Wilfred Owen Letters

Ways With Words: Ted Hughes catches the animal within

Though I grew up within 30 miles of where he grew up, in the Pennines, I came comparatively late to Ted Hughes’s work. My inspiring English teacher at the local grammar was a Modernist in his tastes, and introduced us to Eliot, Joyce, Hardy and Wilfred Owen, but he didn’t come closer to the present than Auden. It was the same at university; I got no further than the Second World War poets Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis.

So I was left to discover Hughes for myself, in my early twenties, and it was a revelation when I did. The “short hot stink of fox”; a black-back gull in the wind bending “like an iron bar slowly”; pike, three inches long, under heat-struck lily pads, tigering the gold; thistles like “a grasped fistful of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost”: after you’ve read a Hughes nature poem, on otters, thrushes, snowdrops or whatever it is, you never see the world in quite the same way again. My first serious shots at writing all bore his imprint.

I wanted to write about this, and set down a few stumbling stanzas, but then worried that I was being sentimental about the skylark, a bird that has always appealed to poets and composers – only days before Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending had been voted the No1 people’s choice for Desert Island Discs, and there are also poems about the lark by Shelley and George Meredith.

The lark begins to go up

Like a warning

As if the globe were uneasy –

Barrel-chested for heights,

Like an Indian of the high Andes,

A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow,

But leaden

With muscle

For the struggle

Against

Earth’s centre.

And leaden

For ballast

On the rocketing storms of the breath.

Leaden

Like a bullet

To supplant

Life from its centre.

The poem (originally divided into six sections, of which this is the first) comes from Hughes’s 1967 collection Wodwo. The globe was indeed uneasy in that year, with war in Vietnam and protest movements in the United States and Europe.

With a head like a hunting arrow, and leaden like a bullet, the lark is a creature of that violent time. It takes courage to use the word “leaden” three times, about a bird honoured for its lightness and aerial prowess. But what Hughes recognises is its ferocious drive to escape the force of gravity: the skylark – so the next section tells us – is “crueller than owl or eagle”, ruthlessly powered by the command to climb and sing.

Transient: Wilfred Owen: "In poetry we call them the most glorious."

Recently I came across a collection of his letters, edited by John Bell (who published Owen's complete letters in 1967, and these selected letters thirty years later.)  Owen's war poetry is so bitter, sharp as bayonets, shaking with rage, that I was surprised to find another side to him in his letters:  light-hearted, enthusiastic, and frequently funny.  Most of them were written to his mother. When war broke out in 1914, Owen was living in France, working as an English tutor.  He did not want to do this for the rest of his life; in fact, he had no clear plan for his life at all.  He wrote poetry but barely allowed himself to dream of making it his career.  He did not enlist until 1915, and spent over a year in officers' training.  Although he had been in no hurry to join up, military life seems to have suited him well.  His letters home are invariably cheerful. We had a march of 3 miles over shelled road then nearly 3 along a flooded trench.  After that we came to where the trenches had been blown flat out and had to go over the top.  It was of course dark, too dark, and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, 3, 4, and 5 feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water.  Men have been known to drown in them.  Many stuck in the mud & only got out by leaving their waders, equipment and in some cases their clothes. I have no mind to describe all the horrors of this last Tour. But it was almost [worse] than the first, because in this place my Platoon had no Dug-Outs, but had to lie in the snow under the deadly wind.  By day it was impossible to stand up or even crawl about because we were behind only a little ridge screening us from the Bosches' periscope. . . . My feet ached until they could ache no more, and so they temporarily died. . . . The intensity of your Love reached me and kept me living.  I thought of you and Mary [his sister] without a break all the time.  I cannot say I felt any fear.  We were all half-crazed by the buffetting of the High Explosives.  I think the most unpleasant reflection that weighed on me was the impossibility of getting back any wounded, a total impossibility all day and frightfully difficult by night. . . . I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and the face-to-face death, as well as another; but extra for me there is the universal pervasion of Ugliness .

Selected letters

Poets of World War One

The poems of Wilfred Owen

Collected letters

Mapping Golgotha, Wilfred Owen: letters & poems