Fluent Essays

what is the center of the earth? Module 01 Content 1. Top of Form Write a 2-page elements of fiction essay on one of the short stories, or the poem, from the assigned readings for Module 01. Explain the following in your paper: · Key historical events which influenced the piece: Expand on how the key historical events influenced the plot and theme. · Setting: Why is the setting important to the story? (The setting is where the story takes place). · Theme: What is the major theme or idea of the story? Here are some examples of themes you might find in literature: loss of innocence, love, loss, grief, man vs. nature, man vs. technology, death, old-age, coming of age, alienation, overcoming the odds, a hero’s quest, etc. Note: The theme of a work of fiction is different from the plot—the plot tells you the sequence of events or what happened. The theme tells you the main lesson or message of the narrative. It is the main point that the author wants you to understand from reading the short story, poem, or novel. · Also, select one of the terms to include in your story analysis from Literary Terms in this module (Allegory, Ambiguity, Antagonist, Archetype, Diction, Flashback, Foreshadowing, Protagonist, and Regionalism). Explain how this was used in the story, with examples and lines illustrating your claims. Use in-text citations where needed. Your paper must be written in APA format. Use the APA template from your Course Guide to complete this assignment. You should have an APA cover page; 2 full pages of essay text with in-text citations, quotes, and lines from the readings; and a References page. No additional resources other than the assigned readings are required; however, you may want to include additional resources from the Rasmussen library. All papers are to be written in Times New Roman 12 pt. font and be double-spaced. Rasmussens Library and Learning Services team has developed a LIT3382 Modern World Literature Course Guide with links to resources to help support students academic endeavors. To help you in writing a literary analysis, you will find a link to the Literary Analysis Guide in the Module 01 tab of the Course Guide. The Writing Guide and APA Guide may also assist you with the writing requirements. You can access the course guide in your Module 01 course tab. Bottom of Form There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die? George Borrow, Lavengro, Chapter xxv1 Though here there are some patients very seriously ill, the fear and horror of madness that I used to have has already lessened a great deal. And though here you continually hear terrible cries and howls like beasts in a menagerie, in spite of that people get to know each other very well and help each other when their attacks come on. Vincent Van Gogh, May 2 On the morning of Monday 25 June, Wilfred Owen left Netley and took the train to London. Arriving after lunchtime, he had an afternoon as a gentleman of leisure, shopping and gallery- going, spending his officer’s pay. Even at Dunsden, he had rarely had the time or the money to pop up to Town for an afternoon of self- indulgence. Nonetheless, his description of his afternoon in London shows that, had he so wished, he could have written the kind of very English social comedy, revolving around class, clothes, cream teas, chatter and curates, that would be mastered by his fellow Oswestrian, the novelist Barbara Pym (born in Oswestry in 1913, she was, like Owen, the grandchild of c h a p t e r   Brock’s Folk 4227.indd 1794227.indd 179 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 4 . Y a l e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w . EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY AN: 675800 ; Cuthbertson, Guy.; Wilfred Owen Account: s9076023.main.ehost 180 W I L F R E D OW E N a successful Oswestry ironmonger, which must be the perfect background for a study of the class system): I had tea at the Shamrock Tea Rooms, perhaps the most eminently respectable exclusive and secluded in Town. There was the usual deaf old lady and her Companion holding forth upon the new curate. I happen to know that a few stories higher in the same building is an Opium Den. I have not investigated. But I know. That’s London. I met few faces I knew. But Strolling down New Bond Street, I ran into the last person on earth or under the earth that I wished to meet: Major, now Colonel, Dempster, of the 2nd Battalion. We stopped, of course, and he pretended to be very affable and cordial. Yet I know a more thorough- bred Snob does not exist – even in the imagination of Thackeray.3 Lieutenant- Colonel J. F. Dempster, who had taken charge of the 2nd Manchesters, might have been a horrid old snob, but, like the proper English gent, quite the Burlington Bertie, Owen happily had time to amble down to the shops of the West End, all a long way from Shrewsbury and Birkenhead. He had himself measured for new trou- sers at Pope and Bradley’s (specialists in dress clothes) and bought a new hat at Peter Robinson’s (Experts in the World of Fashion). He seems to have rather enjoyed his uniform, both as a symbol of his new gentlemanly status and simply as clothes to buy and try on and have cleaned and ironed and look handsome in. Perhaps this was a family matter, since his paternal grandfather was a tailor, although not the Mayfair kind: buying clothes was a form of self- improvement, and we can see the pleasure taken in them by a young man who had a shoe- maker great- grandfather and a tailor grandfather. His life could be told as a wardrobe of clothes – the sailor suit, the home- made Hussar’s uniform, a straw hat (subject of a dream he found most distressing in 1909),4 the rather Freudian slippers of 1912, the Norfolk jacket, the de rigueur evening suit at Dunsden, the teacher’s gown, the bow tie, French fashions (‘Monsieur Dubo through the intervention of some 4227.indd 1804227.indd 180 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B R O C K ’ S F O L K 181 friend, can get stuffs at Tailor’s Prices from Paris, and in fact a fine selection of Spring- Summer Patterns is in my room at present’),5 the cadet’s uniform, the officer’s uniform, and all the life- and- death fussing about socks and gloves and coats in the freezing trenches. His wartime letters are like a wardrobe of clothes, as are his poems – ‘his ghastly suit of grey, / Legless, sewn short at elbow’; ‘hardness of indifference, like a glove’; ‘Glory I cast away, as bridegrooms do / Their splendid garments’.6 Wearing the new hat and a new collar, he boarded the sleeper train to Edinburgh, taking a corner seat. His mother’s maiden name, Shaw, can be a Scottish name – the Irish playwright Bernard Shaw, whom Owen took an interest in, was descended from Highland Shaws – and in the Lowlands ‘shaw’ means ‘a small wood’; nonetheless, any Scottishness was a long way back and Owen was a foreigner to Scotland, a country he had known only at its border. In the train, he read some Israel Zangwill, an author who appealed to Owen’s belief that ‘the Jews are a delightful people, at home’;7 although it might have been another beloved people he was reading about, because if Zangwill mostly wrote about Jewish life, he also wrote Italian Fantasies (1910), which, by tackling Dante, Byron, Venice, and so on, would have attracted Italy- loving Owen. When he arrived in Edinburgh, he found that Craiglockhart War Hospital was a taste of Italy too, an ashlar Italianate Victorian pseudo- palazzo that had been a hydro, a health farm before the war, offering health- improving water treatments amid the hilly Midlothian landscape (Craiglockhart was at the green edge of Edinburgh). Its 160 officers were all suffering in different degrees from shell shock. The area had its literary connections. The Hydro had been adver- tised with a quotation from Marmion describing the view from the hills around it. But the strongest literary association was with Robert Louis Stevenson, and, although Stevenson had died in 1894, Owen was thrilled to be in the country of RLS. Stevenson, an Edinburgh man, holidayed in the countryside near Craiglockhart: at Colinton, where Stevenson’s grandfather lived and every sight and sound had conspired 4227.indd 1814227.indd 181 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 182 W I L F R E D OW E N ‘to feed a romantic imagination’,8 Owen met one of Stevenson’s child- hood friends; and he also got to know Lord Guthrie who lived nearby in Stevenson’s holiday home, Swanston Cottage, on the lower slopes of the Pentland Hills. While at Craiglockhart, Owen read St. Ives, Stevenson’s war novel, where Swanston Cottage is described as ‘a little quaint place of many rough- cast gables and grey roofs’ and a bit like ‘a rambling infinitesimal cathedral’.9 The poet Ivor Gurney, who arrived at another Edinburgh war hospital on 23 September 1917, was excited by the Stevenson associations too: ‘ There are many memories round this city, but the dearest to me are those of R. L. S., that friend of Everyman.’10 Stevenson was not only a friend of Everyman but an example, like Keats, of the connection between ill health and literary creativity – Keats and Stevenson conjured up realms of gold, not despite sickness but somehow because of it, in response to it, out of it. It was not until later in the year that Owen read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but that novel, although set in London, would have been an appropriate novel in Craiglockhart, which seemed like a scholarly and gentlemanly place by day but at night was filled with monstrous screams as, in nightmares, the men were sent back to the Front. In ‘Mental Cases’, Owen would describe men driven mad by murderous memories: ‘Memory fingers in their hair of murders, / Multitudinous murders they once witnessed’. Memories plagued those men who had experienced the war, especially at night when a man was at his most defenceless. But at first, in a Scottish summer of long days and little night, the light kept Owen awake at night, perhaps mercifully. On 1 July Owen described how he had noticed that it never grew quite dark all night, with daylight glim- mering through his window at two in the morning. Unable to sleep, he read W. J. Locke, possibly The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (better than Thomas Hardy, according to Owen), a breezy romantic novel about a wealthy historian and an uneducated eighteen- year- old girl who has escaped from a harem: ‘I have never experienced such an odd sensation in my life as a touch of Carlotta’s fresh young arms upon my face and the perfume of spring violets that emanated from her person. [. . .] She 4227.indd 1824227.indd 182 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B R O C K ’ S F O L K 183 has a child’s engaging way of rubbing herself up against one when she wants to be particularly ingratiating.’11 It is also a war novel in so far as one of the characters dies in the Boer War: ‘ “Dulce et decorum est. He died for his country,” said I.’12 ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (drafted at Craiglockhart in October) is the best- known description of Owen’s dreams, where the speaker describes how a man was caught in a gas attack, and how ‘In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning’: ‘some smothering dreams’ would stop the addressee from telling the ‘old Lie’. All the ‘ing’ words, 15 in 28 lines, serve to empha- sise that the trenches are still very much in the present, returning unin- vited and unwelcomed at night. At Craiglockhart, Owen had horrible dreams, often memories of the Front, but also those of a more civilian character, featuring shocking incidents like motor accidents. Owen was keen to point out that he had not ‘had a “breakdown”’ – ‘I am simply avoiding one’13 – and he had had nightmares before joining the forces, but breakdowns and madness haunted the hospital. The significance of the hospital’s location next to a mental hospital was not lost on the officers of Craiglockhart, nor on the locals who saw that the officers had to wear blue armbands at all times and concluded that the armbands indicated insanity. There was also a rumour that the men were victims of venereal disease. Many people disagreed with the idea of sending these shirkers on holiday rather than punishing them, but the officers were treated well, on the whole, by those inside and outside the hospital. It was indeed something of a holiday camp, and Owen called it a holiday in a letter to his father (a remark intended to annoy the old man perhaps) even if the weather was mostly terrible. Lieutenant J. H. Butlin, one of the patients who was there when Owen arrived, shows us the leisurely daily life: It is a magnificent hydro standing in palatial grounds fitted with all the comforts that man’s ingenuity can contrive. Swimming, baths, billiards, gardening, bowls, tennis, fret- work etc are some of the hobbies one is expected to take up. Personally I am thinking of 4227.indd 1834227.indd 183 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 184 W I L F R E D OW E N writing a book: provided one is in by six o’clock and conforms to a few simple rules life is a complete and glorious loaf. [. . .] Can you imagine me, my dear Basil, getting up and taking a swim before breakfast? Doing a little gardening and poultry farming after breakfast? Fretwork and photography after lunch? Viewing natural scenery after tea? Reading and writing after dinner and then to bed?14 Butlin played bridge every day, and, weather permitting, tennis; there was also golf. It was something of a Butlin’s holiday camp. For the day Owen arrived, Butlin’s diary simply says ‘Fine. Tennis in morning. Tea in Edinburgh. Slight rain after tea.’15 Owen was fortunate to be put in the care of a doctor whose interests and methods chimed so well with his own. A Scotsman born in 1879, the son of a poet and a farmer, Arthur Brock was a scholar interested in legends, history and folklore – ‘Somewhat of a crank’ – and he was a man of the great outdoors, which even his appearance seemed to suggest: he was ‘Very tall, thin, hunched up shoulders, big blue hands, very chilly looking, with a long peaked nose’, and his high- pitched squeaky voice was ‘suggestive of Arctic regions’.16 One who knew him recorded the doctor’s attitude to the patients at Craiglockhart: Full of energy. Pushed his patients out of bed in the dark cold mornings and marched them out for a walk before breakfast. Rumour has it that they bolted themselves into lavatories and bath- rooms, but he was wise to that. One officer boasted that if he lay flat under his bed, so that the untidy bed clothes hid him, as if he were an early riser, he escaped.17 Brock believed in ‘ergotherapy’, ‘the cure by functioning’ – a belief that men could return to normal through working,18 although the work was usually a form of leisure, with the soldiers making full use of the Hydro’s facilities. He sought the true employment of leisure – he didn’t want anyone simply ‘killing time’ – believing that shell- shock patients 4227.indd 1844227.indd 184 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B R O C K ’ S F O L K 185 were no longer part of normal life and needed to be reconnected with it. This could mean visiting Edinburgh’s urban poor or teaching in a local school or joining the Camera Club, but essentially Brock’s treat- ments were a form of primitivism or neo- paganism: he felt that modern life generally is damaging – the war was just an intensified version of the life that was already causing mental ill- health in the years before 1914. Underlying his work there was a belief in traditional ways of life (‘Primitive peoples know better’),19 and a preference for the countryside rather than the city: ‘Are not these horrors of war the last and culmi- nating terms in a series that begins in the infernos of our industrialized cities?’20 He held that ‘Our civilization has become a purely urban one; the city has forgotten the countryside from which it sprang’.21 The city disconnects men from normal life, as do modern inventions like the cinema, a feeling shared by another Craiglockhart doctor, W. H. R. Rivers, an anthropologist drawn to ‘primitive’ cultures, who considered it much better for soldiers to play golf ‘than to be perpetually immured in a picture house, or to parade Princes Street for the gratification of their own vanity’.22 Brock’s bracing morning walks were a way both of taking exercise and of getting back to the land; as he said, ‘let us give Nature a chance’.23 Even the names Brock and Rivers were suitably rural. The featureless, blasted Western Front, dominated by the machine gun, artillery and barbed wire, was the visual representation of the death of the countryside. Men were encouraged to work on local farms or grow vegetables in the Hydro grounds; there was a chicken- run under the trees; even ‘imaginative work’ should be ‘an organic outgrowth from life’.24 This was a nature cure, a Romantic belief in the country- side, an attitude found in the literary world (Wordsworthian, Ruskinian) transformed into psychiatry; it was akin to the ‘Back to the Land’ movements and circles of Owen’s time, all in their way blaming the modern world for unhappiness and ill health. Activities at Craiglockhart were expected to be practical and useful, as if in some primitive community – in July, Owen reported that he spent a morning beating out a plate of copper into a bowl. Owen was also keenly involved in the Field Club. In July, he contributed a report 4227.indd 1854227.indd 185 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 186 W I L F R E D OW E N on the creation of the Field Club to The Hydra, the Craiglockhart magazine: The following office- bearers were elected: – President, Capt. Brock; secretary, Mr. Chase. Recruits are wanted. Don’t wait to be pushed. ‘ The wind’s on the heath.’ [. . .] ‘Our broodings over the face of the earth, and the firmament, and the waters under the earth, will be quite primitive – without form, but, we hope, not void.’25 ‘ The wind’s on the heath’ was an allusion to a famous passage cele- brating the simple life in Lavengro, the book by George Borrow that Owen had read a few years previously, the story of an educated man who gets back to the primitive way of things by joining the gypsies. The passage in Borrow’s book declares, ‘Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?’, which could be taken as a response to Horace’s ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’. Borrow was another of the literary associations of the place, having lived in Edinburgh Castle because his father was in the army, and his time in Edinburgh is described in Lavengro with a characteristic eye for the natural world: ‘It was a beautiful Sunday evening, the rays of the descending sun were reflected redly from the grey walls of the castle, and from the black rocks on which it was founded.’26 Indeed, Brock encouraged the officers to learn about the history, geography and culture of the local area, and again there was in this a belief in local communities, working with the land, tradition and folk culture. In a sense, he wanted to make the men a little Scottish. This worked with Owen, in that when he wrote his well- known poem ‘Disabled’ about a Scottish soldier disabled by the war, he not only showed his sense of connection with Edinburgh – Owen may even have seen the physically damaged soldier as a version of his psychologically damaged self – but he adopted a mildly Scottish voice, as if writing in a refined Craiglockhartian accent: ‘Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts / He asked to join’. ‘Disabled’ is, equally, a poem worthy of Scottish Presbyterianism, in that lying, drinking, vanity, games and womanising are all punished: if the soldier hadn’t 4227.indd 1864227.indd 186 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B R O C K ’ S F O L K 187 been a sinner he wouldn’t have been punished with disability. The poem is suggested by a letter in which Owen claims, in a rather Keatsian moment, that ‘I am whatever and whoever I see while going down to Edinburgh on the tram: greengrocer, policeman, shopping lady, errand boy, paper- boy, blind man, crippled Tommy, bank- clerk, carter, all of these in half an hour’.27 Keats argued that the poet has no identity, and is continually informing and filling some other body. Yeats, too, held that a poet must assume the mask of some other self. Owen becomes Edinburgh, and while, elsewhere in his writing, the window can be a barrier, here it helps to make him part of Edinburgh, and the people he sees are Scottish. From an early stage in his career, Brock had been interested in national identity and belonging, themes that were emphasised by studying in Vienna and Berlin: ‘ To what extent should one become a German when one goes to Germany?’28 The emphasis was on ‘home’, a word that had acquired extra significance during the war. The war, like modern life, took men away from home, which meant not just a house but an organic community, the individual’s natural and proper environment. Brock was interested in Scotland’s Brownies, benevolent creatures from folklore who haunted houses and did the housework, and he was interested too in similar genii and house spirits in other countries. The belief in community stretched to believing in the tradi- tional family. In his book Health and Conduct, Brock discusses the gradual break- up of real home life before the war and the growing disharmony between mother and child, emphasising the need to regain harmony and end this modern dissociation between the child and its parents. Equally, modern life damaged men by not allowing them to become adults. He saw the ordinary progress of the individual’s life appeared to halt, and that he ceased to grow up or even fell back into childhood,29 and believed this childishness of his patients was caused partly by pre- war life, and partly by the war. The screaming patients at night in Craiglockhart were men infantilised, crying for their mothers or for the nurse as mother- substitute, afraid of the dark, even wetting the bed. 4227.indd 1874227.indd 187 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 188 W I L F R E D OW E N Although Brock complained about regression – the modern man’s feeling that he is safer when tied to his mother’s apron- strings, the desire to seek refuge in the past – his own beliefs too were essentially regressive, turning to a traditional way of life and a close connection with the land, which had, of course, been his own upbringing as a farm boy, and he was trying to send the men back to his own Scottish child- hood. Indeed, Craiglockhart could be seen as the return to childhood on a grand scale – not just because of the shell shock but also because of the treatments. Even model boats were made in a workshop for sailing competitions on Craiglockhart Pond, where a Model Yacht Regatta took Owen back to his childhood and he thought how his father would have liked to compete. No doubt it evoked memories of the Jardin Public too, where in the garden of boyhood he happily rescued the boats of the little boys around the pond. At Craiglockhart in August, the schooner Mystery was a popular winner in front of enthusiastic supporters. In this garden of boyhood, ‘this abode of bliss’,30 R. L. S, the schoolboy’s favourite, was the presiding genius. There was also a ban on sex. J. H. Butlin landed himself in trouble when he brought his girlfriend back to the hospital one evening: the commanding officer, finding them on a quiet bench, accused him of breaking the rules. ‘I learned afterwards that a few minutes before he found me, he came upon an officer who had brought up some harlot from Edinboro and was in the act of copulation with her.’31 The next day, he went to the officer’s room like a naughty boy called to the head- master’s study. Certainly, there was a boarding- school atmosphere (as with thirteen- year- old boys, the emphasis on exercise was an attempt to manage sexual energy as well as shell shock). It was also an atmosphere filled with legends and fairy tales. Brock was a classicist who frequently turned to myths and legends for guid- ance and exempla, and he also took a deep interest in Celtic or Scandinavian fairy tales and folklore. This too was an aspect of the regime that appealed to Owen. Given that one of Brock’s obsessions was the ‘Genius Loci – the soul of the place’32 as embodied by the Brownie, the Kobold, the Kelpie, and similar guardian spirits, we can 4227.indd 1884227.indd 188 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B R O C K ’ S F O L K 189 see Brock’s influence in Owen’s use of the spirits of places in three poems over the next six months: ‘Who is the god of Canongate?’ (‘Where is thy shrine, then, little god?’), Princes Street’s ‘Pale rain- flawed phantom of the place’ and ‘the ghost of Shadwell Stair’ (‘I am the shadow [. . .] I watch always’).33 Owen had long been interested in sprites and fairies, as he had shown in ‘A New Heaven’, and he had once turned two of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales into poetry. Indeed, in one of Owen’s most Craiglockhartian poems, ‘Disabled’, there is an echo of one of Andersen’s tales ‘ The Little Mermaid’, as if Brock’s fairy tales haunted Edinburgh; RLS, too, had seen Edinburgh as a ‘lamplit, vicious fairy land’. The disabled soldier (something of a spirit of the place) remembers the park ‘When glow- lamps budded in the light blue trees’ and in the mermaid’s garden beneath the sea, which is itself like a municipal park with carpet- bedding, there are ‘fiery red and deep blue trees, the fruit of which shone like gold [. . .] Everything was bathed in a wondrous blue light down there; you might more readily have supposed yourself to be high up in the air, with only the sky above and below you, than that you were at the bottom of the ocean.’34 The mermaid’s world beneath the sea before she goes to the surface corresponds to the soldier’s Edinburgh before he went to war; the loss of his legs becomes a grim reversal of her equally tragic loss of her tail in return for legs. Both ‘Disabled’ and Owen’s earlier poem ‘ The Little Mermaid’ are poems about growing up and yet, in the act of growing, remaining infantilised for ever, never to know married life: Tonight he noticed how the women’s eyes Passed from him to the strong men that were whole. How cold and late it is! Why don’t they come And put him into bed? Why don’t they come? The park is a place for children.35 Similarly, Owen wrote, at Brock’s urging, the poem ‘ The Wrestlers’ about Heracles (Hercules) and Antaeas (Antaeus), where the emphasis on youth is seen in Hylas, Heracles’s young page who doesn’t 4227.indd 1894227.indd 189 25/11/13 9:31 PM25/11/13 9:31 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 8/13/2021 1:26 AM via RASMUSSEN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 190 W I L F R E D OW E N necessarily even feature in the story but becomes the hero in Owen’s version of the ancient tale, because, although a figure of peace and love, it is he who tells Heracles how to defeat Antaeas: ‘Antaeus deriving strength from his Mother Earth nearly licked old Herk’,36 but Heracles realised that he could defeat Antaeus by lifting him off the ground: If thou could’st lift the man in air – enough. His feet suck secret virtue of the earth. Lift him, and buckle him to thy breast, and win. Brock wrote, in an article for The Hydra entitled ‘Antaeus, or Back to the Land’: ‘Now surely every officer who comes to Craiglockhart recog- nises that, in a way, he is himself Antaeus who has been taken from his Mother Earth and well- nigh crushed to death by the war giant or mili- tary machine.’ Brock argued that Antaeus ‘typifies the occupation cure at Craiglockhart’ and his story is ‘the justification of our activities’.37 Owen got to know, through a friend of a friend, the Edinburgh artist John Duncan, an associate member of the Royal Scottish Academy who lived in Edinburgh at St Bernard’s Crescent and who like Brock, had been a friend and follower of Patrick Geddes, the Scottish academic and social reformer. Owen owned St Columba: A Study of Social Inheritance and Spiritual Development by Victor Branford, published by …