Today’s Poem: Hospital Barge at Cérisy

The doctor poet Amit Majmudar examines the trauma of Wilfred Owen

Hospital barge with nurses, World War I (Wikimedia Commons)

Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist, as well as a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. Formerly the inaugural poet laureate of Ohio, Majmudar is the author of twenty books, including most recently a poetry collection, What He Did in Solitary, and a memoir, Twin A. When his thoughts turned to a consideration of the First World War poet Wilfred Owen (whose birthday was yesterday, March 18), Poems Ancient and Modern invited him to discuss a lesser-known poem by Owen. 

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Amit Majmudar writes: 

In a letter of May 10, 1917, Wilfred Owen wrote home of an experience during his convalescence in France, after a stint in the trenches:

I sailed in a steam-tug about 6 miles down the Canal with another “inmate”. The heat of the afternoon was Augustan; and it has probably added another year to my old age to have been able to escape marching in equipment under such a sun. The scenery was such as I never saw or dreamed of since I read the Fairie Queene. Just in the Winter when I woke up lying on the burning cold snow I fancied I must have died and been pitch-forked into the Wrong Place, so, yesterday, it was not more difficult to imagine that my dusky barge was wending up to Avalon, and the peace of Arthur, and where Lancelot heals him of his grievous wound.

The version of the Athurian legends he was reading was Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. The musicality of Owen’s sonnet, particularly its last lines, has the density and euphony of Tennyson — just read Owen’s lines “How unto Avalon, in agony, / Kings passed in the dark barge, which Merlin dreamed.” This word-music has a lineage that goes back to Owen’s own master and model (both in style and in early death), John Keats.

In September of the next year, Owen passed on foot the same spot along the water where he got the inspiration for this sonnet. Two months later, a bullet would hit him while he was helping his men fix some planks to the earth along a different canal, the Sambre-Oise Canal. We can imagine his having a similar reminiscence again in the moments before a German bullet found him beside that canal — killing him just one week before the Armistice was signed.

Wilfred Owen (Wikimedia Commons)

A well-described symptom of anxiety disorders (such as post-traumatic stress disorder) is depersonalization, that is, the feeling that you are seeing yourself from outside your body. The octet of the sonnet has Owen where he actually was, on the hospital barge. Notice, though, that the sestet adopts the perspective of someone on the bank of the canal. That turn, the volta of the sonnet, marks the moment of depersonalization. The “scream” of the funnel triggers a further stress response: derealization, the detachment of the self not just from itself but from its actual surroundings.

Avalon, the paradise for dead heroes of Arthurian legend, is the unreality toward which the poem moves westward (away from the front lines) so beautifully. The Arthurian storybook world has an unreality twice as poignant because it juxtaposes chivalric, courtly, one-on-one combat with the first line’s mention of the anonymous mass slaughter of the Somme — the river’s name (mentioned in the first line) commandeered ever since to name one of the bloodiest battles of all time.

That last couplet appeals intensely not just to the poet in me but also to the physician. I admire Owen even more for embodying all this wisdom, quite naturally, in a traditional sonnet. I suspect he did this, as great poets usually do, instinctively. “Hospital Barge at Cérisy” is one of the most underrated poems in Owen’s brilliant, but all too slender, collected work because of this astute, real-time enactment of the psychology of trauma.

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Hospital Barge at Cérisy

by Wilfred Owen

Budging the sluggard ripples of the Somme,
A barge round old Cérisy slowly slewed.
Softly her engines down the current screwed,
And chuckled softly with contented hum,
Till fairy tinklings struck their croonings dumb.
The waters rumpling at the stern subdued;
The lock-gate took her bulging amplitude;
Gently from out the gurgling lock she swum.

One reading by that calm bank shaded eyes
To watch her lessening westward quietly.
Then, as she neared the bend, her funnel screamed.
And that long lamentation made him wise
How unto Avalon, in agony,
Kings passed in the dark barge, which Merlin dreamed.

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