POETS Day: Wilfred Owen and The Old Lie

I don’t know about where you live but in my little corner of Birmingham it’s Spring come early. A few days of dull rain have swelled the creek across from my house and now that sun is out and the temperatures are hovering in the “Do I need a sweater?” range I’m not spending POETS Day at the bar. I want to sit at the put-in and listen to the water flow with a crisp glass of white in my hand.

That’s the Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday ethos in a pinch. The weekends are for enjoyment and anything you can do to jumpstart the process is justified so long as you stop right before the other guy’s nose. The sun is back and I want to grab as much time basking in the pre-dusk as I can.

This week’s get out of work early scheme needs a few days lead time, so maybe use it for next week. Sorry. You’re on your own in the short term. Maybe fake a cough.

Start on Wednesday by making sure your co-workers know that your dog got out of the fenced yard but that’s probably fine. “He’ll be back,” you’ll say. “He’s gotta eat.”

On Thursday, depending on the type of place you work, you have to visibly be designing a “Lost Dog” flier on your laptop and make sure others see it, or if you don’t work in an office setting, come in five minutes late with a few fliers and apologize. Make sure everyone at the office sees them, ready to be posted on poles around your neighborhood. Everybody will understand.

The plan is now set.

On Friday a friend places a 2:30 prearranged call to you and says you smell and have a small wiener and your sports team is underperforming or whatever friends say to each other but nobody you work with can hear your stupid friend. He made the call and that’s all you care about. You look to your office or warehouse, depending, and yell “Somebody found Patton!” unless you have daughters because they’ll be the ones naming the dog and you’ll have to yell “Somebody found Puddles!” which is less cool but just as effective in the POETS Day sense.

I first read this week’s poem in seventh or eighth grade. It’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen. I think it’s the most famous of the “War Poets” poems and deserving.

I’ve always had a soft spot for that generation or genre. Growing up, there was a framed letter in my father’s office from Robert Graves (his name be praised.) Dad had communicated with Graves and Graves responded. The letter is so faded now and set back in a closet in dad’s house. I may be able to read it if I send it to my touch screen laptop and zoom in, but as of right now I can see a few words clearly.

If I have the story right, and I got it through my mother so it’s probably wildly exaggerated because she told stories for effect, Dad sent a poem or some poems to Graves and Graves wrote back encouraging him.

Either above or below the Graves letter–both have been banished without prejudice sadly to the closet–was a picture of my… I’m not sure. He was my great grandmother’s uncle, so I suppose that makes him my great-great-uncle, but my understanding of such classifications is so off that he may well be my fiftieth cousin thrice removed. But there was a picture of a guy I’m related to named Joe Kernan with a German prisoner during WWI on Dad’s study wall with the Graves.

Funny aside. My Dad’s good friend, on hearing that Graves wrote Dad back, sent a letter to Annie Dillard, a hero of his, hoping for a similar response. She did respond, with a form to order her next book. He sent it dutifully back with a big old FU in magic marker scrawled across the form. She was very good at writing about urine smelling cats. Personal correspondence, not so much.

Back to the point. I remember looking at that picture. I was told he was Uncle Joe. He was with the Knights of Columbus and went over to Europe to care for the prisoners we took. He’d clothe them and make sure they were fed.

It’s a reminder that even in war the enemy is human and deserving of dignity.

“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” is a line from Horace. It means that it’s sweet and decorous to die for your country. It was a battle cry – a call toward patriotism and martial vigor.

Horace was a giant. Owen took this line forever away from him and left it dripping with bitterness as he declared it “The Old Lie.”

Graves is still my favorite, but he was at his best with romantic or whimsical themes. Among the War Poets this one by Owen hit hardest.

It’s straightforward as far as rhyme scheme. He does an a/b/a/b c/d/c/d etc. but gets a bit messed up in meter. It works, but he’ll have nine or ten or eleven syllables – or six on one line. It really does work. It’s a great bit of writing that conveys the horrors of war and I’ll never divorce it from that picture of my twenty third cousin negative ninth removed that hung in my Dad’s study. They are of a piece.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen 1893-1918

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Next week I’ll write something about clowns or happy puppies. It’s a balancing act.

Maybe Bunnies.