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Symbolism in Modern War Poetry
1. Introduction
2.1. Symbolism
2.2. Yeats’ Symbolism
3.1. Yeats: An Irish Airman foresees his Death
3.2. Owen: Dulce Et Decorum Est and comparison with Yeats
4. Conclusion
Bibliography
1. Introduction
With this paper I am going to try to point out a link between Symbolism and modern war poetry, specifically poetry of the Great War. The leading symbolist English language poets are not generally associated with modern war poetry. Their accomplishments in the evolution of English poetry, however, were picked up and employed in war poetry by other writers.
The examples I picked to analyse and contrast after giving an introduction to Symbolism are William Butler Yeats’ An Irish Airman foresees his Death and Wilfred Owen’s war poem Dulce Et Decorum Est. An Irish Airman is not supposed be a typical example of Yeats’ Symbolism but the best working example to compare war poetry. I am going to give an introduction to Yeats’ Symbolism in a separate chapter and use different poems as examples.
2.1. Symbolism
Symbolism is described in The Cambridge companion to modernism (Cambridge, 1999: 74) as exemplifying extreme poesis in its presentation. Through symbolic correspondences and stylistic elaboration it depicts the world in different layers and connects human feelings to natural events, and spiritual worlds of ideas (sometimes similar to Plato’s world of ideas) to tangible reality. It works through associations, the symbolic items are meant to evoke a particular feeling or thought in the recipient of the respective symbolist work (be it prose, poetry, or otherwise), and as opposed to simple metaphors they are part of a whole system of symbols in which they operate, to create a whole new layer of meaning. (London. 1971: 1) The surface layer of a poem, the literal meaning of its words, does not just contain symbols hinting at the hidden meaning of the poem, it is an entire symbolic web of images serving as the foreground of the poem. The purpose of this is not to poetically narrate a certain incident, but to evoke a particular mood or idea in the reader through which they might arrive at an understanding of the idea, feeling, or event told in the poem.
One of Symbolism’s great aims was to (re)claim the powerful thought- and feeling-evoking properties of music for words. (London. 1971: 44; London. 1947: 13) Richard Wagner’s works, which were very popular during the last decades of the 19th century, seemed to the symbolist Valéry and his peers to express more than classical music had before, and seemed to do it more powerfully with its ferocity, echoing in the listeners and not merely presenting the music to them, but using it to create feelings and thoughts in them. This is how Wagner’s style was perceived by the French symbolists, who were aiming at exactly the same thing with their own craft of writing which Wagner seemed to accomplish through music. For this purpose they broke up the traditional stiff verse and rhythm of French poetry and produced poems with irregular rhythm and irregular numbers of syllables. Arthur Rimbaud, a particularly progressive French symbolist, followed the example Baudelaire and Verlaine and even went so far as to discard rhyme and verses altogether in some of his work, dubbed “prose poems” (London. 1971: 26).1 With this particular form of poetry a likeness to the flow that music has is created through the coherence of the single images, or thoughts, giving them an impression of belonging together as a unity, where the line breaks of verses would have separated them. The “poetry” aspect of this kind of writing is accounted for by other means. It is the lyrical and symbolic nature of it which justify it being called a poem. Its lyricalness is another important likeness to the properties of music. Beautiful sounding words are essential to the creation of a smooth flow in reading a text and to its conveyed content and meaning: “Proper regard for the sound of poetry” is one of “the most lasting contributions of Symbolism to the modern world” (London. 1947: 15). This goal to incorporate musical qualities into poetry was adopted outside of French Symbolism and persued in a similar manner, by Symbolists using other languages and by related movements like Imagism.
2.2. Yeats’ Symbolism
In William Butler Yeats’ time the understanding of the human identity was subject to a number of definitions and theories that favoured a very detailed view on psyche, and for Yeats symbolism was a way of defragmentation of the human identity. (London. 1983: 24) By way of drawing parallels between the mind and the outside world he wanted to reconcile it with nature.
He developed a system of interdependent symbols not merely representing each other, but meant to evoke a sense or the idea of the respective corresponding item. (London. 1983: 26) This is something the French symbolists already strove to achieve, and Yeats adopted this aim and worked towards it with a meticulously developed system of symbols. The correspondences in his system are however not fixed but flexible in their associative links. Depending on the symbols which accompany them they can mean a variety of things. “Winter” does not necessarily always correspond to the idea of “death”, and a “storm” does not always evoke an idea of uncontrolled force. However, through thorough observation and even experimenting with friends Yeats arrived at a system of symbols which offers a pool of connected ideas for each single item, which can be evoked by using just the one symbol. He seemed to have taken to the elements and directions in particular. In A Memory of Youth (London. 1984: 123), for example, age and passing time in the form of “A cloud blown from the cut-throat north” (l. 6) puts a sudden end to the lyrical I’s “Love’s moon”, the romantic atmosphere of the love to a woman. A stark contrast between age and youth by symbols is given in Men improve with the Years (p. 136): The grown, aged man is “A weather-worn, marble triton //Among the streams;” (l. 2,3; 17,18) set against “burning youth” (l. 15). The weather-worn marble among the waters evokes a sense of cold stillness, something that is rigid among living, moving things (“among the streams”). It frames the whole poem, both on the textual layer and as the lyrical I’s whole situation. The poem offers one glimpse of the contrasting vitality in line 15 with the expression “burning youth”.
In accordance with the French Symbolists’ interdisciplinary take on their craft Yeats also “would have all the arts draw together,” to “recover their ancient assocation” (Syracuse. 2003: 1). This purpose of his poetry is also illustrated by the aforementioned poems. The strong visual character of their images, which are all very easily conceivable in the simplicity in which they are presented (simply a moon, a cloud, a marble statue), support the intention to evoke a sense of the meaning of the poem evoked by the particular array of images, rather than an understanding of it by deducing and piecing it together from their individual meanings.
3.1. Yeats: An Irish Airman foresees his Death
The example of a symbolist poem by Yeats that I am going to analyse is An Irish Airman foresees his Death. (London. 1984: 135) It is a dramatic poem, relating the thoughts of a fighter pilot who contemplates his current situation and the decisions that have led him to it.
William Butler Yeats: An Irish Airman foresees his Death
(The Wild Swans at Coole 1919)
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross, 5
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, 10
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind 15
In balance with this life, this death.
The poem consists of 16 lines with four cross-rhyming quadruplets. Not being divided into separate stanzas, the poem’s verses’ unity represents one consistent stream of thought. Several words and phrases are repeated in this poem, which might represent the lyrical I’s dwelling on the same thought and mulling it over thoroughly. “The clouds” in the second verse is repeated in the twelfth, with small changes to the phrasing of the supposed same situation, but in fact this similarity between these two lines brings to the surface a slight progress of the situation. The vague “Somewhere among the clouds above” becomes a more specific “this tumult in the clouds”. This indicates that time is passing and events are taking place in the background, not stated directly in the poem, but taken notice of, even as the lyrical I is entertaining his thoughts in the foreground. The contrast between the future tense in the first line (“I shall meet my fate”) and the deictic “this death”, referring to the present, in the last line supports this notion as well.
From beginning to end the lyrical I is certain of his fate, and content with it. He is merely contemplating his reasons and current situation in a calm manner, listing repetetively as if taking stock: “Those that I [...] I do not [...]” (l. 3) and “Those that I [...] I do not [...]” (l. 4); “My country [...] Kiltartan” (l. 5) and “My countrymen Kiltartan’s” (l. 6); “Nor law, nor duty” (l. 9), “Nor public men, nor cheering crouds” (l. 10); “I balanced all” (l. 13) returns in l. 16: “In balance with”; “The years to come” (l. 14) and “the years behind” (l. 15); and finally “waste of breath” (l. 14) is repeated in l. 15. This repeating of words and phrases could either show that it is a very short time in which these thoughts occur to the airman, and that there is simply no time for refinement, or that his thoughts branch out, and that more than one end of a thought are connected to its beginning: If all except making a difference in action in the war and dying in the course of it is “a waste of breath”, then listing a few instances of that which would be such a waste (“The years to come”, “the years behind”) is a simpler and quicker way of putting it than trying to explain the signifance of the action.
As an outsider without any first hand war experience the view on war in Yeats’ poems never touches on the action; it is limited to Yeats’ own experience and knowledge of the war. The war, specifically, the Great War, is only ever mentioned in his poems as a cause for death and loss, with death or loss being the actual topic which is dealt with. Apart from On being asked for a War Poem (Oxford. 2007: 288), An Irish Airman foresees his Death is Yeats’ only poem that touches upon the topic of World War I more or less directly – at least it uses the war as its setting.
3.2. Owen: Dulce Et Decorum Est and comparison with Yeats
Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen is the example of war poetry that I am going to contrast with Yeats’ symbolist work. It is not a symbolist poem per se, but it has traces of symbolism, which I am going to point out.
Wilfred Owen: Dulce Et Decorum Est (1917)
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 5
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 10
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering 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, 15
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; 20
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 25
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Like An Irish Airman foresees his Death this is a dramatic poem. The lyrical I, as opposed to Yeats’ airman, might very well be identical to Owen or at least a character modelled on him, because at the time when we wrote this poem he had already been in action, and the events described here are likely to have happened to him (Harlow. 1969; Harlow. 1975).
At first the war was even welcomed by the young who were eager to modernise and revolutionise the world, but over time, it dissolved all romantic prejudices about heroicism in war times, and the realisation of its unprecedented horrors settled in and began to show in poets’ works. Rupert Brooke was one of the soldier-poets whose work exhibited a lot of patriotic pathos and heroicism. He died early in service, so that his works did not address the more uncomfortable advanced stages of the war, and kept to their conventional form and their patriotism. However, this initial patriotic eagerness, which is accentuated in Brooke’s and others’ poetry, gets a mention in Dulce Et Decorum Est in the form of its title and at the end of the last stanza.
The title opens the poem with an optimistic sounding citation, deliberately omitting the uncomfortable “dying” part, but this con is quickly revealed as irony as the poem proceeds with the description of a grim situation which could not be less “sweet” or “honourable”. The whole sentence is cited at the end of the poem. The lyrical I concludes in ll. 27: “It is sweet and honourable” is a lie, and only the “dying” part is true – which must be why “Pro patria mori” is set apart from “Dulce et decorum est” by a line break. As if it were a final realisation, this fact of “dying for the fatherland” is the very last verse of the poem. It is also the shortest verse, with only six syllables, cutting the poem short of half a verse and thus lending these three short words more weight and profundity. In a way, this abrupt ending of the poem in its form exemplifies the meaning of the very last word, “mori”. This is an example of how in this poem the possibilities of combining form and content are used, which is similar to the aim of the symbolists to reconcile and unite separate media.
Rhythm and metre are irregular in this poem. Trochees are identifiable in the metre, but they are frequently interrupted by additional stressed and unstressed syllables. It can be read fast and erratically. Anyhow this irregularity throughout the poem makes it seem direct and unmediated and gives the reader a strong impression of a thrilling story, or of being allowed a relatively unaltered view on events. Were it not for the complete, complex sentences this would qualify as a stream of consciousness. In lines 6 and 7 – “All went lame; all blind; //Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots” – “blind”, “drunk”, and “deaf” are added to the preceding simple sentence as if they were just coming to mind in the moment of utterance. The same goes for line 16: “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”
These seemingly spontaneous listings, the length of the lines – depending on the pronunciation of the syllables each line except for the last has 10 to 12 syllables – and enjambements in the first and the last stanza all lend an impression of prose to the poem. It could almost be read as prose-poetry, or as an erratic stream of thought. The division into stanzas and the unfailing cross rhymes, however, lend the text the formal regularity of a traditional poem, although the second stanza is disrupted with a blank line between lines 14 and 15. This additional blank line, like the broken-off last verse of the poem, inserts a meaningful pause expressed through a formal aspect. The second stanza describes a soldier’s death by choking on gas: “Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light //As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.” (ll. 13) The folling blank line has the effect of a thinking pause, because then a very personal amendment is added: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, //He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” (ll. 15) These two verses tell of the lyrical I’s life after the events recounted in the rest of the poem, and of their current private thoughts, hence the displacement of these lines from the rest of the stanza.
Dulce Et Decorum Est contains traces of symbolism, and it also incorporates the elements into its system of association. It is not as intricate and carefully planned out as Yeats’ symbolism, but it is undeniably there. Recurring water- or liquid-related associations suggest an underlying system with water as symbol: “through sludge” (l. 2), “Drunk with fatigue” (l. 7), “floundering” (l. 12), “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning” (l. 14), “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (l. 16), “gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” (l. 22). These water-related images are all closely associated with imminent death. The whole poem deals with imminent death, but these specific images are specifically linked with dying, the idea of being “drunk with fatigue” and equating the fatal gas with a sea are not merely metaphors but indicate a whole set of associations behind these links.
The elements in this poem are interwoven: In the second stanza Owen links air (“GAS! Gas!”, “misty panes and thick green light”), fire (“fire or lime”), and water (“green sea”, “drowning”) to the same event; a soldier choking on poison gas. He “flounders like a man in fire”, is “drowning” like in water, but really it is the surrounding air (gas) that kills him. This might be a hint that a certain order of things is forfeit in the face of death in a war. Most importantly however it demonstrates the symbolist characteristic of a set of images functioning together and encompassing the main component, as described by Ellmann:
“the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water frequently are good examples of cooperative symbols. They set up eddies of association which are auxiliary to the main symbol of the poem. That main or emphatic symbol is a centre of attraction around which the mood gathers” (London. 1983: 63).
Note that Ellmann describes Yeats’ symbols here, and how well this description matches the second stanza of Dulce Et Decorum Est.
Yeats’ poetry is completely dedicated to symbolism with traditional subjects like love, death, and beauty, and scratches upon the surface of the matter of war only within the boundaries of these subjects. It is the personal view of an outsider on it, for whom the war is a matter of fact, a circumstance that is not to be mulled over. Owen on the other hand presents the view of someone who is directly affected. This imminence of the situation Dulce Et Decorum Est is concerned with and which he tries to convey, prevents him from employing any intricate, refined and complex symbolist system such as the kind Yeats always used. Yeats’ poems are all unfailingly carefully structured, very neat and orderly in traditional forms, often identifiable through his symbolism, whereas Owen and other soldier-poets gradually discarded traditional order and subtlety by breaking up the form of their poetry in order to evoke the desired ideas and feelings in the reader. Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud employed similar tactics with their prose poems, but the symbolists of Yeats’ kind stuck to strict, closed verse form and focused on their neatly woven-in interdependent symbols in their pursuit to stimulate their readers’ minds.
Yeats tried to ignore the war. He created poetry for poetry’s sake, with a clear-cut idea of appropriate topics. Owen on the other hand subordinated poetry to the war, his main focus. Breaks in verses, stanzas, and rhythm in his poetry (Dulce Et Decorum Est) show that for him poetry was the tool, not the purpose, of his work. By trying to convey certain impressions of war experiences via poetry he made use of methods similar to the ones which symbolists used to accomplish their connections between disciplines (poetry, music) and different levels of thought and perception (concrete images, moods).
4. Conclusion
Symbolism has played a vital role in the evolution of poetry in general, and has influenced poetry beyond its initial goals. It seeped into other schools and movements and has affected the works of poets who were not consciously symbolists and who are not even chiefly associated with the movement. Wilfred Owen, who was not even acknowledged or appreciated as a proper poet, let alone as a peer in Symbolism, by W. B. Yeats, was, as I tried to show with this paper, observably affected by Symbolism. The mysticism of Symbolism and the stark, shocking depictions of war action in WWI poetry are compatible after all, as the symbolist traces in Dulce Et Decorum Est prove, even if the full blown symbolist Yeats denies Owen’s and his fellow soldier-poets’ works’ profundity and originality. Even if some of these war poets may not even have been consciously aware of this symbolist influence, they have incorporated it in their works.
Bibliography
Bergmann Loizeaux, Elizabeth. 2003. Yeats and the Visual Arts. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Blunden, Edmund. 1969. Writers and their works. War Poets 1914 – 1918. Harlow: Longmans, Green & Co Ltd.
Bowra, Cecil Maurice. 1947. The Heritage of Symbolism. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd.
Chadwick, Charles. 1971. "Symbolism". In: Jump, D. John (ed.). 1971. The Critical Idiom 16. London: Methuen & Co Ltd.
Ellmann, Richard. 1983. The Identity of Yeats. London: Faber and Faber.
Graves, Robert. 1971. THE COMMON ASPHODEL. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Hibberd, Dominic. 1975. Writers and their works. Wilfred Owen. Harlow: Longman Group Ltd.
Kendall, Tim (ed.). 2007. The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levenson, Michael H. (ed.) and Bell, Michael. 1999. The Cambridge companion to modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Owen, Wilfred. 1918. "Dulce Et Decorum Est." (19.08.2009)
Yeats, William Butler. 1984. The Poems A new edition. London: Macmillan.
- The Insect
1. Introduction
2.1. Symbolism
2.2. Yeats’ Symbolism
3.1. Yeats: An Irish Airman foresees his Death
3.2. Owen: Dulce Et Decorum Est and comparison with Yeats
4. Conclusion
Bibliography
1. Introduction
With this paper I am going to try to point out a link between Symbolism and modern war poetry, specifically poetry of the Great War. The leading symbolist English language poets are not generally associated with modern war poetry. Their accomplishments in the evolution of English poetry, however, were picked up and employed in war poetry by other writers.
The examples I picked to analyse and contrast after giving an introduction to Symbolism are William Butler Yeats’ An Irish Airman foresees his Death and Wilfred Owen’s war poem Dulce Et Decorum Est. An Irish Airman is not supposed be a typical example of Yeats’ Symbolism but the best working example to compare war poetry. I am going to give an introduction to Yeats’ Symbolism in a separate chapter and use different poems as examples.
2.1. Symbolism
Symbolism is described in The Cambridge companion to modernism (Cambridge, 1999: 74) as exemplifying extreme poesis in its presentation. Through symbolic correspondences and stylistic elaboration it depicts the world in different layers and connects human feelings to natural events, and spiritual worlds of ideas (sometimes similar to Plato’s world of ideas) to tangible reality. It works through associations, the symbolic items are meant to evoke a particular feeling or thought in the recipient of the respective symbolist work (be it prose, poetry, or otherwise), and as opposed to simple metaphors they are part of a whole system of symbols in which they operate, to create a whole new layer of meaning. (London. 1971: 1) The surface layer of a poem, the literal meaning of its words, does not just contain symbols hinting at the hidden meaning of the poem, it is an entire symbolic web of images serving as the foreground of the poem. The purpose of this is not to poetically narrate a certain incident, but to evoke a particular mood or idea in the reader through which they might arrive at an understanding of the idea, feeling, or event told in the poem.
One of Symbolism’s great aims was to (re)claim the powerful thought- and feeling-evoking properties of music for words. (London. 1971: 44; London. 1947: 13) Richard Wagner’s works, which were very popular during the last decades of the 19th century, seemed to the symbolist Valéry and his peers to express more than classical music had before, and seemed to do it more powerfully with its ferocity, echoing in the listeners and not merely presenting the music to them, but using it to create feelings and thoughts in them. This is how Wagner’s style was perceived by the French symbolists, who were aiming at exactly the same thing with their own craft of writing which Wagner seemed to accomplish through music. For this purpose they broke up the traditional stiff verse and rhythm of French poetry and produced poems with irregular rhythm and irregular numbers of syllables. Arthur Rimbaud, a particularly progressive French symbolist, followed the example Baudelaire and Verlaine and even went so far as to discard rhyme and verses altogether in some of his work, dubbed “prose poems” (London. 1971: 26).1 With this particular form of poetry a likeness to the flow that music has is created through the coherence of the single images, or thoughts, giving them an impression of belonging together as a unity, where the line breaks of verses would have separated them. The “poetry” aspect of this kind of writing is accounted for by other means. It is the lyrical and symbolic nature of it which justify it being called a poem. Its lyricalness is another important likeness to the properties of music. Beautiful sounding words are essential to the creation of a smooth flow in reading a text and to its conveyed content and meaning: “Proper regard for the sound of poetry” is one of “the most lasting contributions of Symbolism to the modern world” (London. 1947: 15). This goal to incorporate musical qualities into poetry was adopted outside of French Symbolism and persued in a similar manner, by Symbolists using other languages and by related movements like Imagism.
2.2. Yeats’ Symbolism
In William Butler Yeats’ time the understanding of the human identity was subject to a number of definitions and theories that favoured a very detailed view on psyche, and for Yeats symbolism was a way of defragmentation of the human identity. (London. 1983: 24) By way of drawing parallels between the mind and the outside world he wanted to reconcile it with nature.
He developed a system of interdependent symbols not merely representing each other, but meant to evoke a sense or the idea of the respective corresponding item. (London. 1983: 26) This is something the French symbolists already strove to achieve, and Yeats adopted this aim and worked towards it with a meticulously developed system of symbols. The correspondences in his system are however not fixed but flexible in their associative links. Depending on the symbols which accompany them they can mean a variety of things. “Winter” does not necessarily always correspond to the idea of “death”, and a “storm” does not always evoke an idea of uncontrolled force. However, through thorough observation and even experimenting with friends Yeats arrived at a system of symbols which offers a pool of connected ideas for each single item, which can be evoked by using just the one symbol. He seemed to have taken to the elements and directions in particular. In A Memory of Youth (London. 1984: 123), for example, age and passing time in the form of “A cloud blown from the cut-throat north” (l. 6) puts a sudden end to the lyrical I’s “Love’s moon”, the romantic atmosphere of the love to a woman. A stark contrast between age and youth by symbols is given in Men improve with the Years (p. 136): The grown, aged man is “A weather-worn, marble triton //Among the streams;” (l. 2,3; 17,18) set against “burning youth” (l. 15). The weather-worn marble among the waters evokes a sense of cold stillness, something that is rigid among living, moving things (“among the streams”). It frames the whole poem, both on the textual layer and as the lyrical I’s whole situation. The poem offers one glimpse of the contrasting vitality in line 15 with the expression “burning youth”.
In accordance with the French Symbolists’ interdisciplinary take on their craft Yeats also “would have all the arts draw together,” to “recover their ancient assocation” (Syracuse. 2003: 1). This purpose of his poetry is also illustrated by the aforementioned poems. The strong visual character of their images, which are all very easily conceivable in the simplicity in which they are presented (simply a moon, a cloud, a marble statue), support the intention to evoke a sense of the meaning of the poem evoked by the particular array of images, rather than an understanding of it by deducing and piecing it together from their individual meanings.
3.1. Yeats: An Irish Airman foresees his Death
The example of a symbolist poem by Yeats that I am going to analyse is An Irish Airman foresees his Death. (London. 1984: 135) It is a dramatic poem, relating the thoughts of a fighter pilot who contemplates his current situation and the decisions that have led him to it.
William Butler Yeats: An Irish Airman foresees his Death
(The Wild Swans at Coole 1919)
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross, 5
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, 10
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind 15
In balance with this life, this death.
The poem consists of 16 lines with four cross-rhyming quadruplets. Not being divided into separate stanzas, the poem’s verses’ unity represents one consistent stream of thought. Several words and phrases are repeated in this poem, which might represent the lyrical I’s dwelling on the same thought and mulling it over thoroughly. “The clouds” in the second verse is repeated in the twelfth, with small changes to the phrasing of the supposed same situation, but in fact this similarity between these two lines brings to the surface a slight progress of the situation. The vague “Somewhere among the clouds above” becomes a more specific “this tumult in the clouds”. This indicates that time is passing and events are taking place in the background, not stated directly in the poem, but taken notice of, even as the lyrical I is entertaining his thoughts in the foreground. The contrast between the future tense in the first line (“I shall meet my fate”) and the deictic “this death”, referring to the present, in the last line supports this notion as well.
From beginning to end the lyrical I is certain of his fate, and content with it. He is merely contemplating his reasons and current situation in a calm manner, listing repetetively as if taking stock: “Those that I [...] I do not [...]” (l. 3) and “Those that I [...] I do not [...]” (l. 4); “My country [...] Kiltartan” (l. 5) and “My countrymen Kiltartan’s” (l. 6); “Nor law, nor duty” (l. 9), “Nor public men, nor cheering crouds” (l. 10); “I balanced all” (l. 13) returns in l. 16: “In balance with”; “The years to come” (l. 14) and “the years behind” (l. 15); and finally “waste of breath” (l. 14) is repeated in l. 15. This repeating of words and phrases could either show that it is a very short time in which these thoughts occur to the airman, and that there is simply no time for refinement, or that his thoughts branch out, and that more than one end of a thought are connected to its beginning: If all except making a difference in action in the war and dying in the course of it is “a waste of breath”, then listing a few instances of that which would be such a waste (“The years to come”, “the years behind”) is a simpler and quicker way of putting it than trying to explain the signifance of the action.
As an outsider without any first hand war experience the view on war in Yeats’ poems never touches on the action; it is limited to Yeats’ own experience and knowledge of the war. The war, specifically, the Great War, is only ever mentioned in his poems as a cause for death and loss, with death or loss being the actual topic which is dealt with. Apart from On being asked for a War Poem (Oxford. 2007: 288), An Irish Airman foresees his Death is Yeats’ only poem that touches upon the topic of World War I more or less directly – at least it uses the war as its setting.
3.2. Owen: Dulce Et Decorum Est and comparison with Yeats
Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen is the example of war poetry that I am going to contrast with Yeats’ symbolist work. It is not a symbolist poem per se, but it has traces of symbolism, which I am going to point out.
Wilfred Owen: Dulce Et Decorum Est (1917)
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 5
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 10
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering 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, 15
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; 20
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 25
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Like An Irish Airman foresees his Death this is a dramatic poem. The lyrical I, as opposed to Yeats’ airman, might very well be identical to Owen or at least a character modelled on him, because at the time when we wrote this poem he had already been in action, and the events described here are likely to have happened to him (Harlow. 1969; Harlow. 1975).
At first the war was even welcomed by the young who were eager to modernise and revolutionise the world, but over time, it dissolved all romantic prejudices about heroicism in war times, and the realisation of its unprecedented horrors settled in and began to show in poets’ works. Rupert Brooke was one of the soldier-poets whose work exhibited a lot of patriotic pathos and heroicism. He died early in service, so that his works did not address the more uncomfortable advanced stages of the war, and kept to their conventional form and their patriotism. However, this initial patriotic eagerness, which is accentuated in Brooke’s and others’ poetry, gets a mention in Dulce Et Decorum Est in the form of its title and at the end of the last stanza.
The title opens the poem with an optimistic sounding citation, deliberately omitting the uncomfortable “dying” part, but this con is quickly revealed as irony as the poem proceeds with the description of a grim situation which could not be less “sweet” or “honourable”. The whole sentence is cited at the end of the poem. The lyrical I concludes in ll. 27: “It is sweet and honourable” is a lie, and only the “dying” part is true – which must be why “Pro patria mori” is set apart from “Dulce et decorum est” by a line break. As if it were a final realisation, this fact of “dying for the fatherland” is the very last verse of the poem. It is also the shortest verse, with only six syllables, cutting the poem short of half a verse and thus lending these three short words more weight and profundity. In a way, this abrupt ending of the poem in its form exemplifies the meaning of the very last word, “mori”. This is an example of how in this poem the possibilities of combining form and content are used, which is similar to the aim of the symbolists to reconcile and unite separate media.
Rhythm and metre are irregular in this poem. Trochees are identifiable in the metre, but they are frequently interrupted by additional stressed and unstressed syllables. It can be read fast and erratically. Anyhow this irregularity throughout the poem makes it seem direct and unmediated and gives the reader a strong impression of a thrilling story, or of being allowed a relatively unaltered view on events. Were it not for the complete, complex sentences this would qualify as a stream of consciousness. In lines 6 and 7 – “All went lame; all blind; //Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots” – “blind”, “drunk”, and “deaf” are added to the preceding simple sentence as if they were just coming to mind in the moment of utterance. The same goes for line 16: “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”
These seemingly spontaneous listings, the length of the lines – depending on the pronunciation of the syllables each line except for the last has 10 to 12 syllables – and enjambements in the first and the last stanza all lend an impression of prose to the poem. It could almost be read as prose-poetry, or as an erratic stream of thought. The division into stanzas and the unfailing cross rhymes, however, lend the text the formal regularity of a traditional poem, although the second stanza is disrupted with a blank line between lines 14 and 15. This additional blank line, like the broken-off last verse of the poem, inserts a meaningful pause expressed through a formal aspect. The second stanza describes a soldier’s death by choking on gas: “Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light //As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.” (ll. 13) The folling blank line has the effect of a thinking pause, because then a very personal amendment is added: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, //He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” (ll. 15) These two verses tell of the lyrical I’s life after the events recounted in the rest of the poem, and of their current private thoughts, hence the displacement of these lines from the rest of the stanza.
Dulce Et Decorum Est contains traces of symbolism, and it also incorporates the elements into its system of association. It is not as intricate and carefully planned out as Yeats’ symbolism, but it is undeniably there. Recurring water- or liquid-related associations suggest an underlying system with water as symbol: “through sludge” (l. 2), “Drunk with fatigue” (l. 7), “floundering” (l. 12), “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning” (l. 14), “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (l. 16), “gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” (l. 22). These water-related images are all closely associated with imminent death. The whole poem deals with imminent death, but these specific images are specifically linked with dying, the idea of being “drunk with fatigue” and equating the fatal gas with a sea are not merely metaphors but indicate a whole set of associations behind these links.
The elements in this poem are interwoven: In the second stanza Owen links air (“GAS! Gas!”, “misty panes and thick green light”), fire (“fire or lime”), and water (“green sea”, “drowning”) to the same event; a soldier choking on poison gas. He “flounders like a man in fire”, is “drowning” like in water, but really it is the surrounding air (gas) that kills him. This might be a hint that a certain order of things is forfeit in the face of death in a war. Most importantly however it demonstrates the symbolist characteristic of a set of images functioning together and encompassing the main component, as described by Ellmann:
“the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water frequently are good examples of cooperative symbols. They set up eddies of association which are auxiliary to the main symbol of the poem. That main or emphatic symbol is a centre of attraction around which the mood gathers” (London. 1983: 63).
Note that Ellmann describes Yeats’ symbols here, and how well this description matches the second stanza of Dulce Et Decorum Est.
Yeats’ poetry is completely dedicated to symbolism with traditional subjects like love, death, and beauty, and scratches upon the surface of the matter of war only within the boundaries of these subjects. It is the personal view of an outsider on it, for whom the war is a matter of fact, a circumstance that is not to be mulled over. Owen on the other hand presents the view of someone who is directly affected. This imminence of the situation Dulce Et Decorum Est is concerned with and which he tries to convey, prevents him from employing any intricate, refined and complex symbolist system such as the kind Yeats always used. Yeats’ poems are all unfailingly carefully structured, very neat and orderly in traditional forms, often identifiable through his symbolism, whereas Owen and other soldier-poets gradually discarded traditional order and subtlety by breaking up the form of their poetry in order to evoke the desired ideas and feelings in the reader. Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud employed similar tactics with their prose poems, but the symbolists of Yeats’ kind stuck to strict, closed verse form and focused on their neatly woven-in interdependent symbols in their pursuit to stimulate their readers’ minds.
Yeats tried to ignore the war. He created poetry for poetry’s sake, with a clear-cut idea of appropriate topics. Owen on the other hand subordinated poetry to the war, his main focus. Breaks in verses, stanzas, and rhythm in his poetry (Dulce Et Decorum Est) show that for him poetry was the tool, not the purpose, of his work. By trying to convey certain impressions of war experiences via poetry he made use of methods similar to the ones which symbolists used to accomplish their connections between disciplines (poetry, music) and different levels of thought and perception (concrete images, moods).
4. Conclusion
Symbolism has played a vital role in the evolution of poetry in general, and has influenced poetry beyond its initial goals. It seeped into other schools and movements and has affected the works of poets who were not consciously symbolists and who are not even chiefly associated with the movement. Wilfred Owen, who was not even acknowledged or appreciated as a proper poet, let alone as a peer in Symbolism, by W. B. Yeats, was, as I tried to show with this paper, observably affected by Symbolism. The mysticism of Symbolism and the stark, shocking depictions of war action in WWI poetry are compatible after all, as the symbolist traces in Dulce Et Decorum Est prove, even if the full blown symbolist Yeats denies Owen’s and his fellow soldier-poets’ works’ profundity and originality. Even if some of these war poets may not even have been consciously aware of this symbolist influence, they have incorporated it in their works.
Bibliography
Bergmann Loizeaux, Elizabeth. 2003. Yeats and the Visual Arts. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Blunden, Edmund. 1969. Writers and their works. War Poets 1914 – 1918. Harlow: Longmans, Green & Co Ltd.
Bowra, Cecil Maurice. 1947. The Heritage of Symbolism. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd.
Chadwick, Charles. 1971. "Symbolism". In: Jump, D. John (ed.). 1971. The Critical Idiom 16. London: Methuen & Co Ltd.
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Yeats, William Butler. 1984. The Poems A new edition. London: Macmillan.
- The Insect
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