This thought-provoking poem is best read with a representation of the painting to which it refers in view (the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel, is reproduced in On Doctoring). Auden considers the nature of human suffering: “how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking / dully along . . . . ” For each individual life affected by personal catastrophe (in the painting, Icarus falling from the sky into the ocean), there is the rest of humankind which must go about its daily business, either oblivious or unable to assist (in the painting, Icarus might almost be overlooked, flailing in the lower corner of the picture while the ploughman in the foreground has his back turned). Life, and death go on although the sufferer, and sometimes those who are paying attention, find this inconceivable. And what about the ship “that must have seen / Something amazing” but “had somewhere to get to”? What is the context in which suffering is noticed, what obligations exist, what can and cannot be remedied?

Source Collected Poems
Publisher Random House
Edition 1976
Editors Edward Mendelson
Place Published New York
Alternate Source On Doctoring
Alternate Publisher Simon & Schuster
Alternate Edition 1995, 2001
Alternate Editors Richard Reynolds & John Stone
Place Published New York
First published 1938

Image of Landscape of the Fall of Icarus from wikicommons
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

As The Ghost Road begins, Prior has been cured of shell shock and is preparing to return to the front in France. Rivers takes care of his patients and his invalid sister, amid memories of his experience ten years earlier on an anthropological expedition to Melanesia (Eddystone Island). He befriended Nijiru, the local priest-healer who took Rivers on his rounds to see sick villagers and also to the island’s sacred Place of the Skulls.

Rivers entertains very un-British thoughts about the morality of these headhunting people, and about the power of symbolic healing. As these thoughts intrude upon his consciousness, Rivers is himself in the process of curing by suggestion a soldier with hysterical paralysis. Meanwhile, Billy Prior returns to the front. It is the autumn of 1918 and the last inhuman spasms of the war are in progress. In a futile battle that takes place a few days before the Armistice, Billy and his friend Wilfred Owen are killed.

To me The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1995, is the most gripping and fastest paced of Pat Barker’s trilogy. The first two novels are Regeneration (1991) and The Eye in the Door (1993). As W. H. R. Rivers reflects on the culture of death on Eddystone Island, World War I, a culmination of the culture of death in Europe, grinds to a close, taking with it the poet Wilfred Owen. Of course, the characters in The Ghost Road are unaware of the new heights (or depths) that the culture of death will attain later in the 20th Century.

The Ghost Road
Pat Barker
Dutton, 1995
New York, 256 pages

Web image by  Claudio Carrozzo 

Mental Cases by Wilfred Owen

Carol Donley Aug 11, 2025

Owen’s stark poem portrays shell-shocked soldiers haunted by war, exposing both their torment and society’s complicity in their suffering.