In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead.
One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home.
Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed.
The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between the Biblical sacrifice to the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men with belts and straps.
At the risk of being heretical, I think Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the point more powerfully, and more effectively.
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In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead.
One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home.
Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed.
The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between the Biblical sacrifice to the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men with belts and straps.
At the risk of being heretical, I think Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the point more powerfully, and more effectively.
W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)
Who are you writing for? For anyone writing poetry the question seems essential.
At some point in his career Yeats had wanted to be a national poet, writing for and on behalf of his country. But in this poem he renounces that ambition, having, he says, discovered that the people he thought we was writing for and about are not worthy. He renounces them for an imaginary figure, a solitary fisherman. And in the poem’s most memorable image, Yeats hopes that before he’s old, he will have written him one poem ‘as cold/and passionate as the dawn’.
You can spend some time admiring those two adjectives, and the effect they create.
Hugh Kenner suggested the difference between Yeats and Pound, or Yeats and most poets, was that Pound, once he’d left London, could sit in relative isolation at his typewriter in Rapallo telling himself he was a genius and dismissing any rumours of negative response to his work as the sniping of lesser interigences. Yeats, standing in the wings at the abbey theatre was forced to confront an often baffled, sometimes hostile audience. It might be one of the reasons Yeats’ poems improved as he got older.
The Poetry Voice
In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead.
One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home.
Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed.
The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between the Biblical sacrifice to the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men with belts and straps.
At the risk of being heretical, I think Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the point more powerfully, and more effectively.
