ok now that you've mentioned it i reaaaally want to know how wilfred owen truly Got virgil, i would be so so interested in that, if you have the time to tell me about it!!!
oh i have no like academic stuff to back this up with it’s just something i think about A Lot...... the first vergil i ever read was aeneid 9 and nisus has this line like “the glory of the deed is enough for me” which was Major “children ardent for some desperate glory” moods. then this year we did aeneid 10 which is. we were thinking a lot about vergil’s attitude towards war in the poem and did this practice essay that was smth like “does vergil more justify or condemn war in book 10″ and like...... it’s not really Either so much as he Pities the Cost of war. “war and the pity of war, the poetry is in the pity”, like wilfred owen in the foreword to his book!
and then as we kept doing aeneid 10 there were a Whole Bunch of other things that were big wilfred owen moods. (i know this is Reversed and it’s wilfred owen who has Aeneid moods but. h) like i think Pity is a big emotion throughout the aeneid but it’s in the battle scenes especially, and with the focus on the victims of war And Also Their Families!!! and pallas and lausus to whom fate denies a homecoming, the young soldiers doomed for the sake of fate/the gods/rome’s destiny, either way a higher force that they have no control over!!! the archetype of the doomed twink!!
maybe im just noticing a bunch of Similarities between them? or maybe wilfred owen was like. actually influenced by vergil in more places than are Thought. so far i’ve only seen Two things in wilfred owen that Other People have said are big vergil moods: the poem ‘arms and the boy’ which quite obviously Is, and the line “when much blood had clogged their chariot wheels” in strange meeting maybe picking up on 6.87 “et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno” (and i see the tiber foaming with much blood). but there is! more! i probably need to reread the aeneid and also wilfred owen but off the top of my head:
“like a purple flower severed by the plow; / he fainted into death, like a poppy bending / its weary neck when rain weighs down its head.” (9.435-7) and “the front line withers, / but they are troops who fade, not flowers / for poets’ tearful fooling” (insensibility) (but i could talk about that flower image A Lot bcs. other big things are going on there!!!)
“he touched the enemy earth with gory lips” (10.489) and “til slowly lowered, his whole face kissed the mud” (the last laugh)
“pallas, evander, everything was before his very eyes” (10.515-6) and “in all my dreams before my helpless sight” (dulce et decorum est)
“the goddess draped her head / in a grey veil and plunged into the river” (12.885-6) and “the pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall” (anthem for doomed youth)
