Discuss how Owen portrays landscape and nature in Spring Offensive.
In Spring Offensive, Wilfred Owen illustrates the transformation of the landscape and
nature when ravaged by war. The poem centres on soldiers lying in wait before an attack, and
the aftermath of the attack. By contrasting the calmness and beauty of nature before the
battle and the hellish environment of the battlefield, he raises the concern of how war changes
the worlds natural state. The title itself plays on this idea; as the soldiers spring an offensive,
they are also attacking spring, an intrinsic period of nature when new life grows. Owens
voice in the poem is measured and solemn, lending objectivity to his observations the readers
can trust.
Firstly, Owen presents nature as a beneficiary. The poem opens with the soldiers halted
against the shade of a last hill. The hill is metonymic of nature, which protects the soldiers
so they can rest carelessly, without worry. In addition, the soldiers waiting to attack are also
soothed by the natural beauty and warmth of a fine, early summer day. Nature has the power
to heal, or at least to anaesthetise their anguish, Like an injected drug for their bodies
pains. The long vowels in, ...summer oozed into their veins, are slightly hypnotic,
mimicking the anaesthetic effects of the drug. Not only the soldiers, but the readers also
feel the calming effect of nature. The soldiers are then blessed with [the] gold [of the
buttercups]. Owen uses this imagery to emphasise how nature stands out against the dark
and diminished background of the war, soothing their mental anguish with its beauty. Hence,
nature is a gracious power, offering help to humans in the form of protection and healing.
However, an underlying sense of unease permeates the poem due to the divide between
nature and war. The edge of the battlefield is metaphorically represented as the last hill and
the end of the world, hinting that the warzone, with its unnatural stark, blank sky beyond
the ridge is separate from the natural world. Mankind, being involved in war, is also severed
from nature as shown through the juxtaposition, summer oozed... like the injected drug.
Nature is described with a gentle sibilance, while mankinds invention sounds harsh with the
forceful j and d consonants. This contrast sets the reader up for the conflict between man
and nature when it, symbolised by the sun, becomes a friend with whom their love is done.
As war is unnatural, it is an offense against nature. Thus by undertaking a war, the soldiers
have rejected nature. The climax hits when the soldiers attack, and nature strikes back: the
whole sky burned / With fury against them... the green slope / Chasmed and steepened sheer
to infinite space. The pathetic fallacy highlights the transformation of nature as it is
destroyed, which then leaves the soldiers vulnerable, exposed to danger as natures
protection has left them through their own harmful actions.
Finally, Owen omits nature and replaces it with a metaphysical, hellish landscape. The poet
draws a parallel between, the whole sky burned with fury and the hot blast and fury of
hells upsurge, highlighting the change of the natural sky into hell. Nature is gone,
devastated by war; as shown in Owens letters home, on the battlefield nature is oft described
in terms of absence, Not a blade of grass, not an insect.... Hell and its flames become
an apt metaphor for the warzone, with its unending gunfire and bombs. The physical
transformation of the landscape also reflects the change in the soldiers, pointed out with the
hyperbole, ...out-fiending all its fiends and flames / With superhuman inhumanities. It is
not only nature, but humans as well, that are transformed by war. In battle, soldiers are forced
to become killing machines, committing inhumane atrocities such as massacring their fellow
humans. Both nature and man have been perverted into aberrations due to war.
Through the contrast of landscapes before and after the ravage of war, Owen throws into
relief the devastation, inhumanity and perverseness of war. It is a message mirrored in his
other poems such as in Dulce et Decorum Est, where Owen portrays the horror of war
through vivid descriptions of the battlefront. War, Owen seems to say, is unnatural. It
constitutes an attack on nature and, in return, nature becomes hostile to those involved in it.
