Poem as Parable: Wilfred Owen’s Harsh Lesson

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

The story of how Abraham, in obedience to a direct command from God, nearly sacrifices his first-born son, Isaac, is one of the most perfectly written short narratives in the Old Testament. Parables teach a lesson, and Wilfred Owen takes his place among Aesop, Confucius and Plato in the canon of education via his “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” He keeps close to the Old Testament story, but takes a twist. This poem-length allusion receives an entirely unexpected ending, proclaiming disgust with war.

The war paralleling this poem is World War I, once given the moniker, “The Great War.” War, great? Not at all – “great” merely connotes “large.” Consider the gravity of the poem’s final line, when “half the seed of Europe, one by one” is destroyed. Seed, of course, a euphemism for ejaculate, represents millions and millions of lives. Human ejaculate contains anywhere from 180-400 million sperm. Estimates tally the total number of military casualties from World War I at 37.5 million overall, the United Kingdom at 1.6 million alone – Owen among them. The most bitter irony of all, the editor notes, is that Owen was killed in the final days of battle.

Owen himself was first-born, and the third line of this poem, “And as they sojourned both of them together,” implies that fathers walk with their sons into battle. Father Abraham sends his son to the sacrificial table and the son trusts enough to believe he will return home safely – a belief that becomes a horrible judgment error. The sacrificial allusion itself brings the entire Abraham story to mind, as Isaac’s birth came as both a joy and a surprise, with Abraham elderly, and Sarah beyond childbearing years. The name Isaac, roughly translated, is “he laughs,” and hearkens Abraham’s wife’s disbelieving guffaw when told she will give birth at her advanced age. Isaac, the solitary sacrificial lamb poetically representing millions of sons, rings a hollow laugh in Owen’s version.

The parable begins with images of “fire and iron,” whereas Abraham’s implements are simply fire, wood and a knife. Owen’s modernizing tactics become increasingly clear, with the anachronism of “iron” and images of tanks and cannon blasts. The Old Testament Isaac was merely bound to the pyre, but Owen’s Isaac is bound by modern battle-like adjectives, “straps and belts,” and then, unmistakably, “parapets and trenches” to create the funeral pyre. Staying true to the original plot, Owen continues with the angel’s stay of execution. His heavenly “angel” is lowercase, yet capitalization emphasizes the symbolic “Ram of Pride.” A capitalized Angel would perhaps pull more weight, but Owen’s Abraham does not take the free pass. In an ironic twist, Abraham here does what his Old Testament counterpart does not. One son sacrificed for the good of all stays in both the Old Testament and the New, but not here.

Owen is concerned both with the tragedy of war and with its bitter irony. How much less it would cost a leader to slaughter a single Ram of Pride instead of millions of young men “one by one.” The poem reveals the sheer ridiculousness of arrogant militarism. The Genesis story has no such moral. It ends with the Angel promising Abraham that his seed, multiplying like stars and sand grains, will “possess the gates of his enemies.” Its subject is the nation’s dream of victory; not pitying war but winking at its deceptive glory. Good war poetry, whether by Homer, Melville or Owen, conveys authenticity and guarantees its integrity by raw images and rough-hewn reportage. Owen gives us raw and rough-hewn, but in this poem he stands back from his subject matter: he is here to preach, and his matter is serious and specific. [The Ram of] Pride goeth before a fall, the hubristic idiom recalls, and the fall of millions in war begins with one blade stroke. Such loss, at such cost.