1. Owen began the poem at Scarborough in the summer of 1918, revised it in France and sent a fair copy to Siegfried Sassoon in a letter dated 22 September 1918, in which he asked: ‘Is this worth going on with? I don’t want to write anything to which a soldier would say No Compris!’ The poem deals with Owen’s own experience of the Allies’ ‘spring offensive’ in April 1917, and was never revised for publication. Morning Heroes also sets poems by Whitman, Robert Nichols, Li Po and Homer.
2. ‘high places’ – the term used in the Bible and in ancient times for sacrificial altars.
1. Written at Craiglockhart in September 1917 and then sent with ‘Anthem for doomed youth’ to his mother.
2. probably Britannia.
3. The OED’s definition is ‘great public sacrifices’, but Owen might have meant ‘the places where they were slaughtered’.
1. Britten’s War Requiem was premiered on 30 May 1962 in the rebuilt and re-consecrated Coventry Cathedral. The soloists were Heather Harper (Galina Vishnevskaya had been refused a visa to come to England), Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Britten, in a letter inviting the German baritone to take part, referred to ‘these magnificent poems, full of the hate of destruction’.
2. Passing-bells are rung in Catholic churches when one of the parishioners is known to be dying. Cf. Schubert’s lovely setting of Seidl’s ‘Das Zügenglöcklein’, D871.
3. On the advice of Sassoon, Owen later revised these two lines – see the introduction to this chapter.
4. See the introduction to this chapter.
1. The final couplet of Sassoon’s ‘A letter home’ (To Robert Graves), written at Flixécourt in May 1916.
1. malediction, curse.
1. Calvary (Lat. Calvariae) – ‘the place of the skull’ – was the site of the Crucifixion; a Calvary is also a model of the crucified Christ, often found at crossroads in France.
2. The Battle of the Ancre was the final stage of the Battle of the Somme (1916).
3. Cf. the Gospels, where the soldiers kept watch, the disciples hid (for fear of detection) and the scribes passed by in scorn.
4. Golgotha (Heb. Gulgōleth) – ‘the place of the skull’ – was the site of the Crucifixion.
5. The Devil was said to leave his finger marks on the flesh of his followers.
6. Germany.
1. Jon Stallworthy points out (Wilfred Owen: The War Poems, 1994) that the title was probably suggested to Owen by a reading of Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam, a work that he admired for its defence of freedom in times of oppression. Lines 1828–32 read:
And one whose spear had pierced me, leaned beside,
With quivering lips and humid eyes; – and all
Seemed like some brothers on a journey wide
Gone forth, whom now strange meeting did befall
In a strange land […]
2. Cf. Owen’s letter of February 1917 to his mother: ‘the men had to dig trenches in ground like granite’.
3. ‘Even from wells we sunk too deep for war,/Even the sweetest wells that ever were’ (Britten uses these variants that Owen rejected for his final version).
4. Fischer-Dieskau, in his autobiography, Nachklang, tells of the difficulty he had in controlling his emotions at this passage. An earlier version of the line ran: ‘I was a German conscript, and your friend.’
5. Owen’s use of half-rhymes or pararhymes is a characteristic of his mature poetry. The final consonants of stressed syllables agree, but the vowel sounds do not match (escaped/scooped; groined/groaned; killed/cold, etc.)
1. One of Owen’s earliest poems. Originally composed (but never performed) in 1960, when Harvey was twenty-one, for a group of Cambridge singers, it was revised in 2010 and first performed at Martin Neary’s seventieth birthday concert at St John’s, Smith Square, on 28 March 2010.