The tradition of war has traditionally given rise to an equal imperative in power: the tradition of poetry about war. However, if, from Homer to the French songs of chivalry, from the “Romanzo cavalleresco” of the middle and late Renaissance to the nineteenth century European patriotic odes, the grandeur of military adventure was the vision advanced, then the First World War pared away the peripheral hordes, hosts and heroes to target the minutiae of frailty, solitary consciousness and the wounded mind. Between 1914 and 1918, English war poets undoubtedly composed the most sustained body of ‘new’ war poetry—“There had been nothing like poetry of the Great War before; there had been no war like the Great War”¹—and among them Wilfred Owen came to epitomize the best of their battle-cries of protest.² In Italy, Giuseppe Ungaretti produced arguably the most influential of Italian war poetry.³ Indeed, major poets like Owen and Ungaretti were bound by a common enlistment in the poetic cause against war, or, at least, in the cause of defying war, yet the respective literary campaigns of these two poets reveal the development of quite distinct responses to its trials.

This brief essay is the study of two anti-war poems emblematic of these poets: Wilfred Owen's “Strange Meeting”⁴ and Giuseppe Ungaretti's “Veglia,”⁵ two poems illustrative of the revolutionary humanitarianism animating the European poet-soldiers of the early twentieth century but also illustrative of the position of distraught individualism from which this new politics of rebellious pacifism sprang in World War One. In both the English poem “Strange Meeting” and the Italian “Veglia” the narrating subject confronts the studied object of another as an aspect or truth about itself. Yet, while the confrontation absorbs and transforms one of Owen's speakers, who sees the other as a mirror of the observer, it exhausts and repels Ungaretti's speaker who must certainly look, by force of physical circumstance, at the dead body before him, but will not see himself in the mirror looking back.

In fact, meeting Death is strangely familiar in Owen's “Strange Meeting.” The poem is parable and sermon, a conversion to healing for the schizophrenically warring and warred-on Self, a self that shifts ideologically and radically within the linguistic territory of the poem from “enemy” to “friend,” from “Yesterday […] you jabbed and killed” to “Let us sleep now. …” However, in Ungaretti's poem “Veglia,” an involuntary vigil by a compatriot's body provokes a body of unpatriotic sentiment: a companion is no companionable corpse. The speaker shifts uncomfortably. In Owen's poem an incomplete universe seems to be reintegrating its floating components: what was In—a man in life—has gone Out—killed, passing through the twilight dimension of a tunnel—and returns to where all is In once more though altered, brought together in a parallel universe: that of the dead (“And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,— / By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell”).⁶ In Ungaretti's poem, the satellite of the Self breaks from the disintegrating junk of a derelict life system: a “bocca / digrignata,” a “congestione” of “mani.” Caught in a Black Hole, “[una] nottata”—Death—the Self spins fortuitously away, upwards, towards Utopian auras of aloneness where, in the luxuriant “silenzio” of its own ego, private “lettere […] d'amore” can be written, an attachment “alla vita”⁷ can be renewed.

If Owen's forty-four free verse lines of compassion, diatribe and anguished autobiography as spoken by one of the implied young German war dead is an anti-war epitaph on a tombstone page, then Ungaretti's is a ballad of subdued revival, its closing tone of relief and thanksgiving, being confessionally, understandably, fragile. Still alive in the face of death, for instance, there is an exhausted, grateful triumph in feeling that:

Non sono mai stato
tanto
attaccato alla vita.(8)

Further, of the two, it is Wilfred Owen who rages a polemic, transcends phenomenology and pumps up dialectic with doctrine. Ascribing, eloquently, to himself ends, motives and principles in a presumably uncompleted preface to what became the posthumous publication of his first volume, before being killed by a sniper's bullet, Owen wrote:

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn.⁹

The poetic method in the English poem is simple enough. Let the victim speak, or an imaginary representation of a victim of war. Pity, authorially displayed by the tender sympathy of limelight, displayed also as comprehensible self-pity—a dead man's sad sense of waste—is conveyed by the signifying references to the heroic excitement and the excited heroics of typical youth (and here the reader discerns the universality of negative Fate both in the Franciscan-like exchange between ex-enemies, suddenly become pacifist equals, and in the romantic reconstruction of Life seen as seductive foolishness—the èlan vital in us all):

“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.”(10)

If, according to Owen, the poet's task was to warn, then, in the poem “Strange Meeting” the ethical warning finally to be delivered by the moral Owen—through the savant-mouthpiece of his simple soldier, a German boy, but also a metaphysician messenger, his Promethean private rebuilding the human by the virtue of the poetic word—is the purest abstract of ontology: the truth. And in the poem truth is seen as the casualty of the determinism of events that undermine the value of empirical knowledge by destroying the individual consciousness of them; that is, they steal away the precious experiences of the living by turning them into the dead and so reduce our collective ability, Owen would seem to imply, to grow beyond the impulse to self-destruction:

For of my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
[…]
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.(11)

In all this, the killer's ego—the deferential listener—concedes control to the one he has killed—the visionary welcomer to Hell—who, like the Freudian superego, ascends to the role of the other's conscience.¹² Hence, the device of concession—silence—creates an equivalence of perspectives as the two become the one. And the speech of this unitary One becomes the benign propaganda of soulful liberation.

For if Wilfred Owen enlists the dramatis personae of Youth in “Strange Meeting” to communicate the weight of the Material—“granites which titanic wars had groined,” “distressful hands,” a “dead smile,” “blood,” “guns” and “wounds”—¹³ the effect is finally to deconstruct the Real. Caught in the blindness of the physical, that world of war outside the poem of which the poem is a signifier, Owen's imagination fuses with the intellectual imperative to know or forge a vaster signification that transcends the original signified: in this case, the destructiveness of that war. The fictive dimension of the poem's language reconstitutes within itself a new signified, in conscientious defiance: in this case, the humaneness of love.¹⁴ Thus, the hard wall of previous fact can be seen to dissolve before the bitter-sweet visions of retrospective understanding which incorporate the premises for love: “Compassion was mine, and I had mystery, / Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery.”¹⁵

Of course Owen's flight into eschatology, morality and humanity was as evasive as his first speaker's “escape” from battle down a “profound dull tunnel,” was only apparently a flight from danger (leading him into the realm of the dead because he too was dead). Owen's poem is generated by war and, therefore, in a paradoxical, though quite obvious sense, is indebted to war. The opposition it excogitates is, by definition, involvement. And the nature of such oppositional dialectics in this poem, as in Owen's poetry in general, leads him to carve out a valid alternative code for civilization. Ungaretti, in his poem, points in the same humanistic direction; set in the midst of war's inescapability, a need persists to live better than that. Ungaretti's conclusion, however, is desperately different, quite individualistic, reluctant, quaintly isolationist. In his poem, the subject stands up against the object despite the object being identified as “compagno.” In “Veglia,” the ego ‘screams,’ draws back, preserves the self in the Freudian sense that it inhibits interactivity with the outside world observed by it; in that “it fends off unacceptable ideas from consciousness”¹⁶—ideas of mortality, death, corruption, decay; in that it evolves a core of genial narcissism which is encapsulated in Ungaretti's poetic persona's effective affirmation of self-love at the end of the poem which is also love of life but in a way that holds the self to be the only residual sign of that life during the vigil over death—the butchered dead man. Further, in a re-doubling of the persona's sense of menace, the nature of the relationship between victim and observer can also be inverted and seen as death's vigil over life, with death waiting to take life, as the two men face each other. Who, then, is the object of which subject? (In fact, the speaker confesses precisely a feeling of almost bodily, as well as psychic, invasion by the other: “… la congestione / delle sue mani / penetrate / nel mio silenzio”).¹⁷

Ungaretti affirmed his recalcitrant survivalist self in aggressive meditations on the war years:

S'ingannerebbe chi prendesse il mio tono nostalgico, frequente in quei miei primi tentativi, come il mio tono fondamentale. Non sono il poeta dell'abbandono alle delizie del sentimento, sono uno abituato a lottare, e devo confessarlo—gli anni vi hanno portato qualche rimedio—sono un violento: sdegno e coraggio di vivere sono stati la traccia della mia vita. Volontà di vivere nonostante tutto, stringendo i pugni, nonostante il tempo, nonostante la morte.¹⁸

Still more explicitly, more probingly, more complexly, he conceded that

Nella mia poesia non c'è traccia d'odio per il nemico, né per nessuno: c'è la presa di coscienza della condizione umana, della fraternità degli uomini nella sofferenza, dell'estrema precarietà della loro condizione. C'è volontà d'espressione, necessità d'espressione, c'è esaltazione […] quell'esaltazione quasi selvaggia dello slancio vitale, dell'appetito di vivere, che è moltiplicato dalla prossimità e dalla quotidiana frequentazione della morte. Viviamo nella contraddizione.¹⁹

In “Veglia” the contradiction is contradistinction. Every physical detail detaches and distances one companion from the other to the point that, through suggestive metamorphosis, the other assumes the grotesque contours of a werewolf figure, his mouth, “digrignata,” turned upwards to the “plenilunio,” his hands—a congestion, a final convulsive movement—fixed in a contorted rigor mortis of paws. Owen's other became the Other by virtue of his crusading Christian words of kindness and forgiveness. Ungaretti's poetic self is effectively Christ denied in so far as it is Man, or the human, revolted at intimacy with the unhuman (we may with greater justification now infer subsumed sentiments of fear and even disgust in Ungaretti's speaker's anguished silence).

And yet if Owen's portrait of “the enemy” is a young man, no macabre mummy, a still recognizable, if transubstantiated, human presence, it is equally clear that Ungaretti's speaker ultimately recognizes the dehumanized presence before him too; and not as enemy, or inimical, but as an aspect of self. It is a “compagno” there, and the speaker grasps the implications for himself: hence, the shivering intensity of the celebration of his own life.²⁰ Figuratively touched by a dead man's hands, his implied horror repudiates the symbolized fate, not the victim of it.

Finally, unlike the colloquy that exists in Owen's poem, the non-communicational nature of the relationship represented in Giuseppe Ungaretti's “Veglia” reflects the non-inquisitional structure of the poem. In it, sensations, impressions and the moment dominate. The argument for life is reclamation and assertion. The principle is allusively metaphysical but the poem is not. Yet neither its enactment of a determined will (to live) nor its celebratory emotional charge (at feeling alive) can lift it out of the bedrock of the Real it is embedded in and supported by. For though conflictive in its attitude to death, in the same measure that Owen's “Strange Meeting” is composed in its attitude to violent militarism, “Veglia” is as much the child of war as the other. Both poems confirm that the indefatigable physics of war equate with the irreducible laws of physics. The individual is undeniably captive. Escape is illusion. Or the only real escape is in the avoidance of capture in the first place. Once capture has occurred, we are told, the only possible evasion is fortuitous respite or, the treasured commitment to some hidden, private value preserved “out of battle,” down a “tunnel” and into the “silence,” waiting: a poem.

Notes

1. From “The Doomed Generation,” Robert Gidding's Introduction to The War Poets, London: Bloomsbury, 1988, p. 6. Gidding confirms two points: “Before 1914, when poets dealt with war it was to render it exotically or historically removed from the immediate experience. War, in the hands of Macauley, Tennyson, Arnold, Newbolt and Aytoun, had all the conviction of modern television costume drama. There were two outstanding exceptions—Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy”; and: “One of the most striking facts about the Great War is the astonishing amount of poetry it inspired. Some of the finest English war poetry ever produced was written between 1914 and 1918,” from Introduction, p. 7, and “1914—Into Battle,” p. 8.

2. “His war poems, a body of work composed between January 1917, when he was sent to the Western Front, and November 1918, when he was killed, seem to me certainly the finest written by any English poet of the First War and probably the greatest poems about war in our literature.” See The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, C. Day Lewis (ed.), London: Chatto & Windus, 1972 (first edition, 1963), Introduction, p. 11.

3. Writing of Ungaretti's first collection of poetry, Il porto sepolto, containing the first of his war poems, Carlo Ossola has written: “… l'opera s'impose subito nella sua fulminea essenzialità, nella sua novità.” See Carlo Ossola (ed.), Giuseppe Ungaretti, Il porto sepolto, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1981, Introduction, p. ix.

4. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, cit., pp. 35-36.

5. Giuseppe Ungaretti, Il porto sepolto, cit., p. 44.

6. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, cit., p. 35; vv. 9-10.

7. Il porto sepolto, cit., p. 44; vv. 5-6, 8, 9, 12, 13 & 16.

8. Ibid.

9. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, op. cit., p. 31. The text of the Preface then continues: “That is why the true Poets must be truthful. (If I thought the letter of this book would last, I might have used proper names; but if the spirit of it survives—survives Prussia—my and those names will have achieved themselves fresher fields than Flanders …).”

10. Ibid., p. 35; vv. 14-21.

11. Ibid., pp. 35-36; vv. 22-29 & 34-38.

12. The Freudian ego is the immediate motivator/inhibitor of the self's actions: “It has the task of self-preservation […]. The ego strives after pleasure and seeks to avoid unpleasure,” while the superego, on the other hand, represents the cultural programming that feeds into the self in an interactive relationship explained, by Freud, in familial terms: “The details of the relation between the ego end the super-ego become completely intelligible when they are traced back to the child's attitude to its parents. This parental influence of course includes in its operation not only the personalities of the actual parents but also the family, racial and national traditions handed down through them, as well as the demands of the social milieu which they represent. In the same way, of course, the super-ego, in the course of an individual's development, receives contributions from later successors and substitutes of his parents, such as teachers and models in public life of admired social ideals.” See An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Sigmund Freud translated by James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press & the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1969 (first edition 1940), pp. 2 & 3.

13. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, cit., pp. 35-36, vv. 3, 8, 10, 12, 13, 38.

14. This love is symbolized internally by the reciprocal brotherliness of the two protagonists, the English and the German soldier, while the poem, seen externally, as it was, symbolizes the poet's dedication to (his love of), the art of poetry.

15. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, cit., p. 35; vv. 30-31.

16. The Works of Jacques Lacan, Bice Benvenuto & Roger Kennedy, London: Free Association Books, 1988 (first edition 1986), p. 49. Apropos of Freud's own definitions, see footnote 12.

17. Il porto sepolto, cit., p. 44; vv. 8-11.

18. Vita d'un uomo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Milan: Mondadori, 1990 (first edition, 1969), p. 518.

19. Ibid, pp. 520-21.

20. The poem's pre-Christmas date of composition—“Cima 4 il 23 dicembre 1915” (Il porto sepolto, cit., p. 44)—may well be seen as contributing to reinforcing latent ideas of (re)birth, hope and deliverance, though this fact alone does not seem crucial to identifying and fruitfully discussing the poem's life affirming leitmotif. Certainly, Ungaretti, it must be acknowledged, was a poet of (at this stage syncopated) religious sensibility as another epigrammatic poem written less than a year later indicates: “Chiuso fra cose mortali / (anche il gran cielo stellato finirà) / perché bramo Dio?” (“Dannazione”—“Mariano il 29 Giugno 1916,” Il porto sepolto, cit., p. 95). However, while it seems reasonable to surmise that the particular date's coincidence—for it cannot objectively be established as anything more than that—may well have been of allusive significance to Ungaretti, we are still bound to note that, ultimately, it simply fits the pattern in which all his war poems contain specific dates and place names (in Vita d'un uomo as subtitles appearing directly below the main title but located at the end of the poems in the cited volume, Il porto sepolto). To conclude, it seems indisputable that had Ungaretti desired to give his poem's conclusion, an overt religious significance he could easily have dated it the 25th of December. Evidently, the date's relevance was factual rather than inferably symbolical.