Saturday, July 17, 2010
Wild with All Regrets - Wilfred Owen
To start this poem is, well in some parts, a bit hard to understand, at least for me. I understand that it is about regret after the connotation of the title “Wild with All Regrets” tells me that much. And then certain parts of the poem such as: “Your fifty years in store seem none too many;/But I’ve five minutes. God! For just two years/To help myself to this good air of yours” (13-15) But then again within that quote I do not entirely understand what he means by “five minutes”, to do what? Or for what to happen? Another part that I do not get is in the first stanza when the speaker says, “I can’t read. There: it’s no use. Take your book” (5). Is the speaker referring to the priest during his mass reading the bible? Well what did you think about the poem?
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Mica, I think that the poem is about a soldier who is in the middle of a battle hiding, in fear for his life. I think this because of lines 3 and 4 where it says "My back's been stiff for hours, dammed hours. Death never gives his Stand-at-ease." While he is there he is regretting all the things he hadn't done yet. For example he talks about how he wasn't able to teach his boys "hitting, shooting and catching" (line 9 & 10). Like the title says "Wild with all Regrets" this poem is talking about exactly that. How the soldier during battle, realize all the other things they could have done. All the regrets come out in the battlefield. In tough situations like these people regret not doing a lot of things in their life. We see this when he talks about teaching his kids how to hit, catch and shot but also when he says, "I'd love to be a sweep's boy" (line 26) this shows all the things he would have wanted to do. Yet to be honest I don't love this poem. The way Owen writes and expresses his ideas is very confusing (at least for me). Yet I feel he does this for a reason but I do not know why! Through the poem he uses a lot of --. Do you know why the does that? Do you know why his ideas are just all over the place in the poem?
ReplyDeleteAnother idea comes to my mind when rereading the poem and after reading your opinion on it. Maybe the soldier is in battlefield, but not hiding rather, he is wounded and slowly dying. I think Owen might be trying to show how a soldier feels as he dies, and how many are so young they still have not had the chance to do any things. That’s probably why his thoughts are all over the place since, people do not think in an orderly way, much less when they are dying. Also I think this “mess” gives the poem a more desperate tone, as if the speaker is fighting for his life, or at least trying to hold on to it. And as to the dashes (“- -“), well I am not entirely sure what they are thee for, but I have some ideas. They could be there to add an afterthought, just as they could represent gun shots, shooting right to the point since they go immediately to an exclamation or a concise idea.
ReplyDeleteMica, I think your right! Now that I re-read the poem, I realize that I do think that this soldier is dying and Owen is writing this poem as if we were in the soldier's head. That would also explain why the poem is all over the place, it shows how peoples thoughts, especially dying soldier's thoughts, are all over the place. It seems like this soldier is almost trying to bargain for his life back. Owen writes, "One Spring! Is one too hard to spare? Too long? Spring air would find its own way to my lung," (lines 15, 16) He is hoping that his life could be longer, he would accept even one minute more of life. I also have a couple of theories for the -- symbols. I think that they are used to show pauses in the thoughts of the soldier, the same way that when we think our minds can suddenly pause and think about something else. It can also show something like the soldier's slow and counted breaths. What do you think?
ReplyDeleteWell I still think that the "--" stand for irect statements like gunshots, I think that's what they symbolize. For example, in the first verse: "My arms have mutinied against me -- brutes!" and in the 10th verse: "Shooting and hunting -- all the arts of hurting!". However, he verse afer that, doesn't seem to be such and urgent and direct statement, so maybe they are just to indicate a change of thoughts or a pause. Maybe Owen did it on purpose, like an open ended question, which we are free to interpret the "--" as we want to.
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