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.

March 18, 1893

November 4, 1918

English

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A Terre

        (Being the philosophy of many Soldiers.)



    Sit on the bed; I'm blind, and three parts shell,
    Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall.
    Both arms have mutinied against me--brutes.
    My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.

    I tried to peg out soldierly--no use!
    One dies of war like any old disease.
    This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.
    I have my medals?--Discs to make eyes close.
    My glorious ribbons?--Ripped from my own back
    In scarlet shreds. (That's for your poetry book.)

    A short life and a merry one, my brick!
    We used to say we'd hate to live dead old,--
    Yet now . . . I'd willingly be puffy, bald,
    And patriotic. Buffers catch from boys
    At least the jokes hurled ...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Anthem for Doomed Youth

    What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
    Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
    Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
    Can patter out their hasty orisons.
    No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
    Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,--
    The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
    And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

    What candles may be held to speed them all?
    Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
    Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
    The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
    Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
    And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Apologia pro Poemate Meo

    I, too, saw God through mud--
        The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
        War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
        And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

    Merry it was to laugh there--
        Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
        For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
        Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

    I, too, have dropped off fear--
        Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
        And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear
        Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn;

    And witnessed exultation--
        Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,
        Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,
        Seraphic for an...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Arms and the Boy

    Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
    How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
    Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
    And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

    Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads
    Which long to muzzle in the hearts of lads.
    Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,
    Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

    For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
    There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
    And God will grow no talons at his heels,
    Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Conscious

    His fingers wake, and flutter up the bed.
    His eyes come open with a pull of will,
    Helped by the yellow may-flowers by his head.
    A blind-cord drawls across the window-sill . . .
    How smooth the floor of the ward is! what a rug!
    And who's that talking, somewhere out of sight?
    Why are they laughing? What's inside that jug?
    "Nurse! Doctor!" "Yes; all right, all right."

    But sudden dusk bewilders all the air--
    There seems no time to want a drink of water.
    Nurse looks so far away. And everywhere
    Music and roses burnt through crimson slaughter.
    Cold; cold; he's cold; and yet so hot:
    And there's no light to see the voices by--
    No time to dream, and ask--he knows not what.

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

Dulce et Decorum est

    Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
    Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
    Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
    And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
    Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
    But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
    Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
    Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

    Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling
    Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
    But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
    And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
    Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
    As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

    In all my dreams before my helpless sight
    He p...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Exposure

        I

    Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us . . .
    Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . .
    Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient . . .
    Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
            But nothing happens.

    Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.
    Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
    Northward incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
    Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
            What are we doing here?

    The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow . . .
    We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
    Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
    Attacks once more in ranks on shive...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Futility

    Move him into the sun--
    Gently its touch awoke him once,
    At home, whispering of fields unsown.
    Always it woke him, even in France,
    Until this morning and this snow.
    If anything might rouse him now
    The kind old sun will know.

    Think how it wakes the seeds--
    Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
    Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
    Full-nerved,--still warm,--too hard to stir?
    Was it for this the clay grew tall?
--O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
    To break earth's sleep at all?

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Greater Love

    Red lips are not so red
    As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
    Kindness of wooed and wooer
    Seems shame to their love pure.
    O Love, your eyes lose lure
    When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

    Your slender attitude
    Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
    Rolling and rolling there
    Where God seems not to care;
    Till the fierce Love they bear
    Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

    Your voice sings not so soft,--
    Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft,--
    Your dear voice is not dear,
    Gentle, and evening clear,
    As theirs whom none now hear
    Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

    Heart, you were never hot,
   ...

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

Mental Cases

    Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
    Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
    Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
    Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?
    Stroke on stroke of pain,--but what slow panic,
    Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
    Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
    Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
    Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

--These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
    Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
    Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
    Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
    Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
    Always they must see these things and hear them,
   ...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Parable of the Old Men and the Young

    So 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 stretch\ed 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. . . .

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Preface

This book is not about heroes.    English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.    Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, dominion or power,

                        except War.
            Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.
            The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.
            The Poetry is in the pity.
            Yet these elegies are not to this generation,
                        This is in no sense consolatory.

            They may be to the next.
            All the poet can do to-day is to warn.
            That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
            If I thought the letter of this book would last,
        I might have used proper names; but if the spirit of it survives Prussia,--my ambition ...

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

Smile, Smile, Smile

    Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned
    Yesterday's Mail; the casualties (typed small)
    And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.
    Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned;
    For, said the paper, "When this war is done
    The men's first instinct will be making homes.
    Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes,
    It being certain war has just begun.
    Peace would do wrong to our undying dead,--
    The sons we offered might regret they died
    If we got nothing lasting in their stead.
    We must be solidly indemnified.
    Though all be worthy Victory which all bought,
    We rulers sitting in this ancient spot
    Would wrong our very selves if we forgot
    The greatest glory will be theirs who fought,
    Who k...

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Spring Offensive

    Halted against the shade of a last hill,
    They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease
    And, finding comfortable chests and knees
    Carelessly slept. But many there stood still
    To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,
    Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.

    Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
    By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge,
    For though the summer oozed into their veins
    Like the injected drug for their bones' pains,
    Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass,
    Fearfully flashed the sky's mysterious glass.

    Hour after hour they ponder the warm field--
    And the far valley behind, where the buttercups
    Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming u...

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

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