The Inadequacy of Language in Graves' "Recalling War"

Nadine Cohen (September 27, 1999): English 354/Finley

(See peer comments by Liz Claessens)

The great limitations of language are never more fully realized than in the description of

excruciating trauma. It is this sense which is most brutally exposed in the work of the

poets of the Great War; their utter incompasity to comprehend the devastation, as well as

their further inadequacy in passing on their experience through the simple and capacitating

medium of language is the soul of much war poetry. Robert Graves gives voice to this

frustration in his poem, "Recalling War," in which he predicts coming indifference as a

result of his generationsí unavoidable inability to capture the absolute destruction of war

through literature.

"Recalling War" itself is a testament to the fact that prose and imagery, however inspired,

are simply incapable of expressing what is essentially expressionless. For Graves, the

outright ridiculousness of the Great War can only begin to be voiced through the use of

irony. For him, in fact, this is not necessarily a literary technique--the grotesque

foolishness of the war simply is ironic. For this reason, the over-analyzation of "Recalling

War" is circumspect. In one sense, such purely literal analysis only serves to incapacitate

the poet further by exposing the inadequacies of literary technique and language. Still,

Graves' irony is brilliant and deserves mention, if only to observe him for a moment

nakedly, as a Poet rather than a War Poet. Graves uses contrast- invoking total extremes

and utter opposites- in order to give some perspective to the absolute enormity of the irony

of war experience. The notion of Death is especially susceptible to this form of literary

expression: "For Death was young again: patron alone of healthy dying, premature fate-

spasm." Through the contrasts of Death and youth, health and dying, Graves portrays the

sheer absurdness of senseless slaughter. It is only through irony that the ridiculous can

begin to be understood, and Graves employs it masterfully.

Despite the literary merit, to dwell much longer on the actual literature of "Recalling War"

would be to lose its message completely. For it is exactly this language, this haunting

irony and painfully breathtaking imagery, which Graves asserts to be wholly inadequate.

For, despite the valiant effort of the poet, the wounds of war are ineradicable:

The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood,

The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm.

The blinded man sees with his ears and hands

As much or more than once with both his eyes.

In the end, despite the magnitude of the Great War and its aftermath, and despite the

personal, life-changing devastations accepted by Graves and those of the same generation,

the war is one day reduced to mere recollection:

A sight to be recalled in elder days

When learnedly the future we devote

To yet more boastful visions of despair.

Not only does the poetry of the Great War then fail to describe the indescribable, but also,

according to Graves, it is unable even to arouse a basic reaction in humanity which would

ensure that such barbaric foolishness erases itself from human experience.

The most fundamental irony of the Great War, then, is that in its passionate outburst of

impetuous aggression it rendered, and continues to render, everyone and everything

associated with it absolutely impotent. The survivors attempting to recall, the writers

wishing to express, and finally, even the readers wanting to understand are all ultimately

paralyzed by its magnitude. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of war poetry is that, by its

very definition, it is destined for failure. If language is helplessly limited--and even the

vivid, meaningful language of Graves is--then the poet can never truly express the cruelties

of their own experience, and, in turn, they must pass their own impotence onto the reader.

For it is the modern reader of poetry who must now struggle with the inadequacy of

language when trying to understand the agony of the war poet; and in this attempt, the

realization ultimately comes that the reader is as hopelessly unable to understand the

experience as the poet is to write about it. In the end, it is this shared sense of utter

inadequacy and helpless impotence that unites poet and reader.