in memorium

I expect most of you already know that Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. I love Vonnegut, but I didn't discover him until my senior year of High School, when I took a class called "Contemporary Literature," with the most extraordinary of my exceptional slate of High School English teachers. (Ms. Keys is the woman responsible for teaching me how to close-read Shakespeare, and I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude.) I don't remember anything about the second half of the class, but in the first half we read All Quiet on the Western Front, "The Things They Carried," the British War Poets, and Slaughterhouse-Five. It was amazingly devastating, and glorious. It was also perhaps my first experience with a collection of literature centered on a theme, and it left a very lasting impression. I fell in love with Vonnegut. I also fell in love with the British War Poets, and I can't help thinking of them today.

So, then, a poem by Wilfred Owen:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell me with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

~Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est, 1917.

Vonnegut is a lot funnier. Still, there's something about this poem - context, at least, and Owen's extraordinary use of imagery and language, not so different from Vonnegut's after all - that will always make me think of Vonnegut. And, I suppose, parts of the gestation of myself as a literary scholar.