How did I get here? How can this happen? Who’s in charge of this mess?

When we try to make sense of human suffering, much of the literature we return to is concerned with these questions.

In Bayonet Charge, Hughes’s soldier seems momentarily to step outside the immediate terror of the battlefield, only to confront something more bewildering: the forces that have placed him there, at that precise moment, with so little prospect of understanding why he is there at all.

The metaphor of the ‘cold clockwork’ is particularly unsettling, I reckon.¹ There’s order, sure, but order isn’t necessarily the same thing as purpose. And purpose is not necessarily the same thing as benevolence.

In thinking about Hughes’s poem, my mind reached for Tennyson‘s The Charge of the Light Brigade, where the soldiers’ duty is famously expressed as:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.²

With Wilfred Owen, however, the questions become almost unbearable.

In Exposure:

What are we doing here?³

In Futility:

Was it for this the clay grew tall?⁴

In the latter, Owen’s speaker looks at a dead soldier and finds himself questioning not merely the purpose of war, but the purpose of creation itself. If human life is the product of a divine act, how are we to reconcile that act with the apparent waste of so much life?

And then there’s Hamlet, who finds a measure of acceptance in the belief that:

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.⁵

Even the smallest event, Shakespeare suggests, may belong to a larger design, though we cannot hope to comprehend it fully.

‘The readiness is all.’

It’s probably as calm and considered as Hamlet gets.

The differences between these writers, and these texts, matter. Tennyson‘s soldier is bound by duty; Owen‘s speaker struggles to reconcile creation with destruction; Hamlet reaches towards providence; Hughes leaves us with a man caught in the cold machinery of forces he cannot understand.

Maybe the most troubling possibility is that order and goodness are not necessarily the same thing. We might recognise the forces that shape our lives without being able to find meaning in them. It’s almost an invitation to dive into the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft (I’ll recommend The Colour Out of Space to you at this stage).⁶

Literature can’t always answer the questions it raises. Sometimes it does something more valuable: it teaches us how to ask them, and how to navigate the discomfort that often accompanies the search for answers.

Ted Hughes died on 28 October 1998, the day after what would have been Sylvia Plath‘s birthday. But today, rather than return to the familiar story of their relationship, I’m thinking about a question that Hughes’s poem leaves hanging in the air.

How much of our lives do we choose, and how much do we simply find ourselves living?

The poem begins:

Suddenly he awoke

… I rail against the idea of lives lived on automatic pilot, but being awake often isn’t easier. Perhaps the opposite.

Hughes’s soldier wakes up and finds himself running. Awareness doesn’t give him control; it makes him conscious of the forces that may already have determined his actions.

We might like to believe that understanding our circumstances will enable us to take control of them. But understanding is the beginning of a response, not a guarantee of an answer.

References and Further Reading

1. Hughes, “Bayonet Charge” (1957) ↩︎
2. Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) ↩︎
3. Owen, “Exposure” (1917; published 1920) ↩︎
4. Owen, “Futility” (1918) ↩︎
5. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 5.2 ↩︎
6. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space” (1927) ↩︎