Wilfred Owen and the Binding of Isaac

Broadcasting in 1946 over BBC Eastern Service radio, Dylan Thomas observed that Wilfred Owen’s poems had revealed “to England, and the intolerant world, the foolishness, unnaturalness, horror, inhumanity, and insupportability of war, and to expose, so that all could suffer and see, the heroic lies, the willingness of the old to sacrifice the young, indifference, grief, the soul of soldiers.”

Reading Owen’s stunningly realistic poems rendering the agonies of World War I, a war in which he died heroically in a machine gun attack at age 25, I found it hard not to think of the fighting in Ukraine and of the cruel senselessness of war in general. Further, reading the poems, as I did, in the runup to the Jewish High Holy Days, I found myself zeroing in on the element of Owen’s verse that stresses “the willingness of the old to sacrifice the young,” as Thomas had put it.

The Sacrifice of Isaac by Rembrandt.

That theme carries particular resonance for Jews this time of year because it’s at the heart of that most troubling of Torah stories, the binding of Isaac. Known in Hebrew as the Akedah, the story, traditionally read in synagogues on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, tells how God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. 

Owen turns that story on its head to powerful effect in “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” and in its two concluding lines tears away the illusion that the Akedah is anything other than pitch-dark at its core. Here is the poem:

 Wilfred Owen

 The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

 Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father, 
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

That concluding couplet makes my stomach churn. In the poem’s first fourteen lines—the traditional length of the sonnet, the most recognizable form in English poetry—we have a simple telling of the Akedah, pretty much exactly as it appears in the King James translation of Bereshit, or Genesis.

That’s true right up to the climax of the story, the point at which Abraham is told to refrain from sacrificing Isaac and to slaughter the ram instead. But Owen doesn’t end the poem in 14 lines with a rhymed couplet, as Shakespeare ends his sonnets. Instead, Owen adds two final lines to the norm—providing time for suspense to build and for the couplet to shock us out of our complacent expectations. They also provide a moral for the parable the poem is telling.

The effect, like the message of those two lines, is to shock. Contrary to all we’ve been told in the past, Abraham does kill Isaac, and rather than bearing progeny as numerous as the stars in heaven, as God had predicted he would, the patriarch slays “half the seed of Europe, one by one.”

Suddenly, we are in chaos—in the midst of a fog of war in which the innocents meet the same fate as the firstborn of Egypt. The story can now be seen as being displaced from Genesis to the darker regions of Exodus.

At the same time, the unreality is made even more horrifying via the stark realism of modern warfare, made plain by the mention of “Europe”—a clear allusion to mass casualties of World War I, in which an entire younger generation was said to be erased in the fighting. The stage is set for the horrors of the modern battlefield by the words “belts and straps” and “parapets and trenches.”  

So potent is the couplet that we can’t help but hear in it today a prophecy of the Holocaust that would come in less than 30 years.  

Also contributing to the power of the poem is the breaking of the taboo implicit in the Akedah—that we should not kill our children under any circumstances. The way the story is told in the sparse language of the Torah, that taboo is brought right up to the edge of being broken. But then, through divine intervention, the harsh decree is averted, to use a phrase from the Yom Kippur liturgy.

Yet once the possibility of Abraham murdering Isaac is presented to us, we can’t put the rabbit back in the hat. It’s a thought that the calming words of the intervening angel can never fully suppress. Between Abraham’s lifting of the knife and the angel’s command—"Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him”—falls a shadow, as T.S. Eliot might say.

What Wilfred Owen’s couplet does is to tear away the shadow that covers the implicit taboo of the Akedah, revealing a darkness in the human heart that seems terrifyingly real, especially in light of the experience of The Great War. Written thousands of years ago, the Akedah, seen through the lens of a great modern poet, projects the truth that the potential for humans to inflict pain on each other may last for as long as we’re around.

That’s what Dylan Thomas thought. Calling Owen “the greatest poet of the First Great War,” Thomas said in his broadcast that if there are still people around to read, “he may be regarded as one of the great poets of all wars.”

The overriding truth he saw is grim, however. “But only war itself can resolve the problem of the ultimate truth of his, or of anyone else’s poetry: war, or its cessation,” Thomas added.