Formal Subversion in Wilfred Owen's "Hospital Barge"

Wilfred Owen's sonnet "Hospital Barge," although one of only four poems published in his lifetime (1893-1918), has received virtually no critical attention and, when noticed, is slightly regarded. Yet its theme— that poetry has traditionally falsified the realities of war and thus promulgated war itself— is also the theme of Owen's best-known poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est," and both poems employ a similar technique to convey this theme: the ironic use of a Romantic, aureate language. But, where "Dulce et Decorum Est" clearly juxtaposes such language with the harsh realities of combat, "Hospital Barge" is more subtle, and this subtlety has led readers to regard the poem as copying a debased poetic mode. Owen turns that mode against itself, though, ironically couching, within its own masking language, a vision of the truth that mode has in the past been able to conceal.