342
A. ALVAREZ
of religion at Dunsden; bouts of horrible danger on the Somme;
bouts of poetry always; of your affection always; of sympathy for
the oppressed always.
I go out of this year a Poet, my dear Mother, as which I did not
enter it. I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet's poet.
I am started. The tugs have left me; I feel the great swelling of
the open sea taking my galleon.
Last year, at this time, (it is just midnight, and now is the intolerable
instant of the Change) last year I lay awake in a windy tent
in
the
middle of a vast, dreadful encampment. It seemed neither France
nor England, but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept a
few days before the shambles. I heard the revelling of the Scotch
troops, who are now dead, and who knew they would be dead. I
thought of this present night, and whether I should indeed–
whether we should indeed - whether you would indeed - but I
thought neither long nor deeply, for I am a master of elision.
But chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all the faces
in
that camp; an incomprenhensible look, which a man will never see
in
England, though wars should be in England; nor can it be seen
in any battle. But only in Etaples.
It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for
it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit's.
It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to
describe it, I think I must go back and be with them.
Nine months later Owen was back in France. Two months after that
he was killed
in
action, exactly one week before the war ended.
There are two forces at work
in
this
letter, each pulling in the
opposite direction: nurture and nature, training and instinct or, in
Eliot's phrase, "tradition and the individual talent." Both are per–
sonal yet both also correspond to vital elements in his poetry. The
first
is
traditional, which is inevitable since Owen was,
in
many
ways, still at one with the comfortable Georgians who had no truck
with the poetic changes already beginning around them.
As
such,
he was responding in the heroic tradition of Sir Philip Sidney and,
say, Captain Oates, as "a brave man and an English gentleman."
He was going back to France because he had to do his duty as a sol–
dier; since duty invariably means sacrifice, even the chance of the
ultimate sacrifice must be accepted without fuss.
But even more strongly, there
is
an antiheroic force at work
which corresponds to all those elements in
his
writing which went to
make
him
one of the British forerunners of modernism; it corre-
