The Send-off

    Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
    To the siding-shed,
    And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

    Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
    As men's are, dead.

    Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
    Stood staring hard,
    Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
    Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
    Winked to the guard.

    So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
    They were not ours:
    We never heard to which front these were sent.

    Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
    Who gave them flowers.

    Shall they return to beatings of great bells
    In wild trainloads?
    A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
    May creep back, silent, to still village wells
    Up half-known roads.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Wilfred Owen was an influential English poet, renowned for his poignant war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare during World War I. His works, such as 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth,' convey the brutal realities of war and challenge the romanticized notions of it. Owen's poetry, characterized by its stark realism and exploration of soldiers' suffering, has had a lasting impact on both literature and the collective memory of the war.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Spring Offensive

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, Simple Poetry

Greater Love

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, Simple Poetry

Futility

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

Wild with all Regrets

        (Another version of "A Terre".)

        To Siegfried Sassoon



    My arms have mutinied against me--brutes!
    My fingers fidget like ten idle brats,
    My back's been stiff for hours, damned hours.
    Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease.
    I can't read. There: it's no use. Take your book.
    A short life and a merry one, my buck!
    We said we'd hate to grow dead old. But now,
    Not to live old seems awful: not to renew
    My boyhood with my boys, and teach 'em hitting,
    Shooting and hunting,--all the arts of hurting!
--Well, that's what I learnt. That, and making money.
    Your fifty years in store seem none too many;
    But I've five minutes. God! For just two years
    To help myself to this good air of your...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Insensibility

        I

    Happy are men who yet before they are killed
    Can let their veins run cold.
    Whom no compassion fleers
    Or makes their feet
    Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
    The front line withers,
    But they are troops who fade, not flowers
    For poets' tearful fooling:
    Men, gaps for filling
    Losses who might have fought
    Longer; but no one bothers.


        II

    And some cease feeling
    Even themselves or for themselves.
    Dullness best solves
    The tease and doubt of shelling,
    And Chance's strange arithmetic
    Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.
    They keep no check on Armies' decimation.


        III

    Happy are thes...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

S. I. W.

        "I will to the King,
        And offer him consolation in his trouble,
        For that man there has set his teeth to die,
        And being one that hates obedience,
        Discipline, and orderliness of life,
        I cannot mourn him."
                                W. B. Yeats.



    Patting goodbye, doubtless they told the lad
    He'd always show the Hun a brave man's face;
    Father would sooner him dead than in disgrace,--
    Was proud to see him going, aye, and glad.
    Perhaps his Mother whimpered how she'd fret
    Until he got a nice, safe wound to nurse.
    Sisters would wish girls too could shoot, charge, curse, . . .
    Brothers--would send his favourite cigarette,
    Each week, month after month, they wrote the same...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Strange Meeting

        It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
        Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
        Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
        Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
        Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
        Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
        With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
        Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
        And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;
        With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
        Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
        And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
        "Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
        "None," said the other, "Save the undone years,
  ...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Disabled

    He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
    And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
    Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
    Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
    Voices of play and pleasure after day,
    Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.

    About this time Town used to swing so gay
    When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees
    And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,
--In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
    Now he will never feel again how slim
    Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,
    All of them touch him like some queer disease.

    There was an artist silly for his face,
    For it was younger than his youth, last year.
    Now he is old; his back wil...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

As The Troops Went Through

I heard this day, as I may no more,
The world's heart throb at my workshop door.
The sun was keen, and the day was still;
The township drowsed in, a haze of heat.
A stir far off on the sleepy hill,
The measured beat of their buoyant feet,
And the lilt and thrum
Of a little drum,
The song they sang in a cadence low,
The piping note of a piccolo.

The township woke, and the doors flew wide;
The women trotted their boys beside.
Across the bridge on a single heel
The soldiers came in a golden glow,
With throb of song and the chink of steel,
The gallant crow of the piccolo.
Good and brown they were,
And their arms swung bare.
Their fine young faces revived in me
A boyhood's vision of chivalry.

The lean, hard regiment tramping down,

Edward