The Art of Escape

Paul Valéry’s “Autobiography” reveals little about his past, only that he observed the Mediterranean Sea beneath his window as a child, and that he saw nothing after his early years “except by effort.” He then lists his achievements up through the 1920s. It is a short autobiography, maybe 10 pages total.
 
His “Mediterranean Inspirations,” a slightly longer essay published in 1934, does manage to find a childhood event worthy of extended notice: he recounts how one day, while walking down a jetty admiring the returning fishing fleets and comparing them to the Greeks victorious after Troy, he glances down into the water and observes “choses d’une rougeur écœurante, des masses d’un rose délicat ou d’une pourpre profonde et sinistre” (Things of a nauseating red, masses of a delicate pink or of a deep and sinister purple . . .).^[1] He can’t turn away.

Je reconnus avec horreur l’affreux amas des viscères et des entrailles de tout le troupeau de Neptune que les pècheurs avaient rejeté à la mer. Je ne pouvais ni fuir ni supporter ce que je voyais, car le dégoût que ce charnier me causait le disputait en moi à la sensation de beauté réelle et singulière de ce désordre de couleurs organiques . . .
 
I recognized with horror the dreadful heap of viscera and entrails of Neptune’s flock, which the fishermen had thrown into the sea. I could neither flee nor endure what I saw, for the disgust caused by that charnelhouse struggled in me against my sense of the real and exceptional beauty of that confusion of organic colors . . .

The young Valéry discovers that his beloved sea has much in common with the ancient poets who transformed “les scènes les plus atroces” (the most appalling scenes) into epic myths.

Mais l’art est comparable à cette limpide et cristalline épaisseur à travers laquelle je voyais ces choses atroces: il nous fait des regards qui peuvent tout considérer.
 
But art is comparable to that limpid and crystalline depth through which I saw those hideous things. Art gives us eyes that can take in everything.

Valéry’s recollections then turn away from this “dreadful heap.” He describes boats neatly stacked with oranges from Valencia and meditates at length on his only youthful recreation, swimming, because the subject “se soutient et se meut en pleine poésie” (moves and has its being in the heart of poetry).

Around the same time that Valéry published these reflections, another poet of his generation, W. B. Yeats, editing the 1936 edition of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, made what, at first glance, seems to be the opposite claim—arguing in its introduction that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.” He then uses this logic to exclude the work of the majority of World War I poets from the anthology, most conspicuously that of Wilfred Owen. They were courageous men, he says, and good letter writers, but their art has no joy, and “all skill is joyful.”
 
The decision provoked an immediate and nearly unanimous backlash. Critics accused Yeats of pettiness, lack of patriotism, and bad taste. Publicly Yeats let his introduction speak for itself. Privately, he wrote to a friend to say that if he could do it all over, he would. Owen’s poetry, he argued, “is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick . . . There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him.”

In 2006, in Mosul, Iraq, I stood in the turret of an armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle as part of an overnight infantry company operation. We were parked on the highway canvassing a series of apartment buildings on the other side of a field of frozen mud. I think the idea was to keep people on the east side of town from placing improvised explosive devices on roads in the west side of town, or possibly vice versa. Or maybe our leadership just wanted to provoke some kind of “kinetic action” (a euphemism for active, lethal force) to prove we meant business. It didn’t matter. The big picture wasn’t the point. We had been ordered to stay there until we saw something.
 
My gunner and I took turns standing in the turret. As one of my platoon’s soldiers was sick, my usual gunner had been moved to the next Bradley down, and we checked in with each other occasionally on the radio. “See anything?” I would ask. “Nope,” he would say. “See anything?” he would ask me. “Nope,” I would say.
 
We waited. The hours ticked by. I mentioned to my replacement gunner that this was a stupid thing to do, sit here all night waiting for something to happen. I thought that by saying it out loud that it would make it less stupid and me less stupid for doing it. It didn’t. I felt even stupider because now my replacement gunner knew I thought it was stupid, and if the officer has one role in a war, it’s to make what is clearly stupid (charge a machine nest or jump out of a plane into flack) not sound stupid. It’s a question of framing—you don’t win a war by discussing the finer points of the events within it.
 
At two or three in the morning a crack rang out. A sniper rifle. I touched my head. It was still there. I radioed my gunner in the other Bradley. “See anything?”

My grandfather lost his eye in the Korean War. He never told the same story twice about it. My favorite was the one where they put him and another private in charge of securing the beer tent for 12 hours. Artillery rounds start exploding around them. The other private—less heroic than my grandfather—abandons the beer tent only to be killed by an artillery round somewhere away from the beer tent. My grandfather loses his eye to shrapnel but retains his honor—not a single Communist drank a single American beer.
 
That eye would “fall out” whenever I brushed my teeth with him, and he would feign panic and fear, and I would feel real panic and fear, and then the eye would pop back in, and we would go watch old cowboy movies. My grandfather observed the pattern of those shows—peace, beautiful country, violence, and then a return to peace—as if it were Valéry’s sea. Sometimes the current would take it in a different direction. Sometimes the pattern would be drawn out by a strange moon, or angered by a rare storm, but the waves would keep coming, and my grandfather seemed, in those moments, happiness itself.
 
For years when writing about the war I would come up against this block—you could turn the events into myth, or you could let them be forgotten as most violent events are in history (the “heap” under an unnamed pier on the Mediterranean coast circa 1880). But that’s what myth does too—forgets the particular to turn it into something outside history and more than its particular self. Owen, Yeats’s introduction implies, had created a new and dangerous kind of myth. He had taken the pointless death of those who were not him and made it about him. It was, to Yeats, pity without proportion. Yeats understood that Owen himself dies a week before the war ends, but that’s beside the point for Yeats. Yeats is not concerned with biography. He is concerned, like Valéry, with how we see our biography, our “effort,” and how this makes for the poet’s theme.
 
Eventually, toward the end of the introduction, after crankily critiquing nearly every poet that is associated with the war, or is thought to be a product of the war, including the work of Eliot and Pound, he maintains that “tragedy is a joy to the man who dies.”
 
The implication is clear: No one dies happily in a modern war. Therefore, no one should write poetry about war today.

Owen thought differently. Though only 25, he very much wanted to write about the war, and having experienced its horrors, felt compelled to make World War I the point and theme of his poems rather than, as Yeats says elsewhere, “the most expensive outbreak of insolence and stupidity the world has ever seen.” In a preface he wrote and never had a chance to publish—as a machine gunner shot him while he helped put down duckboards into mud—Owen makes sure there’s no doubt about his intent: “The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” He goes on to say that his elegies are not consolatory. “All the poet can do to-day is to warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.”
 
It’s a rightly celebrated passage, but it is also exactly what caused Yeats to attack Owen years later: Poets must be consolatory, because if they are not, then what’s the point of poetry? And if all poets can do is warn, what can their poems become but a repetition and echo of what it is they warn us about? If your subject is war, and you are a good poet in a world of endless war, how do you keep war from becoming the only possible subject?
 
This is not to say Yeats does not write about war. Yeats does. But his poems complicate the power of violence in strange ways. Take “Easter, 1916.” This poem, written about the Easter uprising in Dublin, and published in 1920, two years after Owen’s death, attempts to understand how another cycle of violence has changed the world. Its famous refrain—“All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born”—clearly implies violence effects change, makes things different than they were, and also creates beauty. It seems very far away from Owen’s poor soldier murdered in the gas attack in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” But as someone who has read Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” over 100 times to students, and has felt deeply the irony of the cowards sending young men to die for abstractions without having seen the violence themselves, I also have to admit that the poem is terribly beautiful—“As under a green sea, / I saw him drowning”—and the events at hand, the war when described as Owen describes it, definitely changed things utterly. Why else would we still be reading it?
 
So this is where things get more complicated: Like Owen, Yeats is concerned with truth, but his truth refuses to make that terrible beauty and anger at this impossible fact the entire poem, or even the poem’s only subject. In “Easter, 1916,” Yeats movingly intones this transfiguration through violence, but he actually spends the majority of the poem discussing who these people were before dying made them into something else. As a reader, I remember the refrain, but I also remember the vainglorious louts and shrill drunken bar screamers. In a way, they aren’t trans­formed at all in Yeats’s poem. The national Irish narrative says they are, but that would have happened with or without Yeats writing this poem. Newspapers and politicians are onto that. Oddly, thanks to Yeats, they will be remembered for who they were before they become heroes—comically unheroic, fools, dressed in motley, forever part of our casual comedy.
 
In the final stanzas, things become a bit more metaphorical, and he describes the martyrs as “stones,” the only immovable objects in this world’s “living stream,” which seems positive, but then Yeats pauses to wonder whether “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” and asks, “when may it suffice?” He concludes that he can’t say for sure. All he can do as a poet is name the dead, hopefully transform this confusion into something more, and, maybe most tellingly, acknowledge that “they dreamed and are dead.”
 
Suddenly, the poem is less about the British bullets that shot down some people whom Yeats didn’t all that much like to begin with, but dreams, and what dreams can transform, and that feels much more important than the violence, however beautiful.

In “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen’s drowning soldier is seen through a dream. The narrator then wishes this vision into the “smothering dreams” of those back home. This makes sense in context, but it is no small thing to wish such dreams on another person. It’s really kind of a violent desire for the war to come home to the people who made it. That’s well and fair but we—who were not ever in an actual trench during a gas attack—should pause at this swell of anger and wonder who it is exactly we are wishing these dreams on. We should also wonder if this is what it means to dream and all we should be capable of dreaming 100 years after the war. Would Owen himself want this?
 
Yeats, in much of his work from this period, seems to desire the opposite, to wish the war on no one, and maybe even to wish the war away. His only World War I poem written during the war, “On being asked for a War Poem,” simply refuses to talk about the war: “in times like these / A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth / We have no gift to set a statesman right.” His next, “An Irish Airman foresees his Death,” published just after the war, tells us about an Irish Airman who fights those he does “not hate” and guards those he does “not love,” high above the blood and dirt and (maybe) sugar sticks, about to die for no reason at all, just because of a “lonely impulse of delight.” You can call it a war poem because it has a plane in it, but it’s really about escaping the war, flying into the clouds where there is no war and its stupid, bloody back-and-forth.
 
Then there is his “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Here, Yeats literally locks himself up in a tower because he does not want anything to do with the civil war raging through Ireland during and after World War I. He enacts the escape he has been dreaming about since “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and, in his small way, becomes the active hero he always said people should be in this passive modern world. Yeats’s reflection almost channels Owen, meditating in the collective first person on how violence in wartime transforms our previous noble sentiments and tragic joy into parodies of themselves:

We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.

His poetry here, like Owen’s, risks becoming about the war and turning everything in this world into the war’s bloody consequences. It also suggests that to write about honor and truth now would be to make yourself part of the problem (“Mock mockers after that,” he says later in the poem). But it’s still Yeats, and he complicates and questions the finality of his despair: “But is there any comfort to be found? / Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?”
 
This might be cold comfort for some, but the question, the assumption that man can still love, and love what vanishes, works as yet another escape from what feels, in the moment of violence, like it will never vanish—the mother “murdered at her door” by “a drunken soldiery,” or the fact that “we dreamed to mend / Whatever mischief seemed / To afflict mankind, but now / That winds of winter blow / Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.”
 
But “Lapis Lazuli” is likely the greatest, and most frustrating, of Yeats’s strange war poems. Written just before his Oxford Verse introduction, “Lapis Lazuli” begins with “hysterical women” complaining that if nothing is done, “Aeroplane and Zeppelin” will “Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in / Until the town lie beaten flat.” It then moves outside of the 1930s present, to the long history of the world, all the civilizations put to the sword, and points out that while Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, “It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.” This seems a fairly open admission of despair, acquiescence to the ironclad dialectic of violence (good/bad) as the fundamental human theme, but Yeats, for his part, “delight[s] to imagine” the carved image of two wise Chinese philosophers above it all, playing mournful melodies in this tragic scene, for “Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, / Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”
 
Escape, escape, escape—all of them are about escape. They look to art for what keeps our eyes bright and moving with all the mystery of the sea. Whether this is the right thing to do in times of conflict is one question. Whether it is possible is another.

“If war is necessary”—warns Yeats in that same introduction—“it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever.” Scholars of this small, one-sided, literary squabble often quote Yeats and reflect that treating the death of 20 million people as a fever glosses over the fact that 20 million people have just died in variously horrible ways. It is—and I agree—a cavalier and obnoxious thing to say, only possible for someone trying to be willfully obtuse and fortunate enough to be on an island not conscripted into this giant machine war. But the critics seldom address what Yeats says next, that if we don’t forget, we might, “if war is necessary,” do what he was told soldiers returning from the Boer War do—tell over and over an anecdote of a sergeant hit by an artillery shell in such a way that it wrapped him up in his entrails like a dancer. “[I]f war is necessary,” Yeats says again at the end of this section (I think there’s some irony in this repetition of “if”), this grotesque anecdote might be the proper poetry for the now, just as the Dance of Death was the proper form of poetry for the plague-ridden medieval world.

My grandfather, in his own small way, might have agreed with this. I recently found some pictures of him when younger in Korea. He never has a shirt on and grins with other men next to artillery pieces. He also has a Korean boy with him that my mom tells me he later tried to adopt. He never mentioned any of that to me. For him, after a long life, all there was to do was make a joke about it. Because whatever Korea was, whatever Korea meant to the higher-ups and to the American public at that point in time, would be irrelevant to force on me, at 10 or 11, in the mid-1990s. So he made jokes about death, and my sisters and I would try to laugh like him. My grandmother would always be behind him, at the kitchen sink, opening and slamming cabinets, saying, “That’s not true, Bill, that’s not what actually happened.” But no one listened to her. We told my grandfather to tell the same story again, in a different way this time, laugh and dream the world was just a little different than it was. Turn it into a song, make the sergeant trapped in his own entrails dance for the good people on this side of the violence.

Art gives us the eyes to take in everything. It can contain and make beautiful all the world’s manifold horrors. That is, to some degree, the art of art. To call it (or Yeats) escapist is to miss the point. No one escapes. Death, as so much realistic modern art never tires of telling us, comes to us all. The escape is all we have that is not everything else. Yes, it will be provisional. Yes, it will fail. But the failure will be a happy one because it will be our own.

In 2006, when my sergeant failed to respond after the single shot from an apartment building, the war never seemed further away. It had absolutely no reality—all the words and justifications and sugar sticks—it all lacked any point whatsoever. It was not a subject for art at all. Pity seemed to miss badly the point by giving it a point. It would make the moment into another kind of myth. Words might come, but nothing I said about it would ever scale correctly. This was not funny or tragic; it just was.
 
But even “wasness” felt insufficient: This moment’s resistance to language should not be considered special for being distinct, because it wasn’t, not really. Suffering, W. H. Auden says in a poem written two years after Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse introduction, is important for the sufferer and those seeing the suffering, but somewhere else, even during the worst screaming, children are “skating / On a pond at the edge of the wood,” and “the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” The fact that you have entered into, or close to, the sphere of pain for a short while does not preclude the skating and horse-behind scratching. Not only do we ignore it when it happens (not only had I effectively ignored all the suffering around me in Mosul prior to this event), but we inside it, when we are inside, also have a tendency to make its happening everything. But isn’t it also important to remember that somewhere far away the children skate on a pond? Aren’t we happy to have innocent horses in a world of torturers?
 
Then there’s the fact that no one had shot me in the head. I had already, as Yeats complained about Owen, taken on the suffering of others as my own. It was disproportionate. My thoughts spun like a child skating on a pond, and I, for all my sudden introduction to blood and dirt, remained as innocent as a sucked sugar stick.

A few weeks later I did better: Our platoon had been told to clean up the remains of U.S. soldiers destroyed by an IED. They were from another company. Our battalion commander thought it would be bad form for people to pick up the body parts of those they knew. We knew them too, but that was a distant knowledge. My soldiers did fine at first, but after we had gathered everything into bags, and we were back on base unloading them from the Humvees, they couldn’t bring themselves to get the bags out of the last Humvee. They slowed down, slunk away from the moment, as if they were not really there and this would all just fade away if they turned away.
 
I thought this funny. Not “ha ha” funny but “isn’t this world a funny place?” funny. They had already done so much, picked bits and pieces of people they knew off roofs and from gutters (even collected one of the deceased’s Starburst candies scattered all over the road), and now they were getting lazy? Squeamish? I wanted to laugh out loud. People die all the time. I thought of my grandfather’s beer tent story. Of Boer soldiers laughing on the train. Entrails can be beautiful too. They can twist and turn like sunlight on the sea.

Old questions: Can violence ever be anything more than it is? Can we get beauty from violence? Or do we use beauty not to think of violence? Or is it, as Yeats tells us, that terrible beauty that changes utterly?
 
I can say that the day I cleaned up those body bags, it didn’t seem like any of those. Nothing was beautiful, and nothing had changed utterly (physically yes; utterly no). And yet it seemed that much more terrible and terrifying that this would be all; that this was it.
 
This might be why I’m slightly more open to the arguments of a cranky old man about a poor, sensitive boy who tried to make people see the violence that they were doing to his soldiers. Yeats had considered his whole life this relationship between his poetry and violence, and, to his credit, he saw the way that talking about it traps you, that even when you think you are condemning it, you are often giving in to it.
 
Shocked by the fact of his soldiers dying, a 25-year-old Owen wants the world to stop and see the dying; Yeats, 71 and shocked at what the world had become in the 22 years since 1914, is terrified that the human world might actually stop and become nothing but this dying fact.

Life is long if you get through the wars. In his early 70s, my grandfather sometimes told my mom and grandmother that he was taking me to a movie, and we would go to the dog track in Canton, Ohio. Afterwards, he would take me to his friend’s place, and though not allowed to drink anymore, he would drink beers while his friend—who couldn’t leave his recliner because of the bayonet that had pierced his stomach on some Pacific island in 1944—would tell me about the war artifacts he had neatly laid out on every flat surface in the house.
 
The wound was a terrible one, in no way ennobling—a colostomy bag for life. And yet for them, in front of that TV with cowboys shooting six-shooters, surrounded by the debris of their lives and the history that had formed it, it seemed the single ennobling thing in a very lonely world.

Yeats, thankfully for art, never went to war. This was never his problem. He did not have to figure out what to make of a personal experience of a violence that was willed—and therefore contingent and not “necessary” as a heart attack or earthquake is necessary—at such a young age. Maybe this is why he could, later on, with a happy distance, see more shades of reality than those forever stuck in that moment.
 
Owen himself recognized the danger of war for his art, and in poems like “Insensibility” turns this into one of the greatest horrors of the war—this movement toward unfeelingness and inhumanity. Violence bludgeons us until we break or we put up a wall so we don’t break. But that wall is a way of seeing, a refusal to see, or a dance with death, with what we saw, the immediacy of it, and the question of what it means. You flatten the world to save yourself. You lose proportion. You make jokes or you go silent or you talk endlessly about dirt and blood.
 
It could be argued that the poet and the dramatist must be proportionate even in times of wild disproportion, that perspective and distance is as important as immediacy and intimacy. The thinker—the word’s Latin root means “to weigh”—must respect it too. They all measure unhappy events and manipulate them to move their audience to tears more meaningful than those we cry for many other forgotten reasons every forgotten day. They are—Yeats is right about this—tears of joy; we want to cry at art, not at life.

Valéry said we see only through effort after we see for the first time. This is its own sort of trauma. We repeat the seashore of our youth until we die. Yeats did too, with his Irish myths and hopeless love for Maud, his Symbolist trappings and occult obsessions, and all the insecurities of the accomplished autodidact (he once failed to get a teaching job at Trinity College because he couldn’t spell “professor”), but there is a point when we realize art can take us further: It can let us see everything. It is the effort that changes utterly. Owen grasped this as well as Yeats.
 
So, today, now, thinking this through, weighing it, what do we do with this violence? Do we carry it with us like a secret heart? Do we make it into myth so as to share the secret? “All men are dancers and their tread / Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong,” says Yeats in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Some men have eyes that glitter and some go dull to survive.
 
But at whose expense this insensibility? At whose expense this sensibility?

My soldier survived. We were supposed to sit there waiting, and the captain ordered me to, but I didn’t wait. I told another platoon to cover down and took the sergeant who had been shot in the head by the sniper back to the hospital at the American base. Since I had disobeyed orders, the Romanian gate guards weren’t expecting our arrival, and I crawled out on the Bradley and mimed what had happened and our need to get a wounded soldier to the hospital. The Romanians eventually grasped what my pantomime signified, and they let us in, and my sergeant survived.
 
It’s funny to look back on it now, to see this event as mattering somehow enough to stop or pause a “necessary” war. My captain never forgave me for it. And I think he’s right. I proved myself not much of a soldier there. If it came to choosing between this sergeant and sitting still and stopping whatever we were stopping, even if it were an army of jihadis, I would, like Yeats and his declaration against Owen, choose to take him to the hospital all over again.
 
Yet that’s not what I thought at the moment, that’s not what I’m still thinking, even twenty years later. I’m still standing on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, dancing, pretending that a bullet hit my head.

My grandfather died while I was at college, only a few months after 9/11. My mom insisted I talk to him on the phone before he did. He asked if I saw anything in Boston. “Nope,” I said. (I was unhappy, far from home, drinking too much, and already, thanks to much teenage insecurity and angst, thought the world nothing more than a sad repetition of men and flies.) I asked him if he saw anything. “Nope,” he said.
 
I had nothing to say to him because I thought I hadn’t seen anything, and those who haven’t seen anything have nothing to say to those who have. But I could have said anything to him. I could have told him about Yeats and the one “war story” Yeats, according to his Oxford introduction, enjoyed—that of the Irish adventurer who escapes from a Dublin brig, swims down the Liffey, and promises the “stream” two swans in thanks for his escape. I could have made an effort to see him through all that dying, the enormous fact of it in some yellow-lit hospital in a rust-belt town, and said, simply enough, that I enjoyed his stories. That he, by some miracle of human genius, made a life filled with many tragedies and stupidities and dirt and blood into something close to an adventure. And that I had only one real complaint: There should have been a swan or two in the beer tent.

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell tells the story of a young British soldier who copied out a poem into his journal sometime in 1916, during some of the worse days of the trench fighting. The soldier chose, of all poems, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by W. B. Yeats. The poem is fairly straightforward. The narrator wishes to spread the sky’s embroidered cloths under his lover’s feet, but he, being poor, has only his dreams. It concludes abruptly as a gunshot: “I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
 
Fussell, a former infantry officer and World War II veteran, can’t help but roll his eyes at the choice. His book’s argument, after all, is that the Great War, that modern war, its machine violence, made all of us more ironic, less earnest, tougher. The fact that a soldier copied out a poem like this well into the war would seem to suggest that the war made men more fanciful, self-pitying, and romantic. But this misses something essential about war and human beings: Yeats (and this soldier) believed dreams were as real as the blood and dirt. To tread on them was murder. Owen thought so too. He, after all, carried Yeats’s poetry around with him in the trenches. Whatever art is, it likely has something to do with making space for the survival of our dreams and absurd hopes despite our lifetime-long dance with death. Maybe the answer is in the sea. Maybe in the sky. Maybe deep in the suffering human heart. But it’s unlikely to be in the violent event itself, however necessary, however ubiquitous, however great. Pity the man who believes the all is all there is.

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree // And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.”
 
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is likely Yeats’s most famous poem. I found myself murmuring it in the months after deployment and the years following my decision to leave the military, fully appreciating its treacly reputation, how knowing and ironic people, worldly people, even Yeats himself, dismissed it as inexperienced, too easy, too fey. But it’s only clear to me now, writing this, why: It’s about peace. It’s about arising and going and seeking it out as you can. And it’s active—a willing of a different world in a small, silly way. We aren’t talking “hero dying with tragic joy” or anything. But it’s not nothing either.
 
I wish to death that Owen had listened to his friend Siegfried Sassoon and made an effort to stay in Craiglockhart military hospital and not volunteered to go back to the trenches to fix that duckboard. He might have found another theme than war. He likely would not have become a myth himself, a symbol of the horrors of the war and a world and century of war. Maybe that’s what he wanted to happen. But I don’t think so. I think he wanted to write poetry.

[1] The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. by Jackson Mathews, vol. 15, Moi, trans. by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews, Bollingen Series XLV (Princeton, 1975), pp. 24–25.