Wilfred Owen was born in Oswestry on 18 March 1893. His parents were then living in a spacious and comfortable house owned by his grandfather, Edward Shaw. At his death two years later, this former Mayor of the city was found to be almost bankrupt, and Tom Owen was obliged to move with his wife and son to lodgings in the backstreets of Birkenhead. They carried with them vivid memories of their vanished prosperity, and Susan Owen resolved that her adored son Wilfred should in time restore the family to its rightful gentility. She was a devout lady and under her strong influence Wilfred grew into a serious and slightly priggish boy. At school in Birkenhead and later in Shrewsbury – where Tom Owen was appointed Assistant Superintendent of the Joint Railways (GWR and LNWR) in 1906 – he worked hard and successfully, especially at literature and botany. He had begun writing poems when he was ten or eleven, and soon fell under the spell of Keats, who was to remain the principal influence on his work.
Leaving school in 1911, Owen took up a post as lay assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden in Oxfordshire. He was to help the Vicar with his parish work and receive in return coaching for the university entrance examination that he hoped in due course to sit. Removed from his mother’s influence, he became less enamoured of evangelical religion and more critical of the role of the Church – as represented by the Vicar of Dunsden – in society. His letters and poems of this period show an increasing awareness of the sufferings of the poor and the first stirrings of the compassion that was to characterize his later poems about the Western Front. At Dunsden in October 1912, there took place the double funeral of a mother and her four-year-old daughter. Owen responded to that village tragedy with a poem beginning
Deep under turfy grass and heavy clay
They laid her bruisèd body, and the child.
In this his compassion for victims made itself heard for the first time.
The Vicar had been praying for a religious revival in the parish and, early in 1913, it arrived like a spring tide, sweeping converts into church – but leaving Owen stranded with the recognition that literature meant more to him than evangelical religion. He had to explain this to the Vicar, and painful scenes followed. In February 1913, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Owen left Dunsden and, while recovering that summer, made several visits to the archaeological site of the Roman city of Uriconium. Contemplating the excavated ruins of the city which, with its inhabitants (his guidebook told him) ‘perished by fire and sword’, the twenty-year-old poet warms to the subject of his first ‘war poem’, ‘Uriconium, an Ode’:
For here lie remnants from a banquet-table –
Oysters and marrow-bones, and seeds of grape –
The statement of whose age must sound a fable;
And Samian jars, whose sheen and flawless shape
Look fresh from potter’s mould
Plasters with Roman finger-marks impressed;
Bracelets, that from the warm Italian arm
Might seem to be scarce cold
And spears – the same that pushed the Cymry west –
Unblunted yet.
Owen’s compassionate awareness of the victims’ bodies – so prominent a feature of his later and greater poems – enable him to see those
Plasters with Roman finger-marks impressed;
Bracelets, that from the warm Italian arm
Might seem to be scarce cold
and it sharpens his perceptions of the weapons that killed them – ‘spears . . .unblunted yet’. ‘Uriconium, an Ode’ anticipates the later and greater poems in a more mysteriously prophetic way. As the twenty-year-old poet descends in imagination into the grave of the city and its slaughtered inhabitants, he says:
Ruins! On England’s heart press heavily!
For Rome hath left us more than walls and words
And better yet shall leave, and more than herds
Or land or gold gave the Celts to us in fee;
E’en Blood, which makes poets sing and prophets see.
Owen with the French poet, Laurent Tailhade, in September 1914
The earth is seen, metaphorically, as a threatened human body. Many of the poems he wrote later – when blood was making ‘poets sing and prophets see’ – involved a descent into wounded earth, trench, grave, hell.
Within weeks of writing ‘Uriconium’, Owen heard he had failed to win a scholarship to university, and left England to teach English in France. He was in the Pyrenees, acting as tutor in a cultivated French household, when war was declared. A visit to a hospital for the wounded soon opened his eyes to the true nature of war, but it was not until September 1915 that he finally decided to return to England and enlist. For several months he and Edward Thomas (see pp. 130–45) were privates, both training at Hare Hall Camp in Essex, although there is no evidence that they ever met. Commissioned into the Manchester Regiment, Owen crossed the Channel on 30 December 1916 and in the first days of January 1917 joined the 2nd Manchesters on the Somme near Beaumont Hamel. His letters to his mother tell their own story:
I have not been at the front.
I have been in front of it.
I held an advanced post, that is, a ‘dug-out’ in the middle of No Man’s Land.
We had a march of 3 miles over shelled road then nearly 3 along a flooded trench. After that we came to where the trenches had been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was of course dark, too dark, and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, 3, 4, and 5 feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water. Men have been known to drown in them. Many stuck in the mud and only got on by leaving their waders, equipment, and in some cases their clothes.
Owen’s application for admission to a Temporary Commission in the Regular Army
High explosives were dropping all around us, and machine guns spluttered every few minutes. But it was so dark that even the German flares did not reveal us.
Three quarters dead, I mean each of us ¾ dead, we reached the dug-out, and relieved the wretches therein. I then had to go forth and find another dug-out for a still more advanced post where I left 18 bombers. I was responsible for other posts on the left but there was a junior officer in charge.
My dug-out held 25 men tight packed. Water filled it to a depth of 1 or 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air.
One entrance had been blown in and blocked. So far, the other remained.
The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn’t.
Those fifty hours were the agony of my happy life.
Every ten minutes on Sunday afternoon seemed an hour.
I nearly broke down and let myself drown in the water that was now slowly rising over my knees.
Towards 6 o’clock, when, I suppose, you would be going to church, the shelling grew less intense and less accurate: so that I was mercifully helped to do my duty and crawl, wade, climb and flounder over No Man’s Land to visit my other post. It took me half an hour to move about 150 yards.
I was chiefly annoyed by our own machine guns from behind. The seeng-seeng-seeng of the bullets reminded me of Mary’s canary. On the whole I can support the canary better.
In the Platoon on my left the sentries over the dug-out were blown to nothing. One of these poor fellows was my first servant whom I rejected. If I had kept him he would have lived, for servants don’t do Sentry Duty. I kept my own sentries half way down the stairs during the more terrific bombardment. In spite of this one lad was blown down, and, I am afraid, blinded.
Owen (front row, second from right) and officers of the 5th (reserve) Manchester Regiment, 1916
In March 1917 Owen fell into a cellar and suffered concussion, and some weeks later, after fierce fighting near St Quentin, was invalided home with shell-shock. At Craiglockhart War Hospital on the outskirts of Edinburgh he met Siegfried Sassoon (see p. 70), whose first ‘war poems’ had just appeared in The Old Huntsman and Other Poems. Inspired by this book, and encouraged by Sassoon’s constructive criticism, Owen found a language for his own experience. It was probably in August that he read the anonymous Prefatory Note to the anthology, Poems of Today (1916), which began:
This book has been compiled in order that boys and girls, already perhaps familiar with the great classics of the English speech, may also know something of the newer poetry of their own day. Most of the writers are living, and the rest are still vivid memories among us, while one of the youngest, almost as these words are written, has gone singing to lay down his life for his country’s cause [. . .] there is no arbitrary isolation of one theme from another; they mingle and interpenetrate throughout, to the music of Pan’s flute, and of Love’s viol, and the bugle-call of Endeavour, and the passing bell of Death. [my emphasis]
It is not difficult to imagine him, stung by those sentiments, sitting down to write his ‘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 now 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.
Those who die as cattle in a slaughterhouse die in such numbers that there is no time to give them the trappings of a Christian funeral that Owen remembers from his Dunsden days. Instead, they receive a brutal parody of such a service: ‘the stuttering rifles’ praying (presumably) that they will kill them; the ‘choirs . . . of shells’ wailing as they hunt them down. The bugles may sound the Last Post for them, but they had previously called them to the colours in those same sad shires. So, bitterly but obliquely, Owen assigns to Church and State responsibility for their deaths.
German shell bursting near British trenches, Beaumont Hamel, December 1916
The ‘turn’ at the end of the octave (line 8) brings the reader home, across the Channel, and the sestet opens with a question paralleling the first: ‘What candles may be held to speed them all?’ A gentler question than ‘What passing bells for these who die as cattle?’ it prepares for the gentler answer that, instead of the parodic rituals offered by rifle, shell and bugle, those who love the soldiers will mark their death with observances more heart-felt, more permanent, than those prescribed by convention:
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.
Memories of the dead will lie behind the foreheads of the girls who loved them, not just for the fortnight of formal mourning, but for the rest of their lives.
Some indication of the nature of Sassoon’s contribution to Owen’s poetic development can be gained from the fact that the final manuscript draft of this poem (see p. 107) contains nine words and several cancellations in the handwriting of the older poet, whose own work would never equal the rich density of meaning and music in these lines. Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, begun at about the same time, again owes much to Sassoon – in its graphic depiction of the battlefield and in its explosive use of direct speech – and again was triggered by Owen’s angry response to another text: in this case, a poem or poems by Jessie Pope (to whom manuscript versions of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ are dedicated). She was the author of another sort of ‘war poem’ – one, for example, beginning:
Who’s for the trench –
Are you, my laddie?
Who’ll follow the French –
Will you, my laddie?
Who’s fretting to begin,
Who’s going to win?
And who wants to save his skin –
Do you, my laddie?
Army orders sent to Owen
Discharged from Craiglockhart in November 1917, Owen spent Christmas with his regiment in Scarborough, and there read Under Fire, the English translation of Henri Barbusse’s book, Le Feu. One of the most brilliant and searing accounts of life on the Western Front, it made an immediate impact on him, and its influence can be detected in his poems of this period. One such debt appears in the transformation of a sentence from Barbusse’s chapter nine:
The soldier held his peace. In the distance he saw the night as they would pass it – cramped up, trembling with vigilance in the deep darkness, at the bottom of the listening-hole whose ragged jaws showed in black outline all around whenever a gun hurled its dawn into the sky.
Owen expanded this into a vision of ‘one of the many mouths of Hell’:
Cramped in that funnelled hole, they watched the dawn
Open a jagged rim around; a yawn
Of death’s jaws, which had all but swallowed them
Stuck in the bottom of his throat of phlegm.
They were in one of many mouths of Hell
Not seen of seers in visions; only felt
As teeth of traps; when bones and the dead are smelt
Under the mud where long ago they fell
Mixed with the sour sharp odour of the shell.
Once again, he is reacting against the vision of another poet: here it is Tennyson and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’:
Into the jaws of Death
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Owen’s vision of the mouth of hell became more fully elaborated in ‘Miners’ and ‘Strange Meeting’ and can be traced back, by way of ‘Uriconium’, to the hell of which he heard at his mother’s knee. These descents into the underworld have a curious common denominator. The Dunsden elegy for a mother and child speaks of ‘Chaos murky womb’; the landscape of ‘The Show’ is said to be ‘pitted with great pocks and scabs of plagues’; the soldiers ‘Cramped in that funnelled hole’ watched the yawn ‘Of death’s jaws, which had all but swallowed them/Stuck in the bottom of his throat of phlegm’; and in ‘Strange Meeting’, the speaker escapes down a tunnel ‘through granites which titanic wars had groined’. In each case, the earth is described in terms of the human body, and in three out of four instances there is a marked sense of physical loathing. This comes strangely, tragically, from a poet whose early poems are full of lyrical descriptions of beautiful bodies and celebrations of the natural world.
Panoramic view of the ruined village of Beaumont Hamel, November 1916
Owen’s Military Cross (worn on a chain by his mother)
Part of the power of many of Owen’s mature poems derives from his pioneering use of pararhymes: escaped/scooped, groined/groaned. In ‘Strange Meeting’, from which these examples are taken, the second rhyme is lower in pitch than the first, giving the couplet ‘a dying fall’ that musically reinforces the poem’s meaning; the tragedy of the German poet (one manuscript reads ‘I was a German conscript, and your friend’), his life cut short by the British poet whom he meets in Hell. In the poem ‘Miners’, the pitch of the pararhymes rises and falls as the sense moves from grief to happiness and back to grief again:
The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned;
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.
In December 1917, Sassoon was again posted overseas – first to Palestine, then to France – and in March 1918, Owen was transferred to ‘an awful camp’ at Ripon. There he rented an attic room in a nearby cottage to which he could escape when not on duty. In this, over the next three months, he either wrote or revised and completed many of his most powerful poems, including ‘Insensibility’, ‘Strange Meeting’, ‘Exposure’ and ‘Futility’. In early June, he was graded ‘G. S.’ (fit for General Service) and rejoined the 5th Manchesters at Scarborough. A friend in the War Office recommended him for a home posting, as instructor to a cadet battalion, but the recommendation was rejected. By then, however, Sassoon had been shot in the head and invalided home, and Owen seems to have accepted that it was his duty as a poet to take his place. ‘Now must I throw my little candle on his torch,’ he told his mother, ‘and go out again.’
Owen’s last letter to his mother
The great German offensives of March and April 1918 had exhausted the attackers and in mid-July they launched what was to prove their last offensive. This had been contained and their armies were retreating when, at the end of August, Owen returned to France, under no illusions about what awaited him. Before going into the trenches he wrote to Sassoon: ‘Serenity Shelley never dreamed of crowns me. Will it last when I shall have gone into Caverns & Abysmals such as he never reserved for his worst daemons?’ Once again, his image is of hell. Later that month, remembering his sentry blinded in January 1917, he wrote ‘The Sentry’:
Troops returning from the line through a wilderness of mud, 1918
We’d found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew,
And gave us hell; for shell on frantic shell
Lit full on top, but never quite burst through.
Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime,
Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour,
And choked the steps too thick with clay to climb.
What murk of air remained stank old, and sour
With fumes from whizz-bangs, and the smell of men
Who’d lived there years, and left their curse in the den,
If not their corpses . . .
There we herded from the blast
Of whizz-bangs; but one found our door at last, –
Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles,
And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping
And sploshing in the flood, deluging muck,
The sentry’s body; then his rifle, handles
Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.
We dredged it up, for dead, until he whined,
‘O sir – my eyes, – I’m blind, – I’m blind, – I’m blind.’
Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
And said if he could see the least blurred light
He was not blind; in time they’d get all right.
‘I can’t’, he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids’,
Watch my dreams still, – yet I forgot him there
In posting Next for duty, and sending a scout
To beg a stretcher somewhere, and flound’ring about
To other posts under the shrieking air.
Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,
And one who would have drowned himself for good, –
I try not to remember these things now.
Let Dread hark back for one word only: how,
Half-listening to that sentry’s moans and jumps,
And the wild chattering of his shivered teeth,
Renewed most horribly whenever crumps
Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath, –
Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout
‘I see your lights!’ – But ours had long gone out.
The torrential movement of this poem makes it seem simpler, more straightforward than it is. The slang figure of speech in the second line (‘And gave us hell’) conceals the recurrent metaphor. Similarly, when Owen speaks of ‘one who would have drowned himself for good’, he means more than ‘once and for all’, and may well have had in mind the moment when death by drowning seemed, to him, good and preferable to living (see the letter quoted on p. 99 above).
In his celebrated draft Preface, Owen wrote: ‘All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.’ It sounds easy, but it is not easy to tell the truth in a poem, especially a truth from which the memory recoils. He tells the truth in ‘The Sentry’ when he says ‘I try not to remember these things now.’ But, when he tries to forget them, ‘Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids’,/Watch my dreams still.’ In those dreams the horror is reborn, the reality of battle reshaped to the dimensions of the poem; poems to which we, his readers, owe – more than to any other – our vision of the reality of the Western Front, of hell on earth.
At the start of October 1918, Owen was awarded the Military Cross for his part in a successful attack on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme Line and, before sunrise on the morning of 4 November, led his platoon to the west bank of the Sambre and Oise Canal. They came under murderous fire from German machine-guns behind the parapet of the east bank, and at the height of the ensuing battle Owen was hit and killed while helping his men bring up duck-boards at the water’s edge.
In Shrewsbury, the Armistice bells were ringing when his parents’ front-door bell sounded its small chime, heralding the telegram they had dreaded for two years.
Wilfred Owen in 1916
There was a whispering in my hearth,
A sigh of the coal,
Grown wistful of a former earth
It might recall.
I listened for a tale of leaves
And smothered ferns;
Frond-forests; and the low, sly lives
Before the fawns.
My fire might show steam-phantoms simmer
From Time’s old cauldron,
Before the birds made nests in summer,
Or men had children.
But the coals were murmuring of their mine,
And moans down there
Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men
Writhing for air.
And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard,
Bones without number.
Many the muscled bodies charred,
And few remember.
I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed.
Comforted years will sit soft-chaired
In rooms of amber:
The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered
By our lives’ ember;
The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned;
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.
1918
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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped 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 plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
1917–18
1
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.
2
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.
3
Happy are these who lose imagination:
They have enough to carry with ammunition.
Their spirit drags no pack.
Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.
Having seen all things red,
Their eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
And terror’s first constriction over,
Their hearts remain small-drawn.
Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle
Now long since ironed,
Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.
Happy the soldier home, with not a notion
How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,
And many sighs are drained.
Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:
His days are worth forgetting more than not.
He sings along the march
Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,
The long, forlorn, relentless trend
From larger day to huger night.
5
We wise, who with a thought besmirch
Blood over all our soul,
How should we see our task
But through his blunt and lashless eyes?
Alive, he is not vital overmuch;
Dying, not mortal overmuch;
Nor sad, nor proud,
Nor curious at all.
He cannot tell
Old men’s placidity from his.
6
But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
That they should be as stones.
Wretched are they, and mean
With paucity that never was simplicity.
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever moans in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.
1917–18
It seemed that out of 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, –
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand pains 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 that other, ‘save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . .’
1918
Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
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?
1918
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 beating of great bells
In wild train-loads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.
1918
