Until the unendurable moment struck-
The inward scream, the duty to run mad.
The last verse of Graves’ poem returns to the ideas explored in the first stanza. The poet’s voice is ironic as he uses images from childhood to describe the terrifying war he displayed the previous verses. “And we recall the merry ways of guns-”, the images make war sound child-like and unreal, the word “recall” reminds the reader of the poem’s title “Recalling War”. It has the effect of almost silently posing the question, ‘is this how war should be recalled?’ The answer is of course evident having read the previous stanzas, and the final lines of the poem just serve to confirm the reader’s conclusions:
When learnedly the future we devote
To yet more boastful visions of despair
This is a warning from Graves. He argues that our future will be filled with the “despair” that his generation experienced if the horror and brutalities are not remembered. Graves has used a wide variety of imagery to create a complete picture of various stages that the soldier experiences while at war, a powerful sequence of emotions that illustrate not only the damage war does and the painful memories it creates, but the damage which can be done if these memories are forgotten or blurred. This contrasts directly with Owen’s poem that seeks to describe the damage done by war when it is not forgotten.
Both poets discuss the scars that war leaves, both physically and mentally. Graves’ poem is very much a detached reflection on war, focusing on before, during and after effects of a battle in order to argue the point that war should not be forgotten. The immediate effect of war is very powerfully described, but the long term scars are claimed to be forgettable and “silvered clean”, a strong contrast with Owen’s view. Owen’s poem portrays the very personal effects war has, he describes people whom he has met. Indeed as a poet who spent some of the war in a mental institution for soldiers called Craiglockhart, it is amazing that he is as detached as he is, considering he could well have been described as a ‘mental case’ himself, as he suffered from shell shock and nightmares.. Owen’s portrayal is gruesome and shocking, finally concluding by laying the responsibility for the madness at the feet of the reader and poet. This poem, not only demonstrates Owen’s view of the scars war leaves on people, it also serves as a useful insight into the way in which Owen was scarred by war. He clearly feels guilty at his survival, and he too is haunted by the images of the dead that he describes, how else could they be so vivid? This is perhaps the most interesting aspect revealed by Owen’s poem, the scars left by war on a real human with the ability to express and communicate the damage in such a way that the reader is not only shocked, but greatly moved. The poem has its intensity because Owen was writing it while in direct contact with the ‘mental cases’ whereas Graves is more distant as well as describing the memories of war. A poem which describes an inability to remember is far less disturbing than a poem which describes not being able to forget.
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