Formal subversion in Wilfred Owen's "Hospital Barge." - Issues in English and American Literatures

Style, Spring, 1994 by Marc D. Cyr

The poem's final four-line "moral" is immediately preceded and prepared for by similar opposition, this one involving the use of the word "innocent," a word evocative of Wordsworth's cults of the child and the rustic. (Wordsworth was th author of "Character of the Happy Warrior," which Owen echoes with scathing irony in his poem "Insensibility.") "Innocent" presages the children spoken of in line 26, who formed much of Jessie Pope's audience and to whom Horace was a schoolroom standard, but it is not an unsullied innocence: the "innocent tongues" here are seen as infected with "vile, incurable sores" (24). The "moral" follows, and it is ironically couched in the traditional terms applied by poetry to war and heroic military endeavour (see Fussell 21-23). The terms "high zest," "ardent," and "desperate glory" ring with echoes of heroism, yet each "high diction" phrase has been countered by the "low" descriptions given earlier in the poem. The "high zest" available to the noncombatant poetess Pope is set against the soldiers' being "Drunk with fatigue" (4, 7) and against thei "ecstasy of fumbling" (9), a panic incited by informed terror. This is coincident with the idea that while children, ignorant and "innocent," may be "ardent," those who are pictured as actual combatants are not; they are exhaustedly intent on "rest" (4), what enthusiasm they show inspired not by nobility but fear. The "glory," however, is indeed "desperate," though here "desperate" is ironic because it is an act of desperation to try to see the situation described as glorious.

This technique of ironically employing a Romantic, aureate language is a key technique in "Hospital Barge." This poem grew out of an incident that had occurred in May of 1917, while Owen was a patient at a field hospital on the Somme canal. In a letter to his mother, Owen wrote:

I sailed in a steam-tug about 6 miles down the Canal with another "inmate". The heat of the afternoon was Augustan. . . . The scenery was such as I never saw o dreamed of since I read the Fairie Queene. Just as in the Winter when I woke up lying on the burning cold snow I fancied I must have died and been pitch-forked into the Wrong Place, so, yesterday, it was not more difficult to imagine that my dusky barge was wending up to Avalon, and the peace of Arthur, and where Lancelot heals him of his grievous wound. But the Saxon is not broken, as we could very well hear last night. (Letters 457)

The letter's references to Arthurian legends could come from a variety of sources, a possible one being Tennyson's "The Passing of Arthur." (Interestingly, Tennyson's Arthurian poems are "especially" noted by Paul Fussell as "tutors" of the "'raised,' essentially feudal language" traditionall used to render war in literature [21].) Owen was no doubt already familiar with "The Passing of Arthur," but at any rate in July 1917 he bought a copy of The Holy Grail and Other Poems, which contained it. Also that summer he read a biography of Tennyson, and this latter volume prompted him to sneer, in another letter to his mother, at Tennyson's complaint that he had suffered great miseries, since Owen felt that the Victorian poet's sufferings were nothing compared to his own sufferings at the front: "Tennyson, it seems, was always a great child. So should I have been, but for Beaumont Hamel" (Letters 482).