Mark Anderson
May 14, 1999
English 10C—Witzling
The Internal Warfare of Wilfred Owen’s “Sonnet”
The dehumanizing horrors of modern warfare were made sharply clear to the modern mind by the bloody nightmare of the trenches of World War I and its traumatizing psychological effect on the soldiers. The 20th century’s new global consciousness was birthed in violence; the powerful destruction which mankind’s natural violent tendencies could unleash through technological innovation was a sobering and disturbing omen for the future of modern civilization. Wilfred Owen effectively portrays the profound and complex emotions that this dark social climate advances in his “Sonnet: On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought into Action.” A sense of powerlessness and hopelessness is conveyed by the impersonal and formal speaker of the poem, who can only appeal ultimately to a power beyond himself to end the “curse” of violence in man’s soul. He nonetheless betrays personal emotion and fear through his plea for the guns to expend the passions and pride that began the war, and most noticeably through his plaintive entreaty to God. The loathing and fear that he feels at the thought of the senseless destruction of lives who he declares are “innocent of enmity” is contradicted both by his involvement in the plight of his particular nation, and by his awareness that aggression and violence are an unfortunate component of the human psyche.
Owen’s choice of the sonnet for the form of his poem is ironic due to its subject matter, as sonnets were traditionally used for the subject of romantic love. The speaker’s formal language in the use of the impersonal pronoun “thou,” and collective possessive “our,” serves to distance him from his emotions. This need for distancing demonstrates the speaker’s fear of his circumstances as well as the traumatizing effect that it yields upon his sense of personal efficacy. The speaker’s lack of self-potency is contrasted by the aggressive phallic imagery of the “great gun towering towards heaven.” Thus, though the speaker repeatedly maligns the gun as a “curse,” he still maintains a grudging respect of its ability for effective action. Reflecting further upon its unfeeling destruction of innocent men in the closing sextet, however, the speaker ends with the forceful couplet calling for God to cut off the symbolic gun after it has expended its supply of destruction. The sonnet has the sense of being in the shadow of the dark, looming gun--perhaps its destruction potency overwhelmed the speaker’s sense of creative potency.
The piece of artillery indeed casts a “spell” over the whole poem, and the author, perhaps inadvertently, demonstrates a prideful possessiveness of the weapon, claiming it as “our artillery” in the very title of the poem, and urging it to its destructive purpose, calling for it to “sway steep against them”--“them” evidently referring to his nation’s adversaries. Thus, he displays the very binary mentality that he speaks against in the second stanza when he identifies with the victims of the gun, who are “innocent” of ill intent towards him personally, and who “wither” before the “vast malison” of the gun, echoing the his own similar loss of potency. The speaker is hopelessly embroiled in his situation, however, and despite his awareness that warfare is the result of “Arrogance”--which is contrasted with the only other capitalized word in the octet, “Heaven”--he still desires the gun to fulfill its function.
The speaker is horrified by the destructive results of the cannon, but he is resigned to its need for survival, somewhat like an addicted user of heroin. In this respect, his poem has a despairing aspect towards mankind’s destructive urges, for he feels powerless to stop it, and he can only pray that God will change the world. And this plea to a divine power sounds ineffective, for the horror of the “curse” of warfare is that it is directed not at God but at other human beings, and thus perpetuates itself like a disease. The only hope that the speaker really evinces is that the gun will “spend our resentment. . . and beat it down before its sins grow worse,” and that its destructive reign will not be repeated.
Owen’s makes a connection between money and warfare in that he identifies the gun as a monetary creation: “our gold in shapes of flame.” It is as if his society is spending it’s money in order to feed its illusions: “that Arrogance which needs thy harm. . . spend our resentment, cannon.” Interestingly, the speaker sees the resultant economic effect of this investment to be “prosperity.” He hopes that in this new prosperity the cannon will not be needed. Depicting this, the poet identifies the gun as a “dark arm,” and thus relates it to his society—the “bosom”--in terms of the body, making all the more apparent the inherent nature of mankind’s violent urges. The gun certainly has a vitality to it that the speaker identifies with—he associates it not only with “flame,” but as a “storm” resulting from his society’s “breath.”
The speaker displays a wish for the war to even be prolonged, if only to demonstrate fully the destructive force that it is capable of. “Be slowly lifted up,” he urges the gun, addressing it as if it were a consciousness, “for years rehearse thy huge imprecations.” Owen’s decision to personify the gun and address it directly illustrates further the irony of the use of the sonnet form, for the gun takes the place of the lover. Just as an earlier poet would have used the sonnet to beg for his love to be requited, Owen’s uses the sonnet to beg for the gun to be destroyed.
Despite Owen’s distinction between his nation and “them,” his sonnet demonstrates that what the society and its gun are really fighting is not a human enemy, but rather an internal demon. In this aspect, the gun itself is not a negative thing; but rather, it simply serves as an outlet for negativity. The aggression and violence that the gun releases comes from within—a sobering sense of personal responsibility issues from this thought, and such consciousness is reflected in the author’s inveighing against the gun as “dark,” “black,” and as a carrier of the “curse” of warfare. It is fitting that Freudian thought was on the rise at the time of Owen’s poem, for Freud’s psychology assumes the influence of the destructive urge upon the human psyche. Termed “thanatos,” this death instinct--contrasted with “eros”—was an inherent part of human nature and could no more easily be removed than the gun could be removed as an agent to Owen’s nation’s “prosperity.”