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The Beauty of Ugliness

August 4, 2007 on 3:34 am | In Poetry, Uncategorized | No Comments

Many years ago when I was still at Ball State University, I found myself in a debate, as only English students who roam and spend enormous amounts of time in the halls of the English department can, over the idea of beauty in poetry. I was the odd man out, arguing for the importance of beauty in poetry. In fact, I was rather adamant and stubborn about it. Traits which have not dissipated over time, I’m afraid.

Some may have already cringed at the very word “beauty.” I will not retreat from it. But I will not limit “beauty” either. The primary argument I recall from that class against the importance of beauty in poetry was that beauty cannot capture the very real ugliness of living that living often is. That by insisting on beauty in poetry, I was ignoring the reality of life. I did not frame my counter-argument well at that time (and I may not do so now), but it essentially was, “Beauty in the sense you are using it is narrow.” My argument was not to lift up a beauty that only described, imagined, or conjured the everyday beautiful that is so often associated with the word: beautiful flowers, beautiful sunset, etc. My use of “beauty” included that very concept, but it was more than that. Poetry, I suggested, was words, phrases, rhythm, and phonemes first and foremost, and THAT is what should be beautiful. The subject matter, the imagery, and so on need not be beautiful.

My primary example was Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” This is a poem of the utmost beauty in its language, in its rhythms, in its construction. It is a poem of awful horror and ugliness in its description and imagery. For those of you unfamiliar with this vital English poet, Owen joined the infantry in 1915. He suffered severe shell shock and was hospitalized for a time, meeting Siegfried Sassoon. After recuperating, Owen returned to France and the front. He was killed leading his platoon across the river a mere week prior to the armistice. Prior to the war, Owen was a minor poet writing in a decidely Georgian manner. The war changed him (as one would expect it too) and his poetry forever. Here is “Dulce et Decorum Est”:

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 disappointed shells that dropped 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 floundering 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 my 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 writhing 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 with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The Latin translates literally to “It is sweet and right/honorable, to die for your fatherland.”

I doubt anyone could make a successful case that this poem is beautiful based on its imagery or theme. What is beautiful, however, is the poem. The consonance, assonance, rhythm, and sounds are wonderful. The poem moves and strikes with its wordplay. Remove the “meaning” of the images, and just listen to the sounds, to the rhythm, and you will understand how this poem is beautiful.

My last point in that class, which today I am convinced I failed successfully to argue, was that because Owen wrote such an awful and ugly theme into a poem with beauty, he enhanced the horror and ugliness of the topic. In other words, he used beauty to shame horror beyond simply the normal horror one would feel at a gas attack. He took an ugly event and framed it in such beauty as to heighten and horrify further that awfulness. This is a master poem by a poet made a master through the terror and blood and mud of the Western Front.