In Stanza two, the action focuses on one man who couldn’t get his gas helmet on in time. Lines 12-14 consist of a powerful underwater metaphor, with succumbing to poison gas being compared to drowning in a “green sea”(14). “Flound’ring”(12) is what they’re already doing (in the mud) but here it takes on more gruesome implications as Owen introduces himself into the action through witnessing his comrade dying in agony.
From straight description Owen looks back from a new perspective in the light of a recurring nightmare. Those “haunting flares”(3) in stanza one foreshadowed a more terrible haunting in which a friend, dying, “plunges at me”(16) before “my helpless sight”(15), an image Owen will not forget. Owen experiences a “feeling of anguished responsibility” (Kerr, p.41). “The face was a projection of his own imagination and unspoken urges, arousing guilt, fear, and helplessness” (Kerr, p.226).
Another aspect again marks Stanza four. Owen attacks those people at home who uphold the war’s continuance unaware of its realities. If only they might experience Owen’s own “smothering dreams”(17) which replicate in small measure the victim’s sufferings. Those sufferings Owen goes on to describe in sickening detail. One can almost feel the panic that causes a dying man to be “flung”(18) into a wagon, the “writhing”(19) that denotes an especially virulent kind of pain. Hell seems close at hand with the debauched simile “like a devil’s sick of sin”(20). Then that “jolt”(21) intensifies the agony. Lane is critical of this last stanza; he feels “sense of uneasiness at the unrelenting piling up of horrific images”
Some tongues were anything but “innocent”(24) in Owen’s opinion. His appeal to “my friend”(25) is doubtless ironic, whose adopted creed, the sweetness of dying for one’s country he denounces as a lie, which children should never be exposed to, just as the gas should never be exposed to the young men, some of them children in their own right. There is only one antidote to poison and madness. The soldier’s body is ruined, his lungs “froth-corrupted”, because of the lies he has ardently imbibed. The only way to stop the ruin of countless bodies is by stopping corruption at its verbal source, “the old lie”, which is why the true poet must be truthful. (Kerr, p.97)
In the definition of a mirror in the introduction, one keyword was ‘faithfully’. A point that should be made about the poetry acting as a mirror and mirrors in general is that everything depends on the individual, culture orhttp://www.sitesofconscience.org/ nation looking into the mirror. The reflection of the mirror can be interpreted in many ways. And so the significance of the poem may not be a faithful conclusion, but one that is open to discussion. The words on the page do not change and the image in the mirror is constant, it is the reader and the individual who comes to the mirror and the poem with his or her own ideas and experiences that shapes the sense of a poem.
Although the poetry may create a mirror that does not lie, it is the cultures or countries that must decide if they want to take into account what the meaning of the poem is. Do they want to change in the light of the revelation that poetry has the power to make? It is the responsibility of the artists; in this case the poets to present the truth as they see it. However the greater burden lies upon the reader or the public. They must analyse the poems, whilst firstly keeping in mind the biases of the poet and secondly realising that they too have a predisposition and are subjective. Only then can they reach some kind of objectivity and only then can they attain some sort of truth, which is the primary purpose of a mirror.
Works Cited: http://www.sitesofconscience.org/en/home/
