Why Do I Have To Study Poetry?

It can be difficult to see why poetry is important, sometimes. It's 11:15 a.m., classes are dragging, we've just had an hour of geometry, and now we have to read about some dead white guy's frilly interest in floral arcades and green pastures?

Poetry is much bigger than mere words on a page, however, and it has structure and logic as complex as a geometrical design. Learning to see the patterns and sift through the logic can be as time-consuming and frustrating as studying geometry or as detailed and meticulous as exploring a chemical formula; poetry has its own periodic table of elements in the forms of its alliterations and metaphors, its own functions and subsets in the calculus of words.

So what? Will it save the world or cure disease?

Well. Poetry isn't a physical cure or a marvel of bioengineering. But it might well save humankind, if we let it. Not convinced? Read on. . . .

Some of the hardest-hitting words ever put on paper have been in poems. No frilly daffodils, just bare truths. Here's a war poem from Wilfred Owen, a British soldier who died a week before WWI ended.

The title is the first half of a line from another poet--the Roman Horace, who wrote:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit inbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidove tergo.

Got your Latin dictionaries handy? It means something (loosely) like "it is sweet and honorable to die for one's country: swift death follows every man, not sparing those peaceful youths who, trembling, turn to run."

This was abbreviated and used in pro-war propaganda (from Horace's time--65-8 BC--onwards [Horace=Quintus Horatius Flaccus, or "the Fifth Skinny Horace"); you've probably heard it as "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."

You know--if you like dying, that is. I've never understood the sentiment, myself; what do you think? Wilfred Owen is being sarcastic when he uses it here. . . .

Dulce Et Decorum Est

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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines* that dropped behind. [*shells]

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
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,
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,
Obscene as cancer, 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.

I won't waste space here giving you information about the context of the poem that is readily available elsewhere; it was originally directed at a pro-war poet who had never been on a battlefield (oddly enough, most pro-war writers have never seen conflict themselves--many anti-war writers have); so imagine you can hear Owen's voice talking to her.

You really have to read the poem aloud. Have another read-through, and this time read it to anyone handy--the cat will do--and don't skimp on the harsh sounds. The noises this poem makes are deliberate and appropriate!

Knock-kneed? Old beggars under sacks? This is hardly sweet or fitting. Owen emphasizes the horror in several ways, but first by showing us the soldiers. They have been transformed by war into creatures very different from the image that shone in the gleaming recruiting posters. They have been deprived, in fact, of everything sweet and honorable. Their uniforms are rags, and some don't even have boots.

Trench warfare means mud. The sludge here shows us that the soldiers' environment has been stripped, too, of everything sweet and decorous: there are no flowers, shrubs, or trees in this war, only mud.

Mud and blood.

The illustration to the right shows WWI soldiers wearing gasmasks. To put it bluntly, mustard gas can liquify cell tissue, causing victims to drown in the contents of their own lungs if they are exposed to a high enough dosage.

In the second stanza, Owen makes us more than mere witnesses of the scene, dragging us out of our comfortable chairs and into the mud with the others.

"GAS!"

With the yell of "quick, boys," we can almost feel the desperate fumbling for a gas mask, holding our breath and then exhaling with relief -- such a relief that Owen calls the process of attaining it ecstasy -- when the mask is finally on.

The gas swirls around the soldiers, making the light watery and green. Looking through the glass of the gas mask is like looking through a diver's scuba mask under the ocean, and is fitting for this scene: one soldier, not as quick as the others, drowns in this sea of gas.

Many returning war veterans cannot talk to family or friends about their experiences. We do not have much of a vocabulary or idiom for describing such personal horror.

The poet here has been able to present us with a direct portrait of this indescribable, life-sucking, blood-gurgling obscenity. He calls it "obscene as cancer" and "froth-corrupted."

People back home need to know what war does, this poem implies; Owen speaks directly to the reader ("my friend"--originally addressed to Jessie Pope, but now including us all): if we could only see this scene ourselves, then we wouldn't tell the "old lie" to young men who enlist, who expect honor and glory--but who find themselves choking in mud instead.

Does a poem such as Owen's "Dulce et decorum est" matter?

Yes: again, bluntly, it provides a service to humankind that few others can manage; it shows us the consequences of failed diplomacy, failed peace talks, failed policy. War, we see for ourselves, is messy and it treats humanity as a commodity to be squandered like mud.

Are all poems equally important?

In a way, yes. Isn't it the responsibility of the poet to show us the flowers, as well as the sludge?