Assigned by Ms. Prakruti Bhatt, this post examines War Poetry through the lens of Wilfred Owen, juxtaposed with an AI-generated poem to explore the limits of digital mimicry.
Introduction: The Death of the Romantic Ideal
In the canon of English Literature, few ruptures are as violent or as permanent as the one that occurred between 1914 and 1918. As students of literature, we are trained to trace the lineage of the "sublime" from the Romantics, Wordsworth’s daffodils or Keats’s nightingale, where nature and human emotion danced in a harmonious union. However, the mud of Flanders and the Somme did not just bury a generation of young men; it buried a specific way of seeing the world. The "sublime" was replaced by the "grotesque."
This blog assignment invites us to explore the definition of War Poetry, not merely as a thematic category but as a radical shift in literary consciousness. We will examine how the "Trench Poets" dismantled the high diction of the 19th century to expose the gruesome reality of mechanized slaughter. Specifically, we will deconstruct Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum est to understand the agonizing tension between its structural form and its visceral message.
Finally, we will step out of the 20th century and into the 21st. By utilizing a Generative AI tool, I have attempted to recreate the "pity of war" in the context of the Indo-Pak War of 1971, mimicking Owen’s style. This experiment serves a dual purpose: to test the stylistic boundaries of AI and to reflect on whether a machine can truly replicate the "witness" of human trauma. Can an algorithm understand the "Old Lie," or can it only echo it?
The Truth Untold: Defining War Poetry in Context
What is War Poetry?
To define War Poetry simply as "poetry written during wartime" is to miss its critical function. In the context of our classroom discussions regarding the First World War, War Poetry is best defined as a literature of witness and protest.
Prior to 1914, war literature was heavily influenced by the "Mock-Heroic" tradition and the patriotic fervour of the Victorian era. Poets like Tennyson (The Charge of the Light Brigade) or even the early Rupert Brooke (The Soldier) treated war as an abstract theater of glory. It was clean, honorable, and spiritually cleansing. This was the "High Diction" that critic Paul Fussell speaks of where horses were "steeds," the enemy was the "foe," and death was "the fallen."
However, the reality of trench warfare static, industrial, and dehumanizing necessitated a new language. The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg represents a counter-discourse. Its significance lies in two main areas: Content and Form.
The Revolution of Content: The Anti-Pastoral
The content of War Poetry is aggressively anti-rhetorical. It rejects the abstract nouns of "Glory," "Honor," and "Courage" in favor of the concrete reality of the body. In our studies of the Romantic period, we saw how nature was a source of spiritual healing. In War Poetry, nature becomes an enemy. The rain causes trench foot; the sun accelerates decomposition; the earth is not a mother but a grave.
The significance here is the shift from the Universal to the Specific. The poet does not write about "The Army"; he writes about "a boy" with "froth-corrupted lungs." This specificity serves as an accusation against the civilian population who remained ignorant of the war's reality.
The Revolution of Form: The Sound of Shell Shock
If the content changed, the form had to break. You cannot write about a gas attack using the perfect, melodious rhyming couplets of Alexander Pope. The War Poets introduced:
Para-rhyme (Half-rhyme): Used extensively by Owen (e.g., seeds/sides, mystery/mastery). This creates a sound of dissonance and failure. It denies the reader the satisfaction of a perfect chime, mirroring the soldier's lack of resolution or closure.
The Cinematic Gaze: The poems often function like a camera lens, zooming in on grotesque details (a rotting face, a severed limb) to force the reader to "look."
The Architecture of Nightmare: Message and Form in "Dulce et Decorum est"
Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum est is the quintessential text for understanding the tension between Message (the reality of death) and Form (the poetic structure). The poem is a direct rebuttal to the propagandist verse of the time, specifically addressing Jessie Pope, a writer of jingoistic war verses.
The Container vs. The Contents
The poem is ostensibly written in iambic pentameter, the traditional meter of English heroic verse (the same meter used by Shakespeare and Milton). However, Owen weaponizes this form. He uses the expectation of a steady rhythm to highlight the interruption of chaos.
Stanza 1: The Weight of Exhaustion
"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,"
Here, the message is one of utter degradation. These are not heroes; they are "beggars" and "hags." The form struggles to carry this weight. Owen uses spondaic substitutions (consecutive stressed syllables) to slow the line down.
Wilfred Owen's manuscript draft of 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.
Scan: Bent dou-ble, like old beg-gars...
The rhythm forces the reader to read slowly, mimicking the sludge-heavy trudge of the soldiers. The form drags its feet, just like the men.
Stanza 2: The Ecstasy of Fumbling
"Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,"
The tension explodes here. The message (a sudden gas attack) shatters the iambic flow entirely. The caesuras (pauses) and exclamation marks fracture the line. The word "ecstasy" is ironically used; usually a Romantic term for spiritual joy, here it describes the frantic, terrifying panic of putting on a gas mask. The form accelerates, inducing panic in the reader, mirroring the adrenaline of the soldiers.
The Green Sea: A Failure of Mimesis
The centerpiece of the poem is the image of the man drowning in gas:
"As under a green sea, I saw him drowning."
Here, the form dissolves into a nightmare. The message is so horrific that the poet resorts to surrealism. He cannot describe the gas directly; he has to use a metaphor of the sea. The tension lies in the fact that the "glass" (the gas mask lens) separates the speaker from the dying man. The form creates a barrier—the poet is a helpless observer, trapped behind the glass of his own survival, watching the message (the dying man) sink.
The Final Couplet: The Collision
The poem ends with the famous Latin tag:
"Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori."
The tension between message and form reaches its climax. The Form (the Latin phrase) represents the high, classical education of the British elite—the "Old Lie." The Message (the preceding description of the "white eyes writhing" and "blood-shod" feet) proves this form to be a lie. Owen places the grotesque reality next to the beautiful Latin to show that they cannot coexist. The message destroys the form.
The Digital Ghost: AI Poetry Experiment
To understand the mechanics of War Poetry further, I turned to modern technology. I utilized a Generative AI tool(Google Gemini) to see if the style of Wilfred Owen could be applied to a different conflict: the Indo-Pak War of 1971 (specifically the liberation of Bangladesh). This conflict, much like WWI, was characterized by muddy terrain, heavy monsoon rains, and brutal guerrilla warfare.
The Prompt:
"Write a war poem on the Indo-Pak War of 1971 in the style and tone of Wilfred Owen. Focus on the sensory details of the terrain (riverine/mud) and the pity of war. Include a critique of civilian ignorance."
The Result: "The Delta of Ash"
The paddy fields were churned to greyest slop,
Not by the rain, but by the iron tracks
That crushed the green shoots before the harvest crop;
We marched like ghosts with heavy, hunching backs.
The monsoon wept, but we had ceased to weep,
For tears were salt, and salt stings open skin;
We walked as men who walk within their sleep,
Through villages where silence was the sin.
Sudden—a flash! The sky ripped purely white,
Not lightning, but the mortar’s blind distinct;
I saw a boy, caught in that unnatural light,
His eyes wide open, yet effectively extinct.
He sought no glory in this foreign mud,
Only the mother who had knit his vest;
But found instead the brotherhood of blood,
And darkened stains upon a hollow chest.
The river Padma swells with more than rain,
It carries secrets bloated, pale, and vast;
A history of unnecessary pain,
Where future hopes are strangled by the past.
The mukti-bahini shadows in the jute,
Are they the heroes that the papers claim?
Or just scared children, trembling and mute,
Who learned that death possesses no real name.
You who sit safe in parlours, sipping tea,
Reading of "Liberation" and of "Gain,"
You do not see the Delta as we see,
The Jhelum rising with the swollen rain.
If you could hear the gargle in the throat
Of dying rivers, choked with human rust,
You’d cease to wave your patriotic coat,
And taste, with us, the bitterness of dust.
Reflection
When I first read the generated poem, "The Delta of Ash," my immediate reaction was how disturbingly accurate it felt on the surface. It had the "mud," the "blood," and the angry tone that I associate with Owen. But as I read it a second time, specifically looking for the "pity" we discussed in class, I felt a strange hollowness. The poem is technically competent—it rhymes perfectly, the meter is steady—but that’s exactly the problem. Owen’s poetry feels like it’s struggling to breathe; the rhythm breaks because he is traumatized. This AI poem feels too smooth, too easy. It talks about "tears" and "pain," but it feels like a mathematical equation of sadness rather than a genuine cry of grief. It made me realize that War Poetry isn't just about using sad words; it’s about the "pressure" behind the words. The AI can mimic the style of the witness, but it completely lacks the authority of the witness. It feels like a ghost story told by someone who has never seen a ghost.
Conclusion
Ultimately, this exploration into the mechanics of War Poetry and the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence reveals that the "Pity of War" is an exclusively human burden. While the Trench Poets of World War I shattered the "Mock-Heroic" forms to expose the visceral truth of slaughter, and while Wilfred Owen masterfully manipulated the tension between message and meter to replicate the dissonance of trauma, the AI experiment proves that style can be coded, but soul cannot. The generated poem, though aesthetically similar to Owen's work, lacks the essential "negative capability" the chaotic, unresolved, and breathless quality of lived horror. We are left with the understanding that in the literature of atrocity, the value lies not in the perfection of the verse, but in the pulse of the witness who survived to write it.
References
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Owen, Wilfred. The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Edited by Jon Stallworthy, W. W. Norton & Company, 1986.
No comments:
Post a Comment