~ Sceopellen ~

I cannot believe that no-one has noticed, in any of the criticisms I have read on Wilfred Owen, the distinct difference between his first draft of ‘Mental Cases’, which can be seen at the Oxford Libraries, and the final version which has proliferated the web. I even searched for the text of the original, and absolutely NOTHING appeared. I am disappointed with the intellectual standard of the internet!

Thus, I must remedy the situation:

Mental Cases: May, 1918; Rippon, England

O darkness and smell of many deaths murmurs of deaths
O silence and ceasing of breaths

terrible tremble terror

O sorrow and horror of murdered
Of multitudinous murder

murder

_____________________________

O darkness and murmurs of deaths
O silence and ceasing of many breaths
O terrible trembling of murdered men

the quick
sterile

O multitudinous murder!
O belching of blood from mouths

the lungs that loved laughter

made

O vomit of mud from the green

earth grown venemous

O spite of the earth that she

spawns dark diseases

new

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

O stalking and scorching of

shattering machine guns
deep

O bodies a buried in carcases
carcases bodies

and some writing some nothing

and

O carnage incomparable

Mental Cases: (date unclear)

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, — but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

— These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh
— Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
— Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

Personally, I get the sense that the first draft was written in rather more mental torment than the completed version. I can imagine him sitting in a white-sheeted bed, furiously writing down the images from a nightmare or recollection, and spring out in a near-biblical “O’ manner. It’s beautiful, in a rather frightening way.

UPDATE:

I discovered this when browsing the internet: