Halted against the shade of a last hill,
They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease
And, finding comfortable chests and knees
Carelessly slept. But many there stood still
To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,
Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.
Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge,
For though the summer oozed into their veins
Like the injected drug for their bones’ pains,
Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass,
Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.
Wilfred Owen’s poem, Spring Offensive begins with a pause. A pause where refuge from the slaughter of the first world war is almost kindly provided by the ‘shade of a last hill.’ How tragically poignant the finality of the ‘last hill’ it is as if those pausing are only too aware of the imminent annihilation of self and others. The soldiers temporarily enjoy this brief respite, almost reaccessing another time, an earlier time and place, where their lives were not so dangerously threatened by death.
Assonance breathes a healing gentleness in these stanzas. Owen is breathing slow, deliciously free air into the lungs of his fellow men, as they shortly anticipate the horrors of the barbaric war. Breath is pulse like. We breathe because we are here, alive.
So much of Wilfred Owen’s poetry is about the breath, a characteristic recognised by Carol Ann Duffy’s revisitation of the First World War in her poem, Last Post.
‘Easy’ is almost repeated twice, an emphasis delicious in its pleasure. soldiers share the intimacy fo physical contact and space, abandoning physical tension for release.
‘Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.’
Once again, reality is spatially measured. The First World War, so much about a few hundred yards of mud, is here reflected in the knowingness of the soldiers’ toes. Here is safety. There is fear and death. it is as if the feet of the men are poised on a precipice. When I say ‘as if ‘, of course this is not a fabrication, for their enjoyment of this healing moment is truly marvellous’ something magical and temporarily freeing.
Cleverly owen does not use direct rembrance or nostalgia here. He utilises Keatsian suggestiveness with the sound image of ‘murmurous with wasp and midge…’ presence is so gently, yet so intensely described here, as Owen’s soldiers await the next battle surge.
I have rarely read anything so succinct about apparoaching personal extinction as ‘the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge..’
Even someone with Owen’s faith, must have had his doubts about the existence of God , when faced by the inhumanity of the First World War.
For once, nature seems kind.