"I try not to remember these things now" (THE SENTRY)
The poem The Sentry is an accurate and detailed account of an actual event that occurred while Owen’s company were occupying a German dugout on the front line. This can be seen in his letters to his mother. Within the poem, Owen describes the conditions of the waterlogged dugout as it is hammered by explosions, until a sentry he had posted was blasted into the dugout by an explosion. He then goes on to describe the soldier himself, and how his appearance and sobbing haunted Owen in his dreams.
The language throughout the poem is simple, which lends its defining trait of gritty texture and onomatopoeia to the poem to great effect. ‘Hammered on top’, referring to the shelling, gives a powerful impression of the relentless assault on the aural sense the soldiers suffered, and this is further depicted later on in the poem with the phrase ‘shrieking air’, which likens the sounds of war to an almost inhuman and banshee-like scream. ‘What murk of air remained stank old, and sour’ focuses on the sensation of smell, and along with the visual description of the ‘guttering’ rain compared to slime, and the dugout steps ‘too thick with clay to climb’ paint the scene in the full spectrum of human sensation. It is not just horrific scenes that are recalled, but sounds and smells too. Like in Dulce et decorum est, as much as the narrator tries to forget, he cannot. “In all my dreams before my helpless sight / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” The memories become stronger the more he tries to forget, even the smallest details aren’t left out. These vivid, visceral and disorienting memories almost mock the narrator’s attempt to not remember. The use of harsh, violent, progressive verbs makes the physiological damage the soldiers suffer even more violent.
The sounds of the words are a main tool of Wilfred Owen’s poems, and this poem is no exception. In the opening lines, he uses a combination of repetition and rhyme in ‘…hell, for shell on frantic shell’ and ‘hour by hour…sour’ to establish the cadence, and this, along with the heavy dull sounds of ‘thud! flump! thud!’ later in the poem all reinforce the reference to an endless hammering, and the continuity strengthens the impression of the ceaseless barrage. To describe the shells as frantic gives a sense of the terror and confusion they inspired, but also blurs the distinction between objects and humans, in a similar way in which he insinuated that soldiers had been dehumanized and ‘die as cattle’ in Anthem for Doomed Youth. These repetitive sounds give the impression that these memories are recurring, they go through the soldier’s mind often and he is unable to stop this repetitive loop. The alliteration of the ‘t’ sound in ‘wild chattering of his broken teeth’ emphasises what is already an unpleasant image, through the rattling of the consonant, and this again displays how Owen ensured that his poetry was effective not only through the power and horror of his topic, but through the sounds and rhythm the words create.
The sentry himself is introduced as being distinct from his physical being, with ‘The sentry’s body’, making him seem like nothing more than an object possessed by life rather than a living human being. One of the most effective similes Wilfred Owen employs in the poem is comparing the sentry’s ‘huge-bulged’ eyes to those of a squid, as the grotesque and slimy sea creature being related to a person’s eyes, which have associations of beauty and innocence, is powerfully incongruous. The other soldiers are later described as ‘Those other wretches’, continuing the theme of war’s dehumanizing effect. This is not dissimilar to the line “Treading blood from lungs that had once loved laughter.” from the poem Mental Cases. The grotesque images of the soldiers’ deformities are echoed here and by putting a negative image of blood with the positive image of laughter, Owen once again builds another incongruous image whereby the stark morbidity of blood is compared to the innocence of laughter. By doing this, Owen puts together bizarre images that ensure the reader does not forget such appalling memories and the physiological pain of the soldiers, just as he cannot. It also shows how the war must have looked to the soldiers who had never before experienced anything of the sort, and the tumultuous emotions they must have felt while trying to cope.
Pathetic fallacy presents nature as a theme of ‘The Sentry’. “Rain guttering down in waterfalls of slime / Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour”. These two lines explore the idea that nature has become the British Armies’ enemy and that the Germans have become less of a threat in comparison. The use of pathetic fallacy gives the poem an aura of inevitability and the rain seems to give the poem a sinister tone. In this sense, Owen presents the experience of war as a regrettable, dark one. This idea links in with the poem ‘Futility’ where pathetic fallacy is also used. The use of the technique on the words ‘sun’ and ‘snow’ gives the poem different contrasting ideas of hope and despair, similar to the words “lights” and “died out” in the last line.
Owen’s recollection of the memories of war and its physiological effects, as described in The Sentry are very similar to those in Disabled. Both poems describe the persona in the poem forlornly remembering the days he was at war and how they affected him. The lines “Now he will never feel again how slim / Girls’ waists are” show not only the pain in the physical loss of his arm, but also the psychological scars, as the soldier knows he will be shunned for it. Owen sees memory as neither good nor bad, but describes the role it plays in helping the soldiers get through the war, as well as taking them back to it well after they are freed from it. ‘Although memories are not necessarily a bad thing, they may tie you down to a past you wish to escape’ seems to be his message across his poems.
No comments:
Post a Comment