Purgatorial Passions: “The Ghost” (aka Wilfred Owen) in Owen’s Poetry

Abstract

A young man writhes on a humble cot, the darkness lying heavy, smothering him. In his mind’s eye a horse-drawn cart rumbles along a broken road. A heavy object strikes one horse and both bolt. Two figures catapult from the cart, one falling beneath the rear wheel, blood smearing the face. The wheel spins, inducing nausea in the sleeper, and then it is a bicycle wheel, dangling and bent, and seen from muddy clay. A fresh-dug grave sinks into the mud and the young man stands at its edge, scorning and mocking, and stabbing at the putrid air, as the words of his creed hang in it. As he falls forward, gray Gorgon-faced despair clutches at him … The sleeper cries out and sits bolt upright. His heart runs fast and irregularly, his dark eyes shrink back in his head. Shadowy phantasms swirl around him, bearing crosses, fingering his hair. He screams but nothing comes out and he chokes. His arm shoots up to ward off these ghosts, but he is thrown off balance, and falls to the floor, seeing nothing.

“They call me The Ghost, (which is a point in favour of their latent imaginations).”

Wilfred Owen, Letter to his mother, 28 September 1918 (Letters 579)