to understand something vital to begin healing: that in order to make his
traumatic memories into something he could bear witness to in his poetry, he had to choose how to
engage with them, instead of repressing them.

“Spring Offensive” is the account of an actual action on the frontier, told with a prologue and ended
with an epilogue. In several stanzas, the phases of the Offensive are reflected. First we have the
scene or setting from where the charge will start- ‘the shade of a last hill’. There is a pause before
the attack, a natural desire to enjoy the soothing caress of vernal nature: ‘’the summer oozed into
their veins/Like an injected drug for their bodies’ pains” is a balanced reminder of the physical
hardship they have already suffered. But even the brief rest is plagued by tension which shows how
the war affects the minds of the soldiers: ‘They breathe like trees unstirred’ and it reaches the climax
with ‘the little word’ of command to charge, at which ‘each body and its soul’ stiffen to rigidity and
they bid goodbye to the sun:

“O larger shone that smile against the sun

Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned.”

The fourth stanza also introduces to the initiation of the sudden military action where the readers
are provided with a vivid and live picture of desperation, devastation and horror of the attack. They
run exposed on the hill top,

“And instantly the whole sky burned

With fury against them; and soft sudden cups

Opened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes

Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space.”

Owen says in a letter of 14th May, 1917- “The sensations of going over the top are about as
exhilarating as those dreams of falling over a precipice, when you see the rocks at the bottom
surging up to you.”
The casualties are further described through fiery words and we see how the soldiers

“Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up

On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,

Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge”.

The last part of the poem records the effect of the war on the survivors who miraculously escaped
the horrible death, but remained traumatized and dumb about the fate of their dead colleagues:
“Why speak not they of comrades that went under?” is a question the poet poses to those who
motivate and conscript young men with the temptation of earning immortal glory through
martyrdom. Thus Spring Offensive reinforces the sense of alienation and trauma produced by the
soldier’s participation in the war.

Owen’s exploration of trauma in his poems reflects his own traumatic experiences on the front,
including being trapped in a deep hole for over a day with the dead body of a friend, which led to his
suffering from shell shock. Owen’s coping method for handling his traumatic memories and dreams
was to seek artistic control over his poetry in tandem with control over his memories by expressing
them as poetic experiences that were all at once personal and specific, yet universal and general.

“The Sentry” is one such poem that shows Owen’s control over his traumatic memories, and is also
one of the last poems he wrote. Owen grounded the poem in a concrete event he witnessed in order
to unite his most traumatic and defining experience during the war into a coherent narrative in a
form Owen can control and modify. In a letter to his mother from the front, he describes the deeply
scarring incident that, a year and a half and many revisions later, becomes “The Sentry”. He
writes,”…I have suffered seventh hell…I held a dug-out in the middle of No Man’s Land…One of
these poor fellows was my first servant who I rejected. If I had kept him he would have lived, for
servants don’t do sentry duty. I kept my own sentries halfway down the stairs during the more
terrific bombardment. In spite of this one lad was blown down and, I am afraid, blinded.” We get a
sense of Owen’s feelings of responsibility for the man who died after being rejected by Owen as a
servant, and the man who was blinded instead of Owen. It seems that this sense of guilt haunted
Owen, who took this trauma and transformed it via “The Sentry” where he says: “I try not to
remember these things now.” This poem is emblematic of Owen’s choice to take control of how, and
in what manner, he should remember the traumatic fifty hours he spent in the dugouts of No Man’s
Land. At the end of the poem, Owen is no longer isolated in the “I” of a personal nightmare, haunted
by octopus eyes, but sharing in the collective “ours” which provided him solace and allowed him to
feel a measure of safety and control over the memory and the fate of the sentry.

In “Dulce et Decorum est”, Owen, by depicting the horrible experience of chlorine gas attack,
questions the jingoistic sentimentalists where then glory of war really lies. The poem presents the
soldiers as “old beggars under sacks” and who are “coughing like hags…”. The poet-persona’s trauma
as a witness to that pathetic sight becomes clear: “In all my dreams before my helpless sight, / He
plunges at me, guttering, chocking, drowning”. This realistic picture shatters all the perceived
romanticized notion of war, as neither victory nor defeat can recompense the pain and agony of the
soldiers or soothe the wailing of their family and friends. The last stanza is formed like a message.
The use of words like “White eyes writhing in his face”, “forth-corrupted lungs”, “incurable sores”
jointly create the image of terror and torture the soldiers inevitably become victim of. The poem
ends with the poet’s earnest plea not to hide the grey face of war as the black face of death is not
different from it. “Ending the poem with justified anger at ‘The old Lie’ of patriotism that led him and
other young men to battle shows that Owen's personal struggle is far from over”.
Written in the similar vein, “Mental Cases” is composed in the summer of 1917. John Silkin opines
that the poem falls to the second category of Owen’s poems as here the poet fuses anger with satire
and irony not only to decipher the miserable condition of the soldiers but also to critique the
civilians who have least understanding of the war heroes (Silkin 206). As the title suggests, the poem
considers the psychic state of the soldiers who live in the ‘purgatorial shadows/ Drooping tongues
from jaws…” (Kendall 170) This is one of Owen’s most disturbing war poems. It distinctly captures
aftermath of shell shock. The poem gains additional importance as Owen here informs how memory
of the war has maimed them as they can visualize “Multitudinous murders they once witnessed”
(Kendall 170) and were responsible for. Sounds of machine guns and scent of gunpowder always
question their heroism. “Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented” (Kendall 170). Their
realization of the war as “madness” comes much after the damages have been done.

“Darkness, guns, mud, rain, gas, bullets, shells, barbed wire, rats, lice, cold, trench foot: these images
which have formed the modern memory of the war are largely culled from the trench poetry of
Owen, Sassoon, Graves, and Rosenberg expressing the truth of war” (Das, 2007: 76). Gaining their
powers from this reality and “fusing aesthetics with ethics, poetry with pity” (Longley, 2005: 71),
Owen’s poems are like scenes of a dramatic play that depictures suffering of war. Instead of big
political declamations, his poems present stories in which we see physical and psychological
struggles of soldiers and their embodied pain. Hence, Wilfred Owen’s poem successfully depicts the
trauma the soldiers suffered from during the First World War.