Blunden and the Prophetic Potentiality of "Yet" in "Preparations for Victory"

Jean Otsuki (September 27, 1999)

(See peer comments by Ada Palmer)

In "Preparations for Victory,î"Edmund Blunden commences by disassociating himself from his body and soul in an attempt to disown his fear of death. In apostrophes, Blunden commands his soul to "dread not the pestilence that hags / The valley" (2-3) and orders his body to "flinch not . . . / At these great shouting smokes and snarling jags / of fiery iron." (2-4) By addressing his body and soul as if they were entities outside of himself and reprimanding them for his dread of mortality, the poet attempts to distinguish himself as the omniscient speaker of brave lines: in control and unafraid.

However, Blunden's recurrent use of the word "yet" in his first two stanzas reveals his inability to detach himself from the fear that he attributes to his body and soul. The poet's plea for his body and soul to maintain hope in their survival consists of an acknowledgement that "as yet may not be flung / The dice that claims [them]." (4-5) Blundenís recognition of the randomness of destiny certainly figures less as an exemplary avowal of life than it does as an apprehension of mortality. Further, whereas the poet gestures his soul to look to the "gardens" (7) of undamaged pastoral to gain reassurance that the war has not destroyed all, his evocation of a house "yet unshattered by a shell" (9) points more poignantly to the pastoral's imminent destruction than it does to its current intactness. Thus, the soul's allusion to the "yet unmurdered tree" (11) does not express an alien sentiment of fear that the poet might rightfully rebuke: rather, it echoes the haunted foreshadowing that repeatedly resonates in the poet's own voice. Consequently, when his soul admits an inability to look upon the vestiges of the pre-war pastoral without this preoccupation with its imminent destruction since "yet [he sees] them not as [he] would see," (13) he describes his fateful vision as cogently as that of the poet.

Blunden's reliance on negative words such as "unshattered" and "unmurdered" reveals an obsession with what he envisions rather than what he currently sees, and his insistence on the word ìyetî indicates his belief in the imminence of these prophecies. However, the poet never counters the scenarios of potential disaster that follow these fateful ìyetîs with any efforts to ward off, or even to alleviate, the impending destruction, for like the tree and the house that are powerless to resist the approaching apocalypse, the poet, as well as the rest of mankind, lack agency against the calamity of war. In fact, the imperative "look" that Blunden repeats twice in this poem indicates the only thing that one is able to do: to regard the horrors of war while passively awaiting imminent death.

In the third stanza, the "yets" disappear as this apocalypse arrives, for the fulfillment of the horror eradicates the need for the poet's prophecies. The war surges forward as all that the first two stanzas anticipates finally occurs. Life is reduced to a diminishing series of pictures as the war consumes the poetís body, soul, and voice, as well as all other forms of being, into one universal "we"(20): despairing in its impotency, but necessarily unresisting in its powerlessness. Similarly, the valley is no longer separate from the pestilence: instead, it collapses into the pestilence, for now, "earth, air are foes."(26) Thus, Blunden's "preparations for victory" are neither preparatory nor approaching vanquish: instead, mankind and anything alive must passively accept the coming destruction from which there is no chance for escape.