"Rats' Alley": The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti)Pastoral Elegy

Abstract

“Rats’ Alley”: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy Sandra M. Gilbert (bio) I read a Biography of Tennyson, which says he was unhappy, even in the midst of fame, wealth and domestic serenity. Divine discontent! . . . But as for misery, was he ever frozen alive, with dead men for comforters? Did he hear the moaning at the bar, not at twilight and the evening bell only, but at dawn, noon, and night, eating and sleeping, walking and working, always the close moaning of the Bar; the thunder, the hissing, and the whining of the Bar?— Wilfred Owen, letter of August 8, 1917 (written from Craiglockhart, mental hospital for shell shock victims) 1 Life contracts and death is expected, As in a season of autumn, The soldier falls. He does not become a three-days personage, Imposing his separation, Calling for pomp. Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops, When the wind stops and, over the heavens, The clouds go, nevertheless, In their direction. Wallace Stevens, “The Death of a Soldier” 2 In “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” a major elegy for his good friend Henry Church that he composed not long after the end of World War II, Wallace Stevens announced a new poetics of grief even as he theorized the demise—or at least the disintegration—of the very genre in which he was writing. Arguably our century’s noblest artificer of absence, Stevens had meditated on death as “the mother of beauty” throughout most of his literary career, but in “Owl” he frankly declared that what he called his “inventions of farewell” were rooted in a set of new assumptions about both death and grief. Imagining a muse/ [End Page 179] mother who stands “tall in self not symbol . . . . With a sad splendor, beyond artifice,” the famously skeptical poet of “Sunday Morning” asserted that This is the mythology of modern death And these, in their mufflings, monsters of elegy, Of their own marvel made, of pity made. (CPP 374) Defining his own efforts at memorializing the dead—his own gravest imaginings—as in some sense monstrous, Stevens was calling attention to the mutations of a genre infected by its own belatedness, its surprising modernity. But though the death of Church, one of his closest and most admired companions, elicited what is probably this artist’s most beautiful statement about a poetic form to which he was deeply yet ambivalently drawn, Church’s demise was by no means the first event to evoke the poet’s thoughts on procedures for mourning. Indeed, Stevens’s views on both the modernity of death and the concomitant monstrosity of the (modern) elegy might be traced back to the early, tersely solemn “Death of a Soldier” (1918), which I have used as my second epigraph here. One of Stevens’s most frequently anthologized texts, “The Death of a Soldier” formulates a view of bereavement in which traditional funerary customs have been annihilated as definitively as the dead soldier, who does not become a three-days personage, Imposing his separation, Calling for pomp. (CPP 81) On the contrary, powerfully prefiguring the conditions of all “modern death,” the soldier’s death “is absolute and without memorial” or at least without the kind of memorial associated with the “three-days personage” of long-established ceremonial lament. After this first (modern) death, as Stevens ultimately implies in “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” there will be every other. Given what would become Stevens’s emphasis on death’s historicity, it is especially significant that “The Death of a Soldier”—so often detached from its original context—was first published in the grimly historicized World War I sequence entitled “Lettres d’un Soldat” (1917–1918). Based on letters from the front written between August 1914 and April 1915 by the French painter Eugene Emmanuel Lermercier (who was killed in combat in 1915), the sequence concludes with a Stevensian vision of wartime death that prescribes just the “monsters of elegy” this poet and [End Page 180] his contemporaries were beginning to produce. Like all the other poems in the series, this piece (XIII) is prefaced by a quotation from...