{"id":4667,"date":"2015-02-08T16:33:41","date_gmt":"2015-02-08T16:33:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/?p=4667"},"modified":"2024-09-04T10:57:32","modified_gmt":"2024-09-04T09:57:32","slug":"army-surgeon-comments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/2015\/02\/08\/army-surgeon-comments\/","title":{"rendered":"The Army Surgeon – some comments"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The Army Surgeon”<\/span><\/h2>\n

Sydney Dobell<\/span><\/h2>\n

Over that breathing<\/span>[1]<\/span> waste of friends and foes,<\/span>[2]<\/span><\/span>
\nThe wounded and the dying, hour by hour,-<\/span>
\nIn will a thousand, yet but one in power<\/span> [3]<\/span> ,-<\/span><\/span>
\nHe<\/span> [3]<\/span>\u00a0labours thro’ the red and groaning day.<\/span><\/span>
\nThe fearful moorland where the myriads lay<\/span>
\nMoved as a moving field of mangled worms.<\/span> [4]<\/span><\/span>
\nAnd as a raw brood, orphaned in the storms,<\/span>
\nThrust up their heads if the wind bend a spray<\/span>
\nAbove them, but when the bare branch performs<\/span>
\nNo sweet parental office, sink away<\/span>
\nWith hopeless chirp of woe, so as he goes<\/span>
\nAround his feet in clamorous agony<\/span>
\nThey rise and fall;[5]<\/span> and all the seething plain<\/span>
\nBubbles a cauldron vast of many-coloured pain.[6]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

[1] This immediate emphasis on breath not\u00a0only suggests breath as a theme but as a corporeal sensation for the reader – for the poem itself offers various challenges to the reader\u2019s control of her or his own breath: it starts with\u00a0pretty regular rhythm (iambic pentameter), but especially during the epic simile from line 7 onwards, the convoluted syntax spreading over clever enjambements and caesuras strains the reader\u2019s own breathing as well as the rhythm.<\/p>\n

[2] The rhyme scheme gives the impression of being\u00a0broken, befitting the damaged bodies the poem describes. As with the rhythm,\u00a0the syntax fights the rhyme scheme, making it\u00a0difficult to discern.\u00a0When split into two sestets the scheme seems less awry —\u00a0abbccd, d[eye rhyme]cdcac [pseudo rhyme], ee — but the rhythms, especially the strong pause at the end of line 4\u00a0and\u00a0the recall of that line’s rhyme at line 8 suggest a tough yet\u00a0ghostly tension with an\u00a0organisation of\u00a0the poem into the more traditional 3 quatrains which is never realised.<\/p>\n

[3] Death and its proximity unite all into one undifferentiated nameless mass. This is a particular example of the sublime, as defined by Edmund Burke<\/a>. Today we might be tempted to regard the use of the sublime here not for aesthetic purposes but for political — in\u00a0describing and enacting\u00a0the horrors of war, we might assume the poem is against war. However, other readings are certainly possible: quite what the poem’s politics are depends on how we read the poem. Read in isolation, it\u00a0is true that its violent sensationalism\u00a0seems to oppose war. Yet when read as an\u00a0element of\u00a0 the whole collection it might be regarded as indicating the depth of sacrifice necessary to make Britain Great. This latter was a reading of the collection certainly made at the time by critics and newspaper editors.<\/p>\n

[3] The final line of the first stanza introduces the single character into the undifferentiated mass of humanity. Both are unnamed: neither the mass nor the surgeon are individuals, but effects of their jobs. We might also regard the surgeon as the poet who surveys and dispassionately\u00a0reports. Given the emphasis of the poem on painful suffering this might be a surprising suggestion, yet we should not forget the sheer\u00a0skill of the\u00a0poet’s pen here mirroring the surgeon’s own expertise with the scalpel. In neither case can professional knowledge alleviate suffering (see also below, note [5]). What the poet can do, however, is in a curious way comfort<\/em> readers by reminding them that, like the surgeon, both he and they\u00a0have survived. This is quite consonant with the Burkean understanding of the sublime, which was based on the perceiving subject’s realisation that he or she\u00a0had survived death even though death had been encountered<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[4] The fallen seem already to have become prey to being eaten by worms: time, in this case the future and the present, has been collapsed in ways typical of the sublime. Simultaneously, a\u00a0point is being made about the unity of living creation, a notion\u00a0reinforced by the following comparison of the wounded to chicks\u00a0desperate to be with their mother who will never come, and the surgeon to the tree branch which the chicks believe to be her but which cannot, by its nature, help them. We are all mortal animals dependent on the rhythms and failures of breath.<\/p>\n

[5] The suggestion is of a wave – a rhythm – that rises and falls uselessly. The surgeon can do nothing for the dying. Here is the limit\u00a0of the professional’s ever-increasing pastoral role caring for his flock (cf.\u00a0King para 31). Scientific rationality cannot\u00a0have a purchase\u00a0here: the only language adequate for\u00a0such suffering is that of flesh itself – the body and its breath, fragile, easily interruptible: in short, corporeal\u00a0sensation, the spasmodic<\/a>. This is not representation so much as presentation<\/em> <\/strong>that produces in\u00a0the reader the same sensations\u00a0felt by the described.<\/p>\n

[6]\u00a0The last line\u00a0shockingly introduces the language of the kitchen,\u00a0suggesting a\u00a0parti-coloured\u00a0stew\u00a0of boiled\u00a0meats and vegetables seen from the point of view of the meat rather than\u00a0the cook (whether the reference is to\u00a0a witches brew leads to the same conclusion). Suddenly in this line we are presented with a\u00a0space \u00a0where damaging flesh, even if not human, is the norm. This\u00a0normalisation and naturalisation of suffering,\u00a0legible in\u00a0the epic simile too, confirms a\u00a0preoccupation\u00a0for how suffering\u00a0is to be represented (or presented) rather than politically or ethically dealt with. Death\u00a0is natural and normal, however painful and horrific,\u00a0and it is the poet’s duty to communicate it. How to communicate death and dying\u00a0is both the “scientific” and aesthetic point of the poem. Whether the suffering is to be\u00a0valorised or condemned – that is, read politically and ethically – is, however, for the reader to decide, at least in this poem.<\/p>\n

\n

Publication and Reception Note<\/span><\/p>\n

Sydney Dobell’s sonnet “The Army Surgeon” was originally published in Sonnets on the War<\/em><\/a>, a joint collection with Dobell’s friend Alexander Smith that is now freely available or archive.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No manuscript source seems to have survived (see National Archives entry on Dobell<\/a>). The one contemporary reprinting (see below) offers no variation of the text. While Dobell used only ‘the Author of “Baldur” and “The Roman”‘ on the title page, contemporary reviews show that his name and identity\u00a0were already\u00a0well known.<\/p>\n

\"Frontispiece<\/p>\n

Smith and Dobell’s\u00a0slim volume (of just 48 pages) was published in the first days of January 1855 by Bogue of Fleet Street as a shilling paperback (we can date the publication from a reference to it in a letter from Dobell to one of his sisters dated 5 January in which he says he hopes to send her a copy the next day – Life and Letters of Sydney Dobell<\/em>, p. 396<\/a>). Presumably Smith and Dobell’s usual publisher, Smith, Elder and Co (who published Dobell’s\u00a0later and more expensive hardback collection England in Time of War)\u00a0<\/em>was unable to insert publication of the volume into their schedules, whereas the lower-status Bogue was more flexible. The poem was republished without emendment in The Poetical Works of Sydney Dobell<\/em> (2 vols, Smith, elder & Co, 1875) \u00a0on p. 226, where Dobell’s contribution to “Sonnets on the War” are precipitated out from that volume, enabling us to distinguish\u00a0them from Smith’s. The Poetical Works of Sydney Dobell<\/em>\u00a0is also available through archive.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Although “The Army Surgeon”\u00a0can certainly be read as a self-standing commentary on (or description or enactment of) generic\u00a0horrors of war, it in fact forms part of a narrative sequence that very firmly locks the poem into its historical context. The borders of this particular sequence are porous since the entire\u00a0volume begs to be read as a whole, but one can see a distinct set of poems centred on the Battle of the Alma<\/a> (20 September 1854, generally considered the first major battle of the Crimean War), comprising the sonnet “Alma” that immediately precedes “The Army Surgeon”, and the following three, two entitled “Wounded” and the last “After Alma”. Dobell only wrote “The Army Surgeon” amd the two “Wounded” poems but the arrangement of the pages certainly asks the reader to think of the Surgeon at the Alma.<\/p>\n

Even though I have been unable to locate specific examples in newspapers\u00a0before<\/em> the collection appeared, I nonetheless think it helpful to regard the\u00a0collection as comprising\u00a0a specific type of what Natalie Houston has called the “newspaper poem,”\u00a0that is, occasional poetry responding to or commenting on contemporary events\u00a0reported in the press. The most famous Victorian example of this\u00a0is Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade<\/a>” \u00a0first published in The Examiner<\/em>\u00a0on 9 December 1854 in response to a Times<\/em> article.<\/p>\n

Andrew Hobbs has persuasively argued that the provincial press was a major locus of poetry publishing in the nineteenth century<\/a>,\u00a0\u00a0and poems from “Sonnets on the War” is no exception.\u00a0But rather than reprint all of them equally, there is a decided preference by newspapers for some over others. “The Army Surgeon” was not amongst those favoured at the time, perhaps because its imagery was too strong or its sentence structure and long and tortured central metaphor were considered too difficult. \u00a0The Aberdeen Journal<\/em> (10 January 1855, p. 6) reprinted six sonnets:\u00a0“Alma”, “After Alma”, the two sonnets on “The Cavalry Charge”, “Miss Nightingale” and “Cheer.” This is a selection that\u00a0offers a reassuring narrative arc and avoids too much horror. The first three are reprinted again by\u00a0\u00a0The Blackburn Standard<\/i>\u00a0on 7 February (p. 4)\u00a0along with “Sebastopol” with a similar effect.<\/p>\n

The politically more\u00a0radical Lloyd’s Weekly<\/em>, full of praise for the collection (14 January 1855, p.8), offers a different selection. Starting with “Alma” again, it continues with the second\u00a0“Wounded” poem (a startling choice given the poem’s poetically very new technique of assembling\u00a0fragments of everyday speech\u00a0and follows it with\u00a0“America”, “Freedom” and “Volunteers”. Again, however, despite a selection emphasising the politically and aestehtically\u00a0radical, the arc remains\u00a0comforting: for even if poetic novelty is admitted in Lloyd’s<\/em> pages, the most shocking, visceral poems are omitted.<\/p>\n

The volume was greeted with a mixed reception\u00a0at the time. The lengthy review in the Inverness Courier<\/em><\/a> (1 February 1855, p. 2), the only contemporary newspaper\u00a0where I have found “The Army Surgeon” reprinted, regarded the collection’s\u00a0level as of “respectable mediocrity.” But it did praise the\u00a0the poets for “producing work on a practical subject, which, if its poetry is not of a very high order, contains nothing visionary, absurd or impracticable”. It singles out “The Army Surgeon” as one of the best according to\u00a0these criteria. The review of the collection in\u00a0The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent<\/i> (<\/a>5 May\u00a01855) is likewise very lukewarm. Its principle bone of contention is that the sonnets are not musical: “In the hands of of a master the sonnet gives exquisite music;but strung by a tyro the sounds will be discordant.” \u00a0Ironically, of course, it is precisely the violence the authors of “Sonnets on the War” do to the traditional expectations of the sonnet that today constitutes one of the collection’s\u00a0main interests. The review ends \u00a0by reprinting two of the more conservative poems (both ideologically and formally): “Miss Nightingale” and “Good Night” which they assume to have been written by Smith and Dobell respectively. It\u00a0thus rescues the collection for patriotism just as the other newspapers\u00a0had done.<\/p>\n

Interestingly the London Lancet<\/em>\u00a0(the American edition of the British medical journal\u00a0Lancet<\/em>)- which reprinted the poem in 1856 – uses the isolated poem as an example of “all the heroism and self-denying devotion of which we have spoken” (p. 222<\/a>), suggesting not only a reading of the individual poem through the lens of the self-abnegating professional (cf.\u00a0King para 34)\u00a0but also a reading of “The Army Surgeon”\u00a0through other poems in the volume. Whatever our\u00a0own views, this is a reading made possible by the poets’ interest in the problems of communication rather than in the politics of the described action.<\/p>\n

That said, when the poem became detached from its collection, the\u00a0alternative anti-war reading became\u00a0more easily available. This is certainly possible for example\u00a0in the\u00a0New Zealand Herald (10 February 1917, p.\u00a01)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The context of the poem in the Crimean War and has been well\u00a0covered elsewhere:\u00a0Kathleen B\u00e9res Rogers “Embodied Sympathy and Divine Detachment in Crimean War Medical Poetry”\u00a0is recommended as offering\u00a0an attentive reading of the poem which places “The Army Surgeon” in a slightly different context from what I have offered\u00a0here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The Army Surgeon” Sydney Dobell Over that breathing[1] waste of friends and foes,[2] The wounded and the dying, hour by hour,- In will a thousand, yet but one in power [3] ,- He [3]\u00a0labours thro’ …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":4680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,15,16],"tags":[34,41,95,98,105,107],"class_list":["post-4667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-periodicals","category-publishing-history","category-victorian-popular-literature","category-victorian-publishing","tag-crimean-war","tag-english-literature","tag-spasmodic-poetry","tag-sydney-dobell","tag-victorian-literature","tag-victorian-popular-literature"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2015\/02\/iln-double-page-spread-alma.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4667"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16081,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4667\/revisions\/16081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/andrewking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}