Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

POETICAL EXCURSION #9

"Arms and the Boy", by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918).

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads
Which long to muzzle in the hearts of lads.
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

:: The dates of Owen's life make his fate fairly obvious: he was killed in action during World War I, ironically just a week before the formal cessation of hostilities. I am not certain as to when this poem was written, but it definitely appears to spring from Owen's "anti-war" period, which began roughly around 1917 and formed the last year of his life.

What interests me here is Owen's concept of human nature. Since humans are not equipped by nature for war, we must create our weapons ourselves: our teeth are not suited to fighting, we have no talons for shredding the bodies of our enemies, and our heads do not sport antlers. Owen says more than this, though, through his personification of the weapons that we have made. It is not that we long for war and thus create these things to fight it; it is that the weapons themselves that are "keen with hunger for blood" and "long to muzzle in the hearts of lads". The implication is of war as an unending cycle: we create the weapons, whose desire for blood we must then fulfill. War becomes less a means by which grievances between nations are prosecuted and matters of good and evil are settled, and more a primal thing: war not as necessity, but as appetite, and cruel appetite it is, a type of bloodthirst against "lads" who would be better eating apples.