Poems Read online

  Wilfred Owen

  * * *

  POEMS

  Contents

  Preface

  From My Diary, July 1914

  The Unreturning

  To Eros

  My Shy Hand

  Storm

  Music

  Shadwell Stair

  Happiness

  Exposure

  Fragment: ‘Cramped in that Funnelled Hole’

  Fragment: ‘It is Not Death’

  The Parable of the Old Men and the Young

  Arms and the Boy

  The Show

  The Send-Off

  Greater Love

  Insensibility

  Dulce et Decorum est

  The Dead-Beat

  The Chances

  Asleep

  S. I. W.

  Mental Cases

  Futility

  Conscious

  Disabled

  Sonnet (On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought into Action)

  Sonnet (To a Child)

  The Fates

  Anthem for Doomed Youth

  The Next War

  Song of Songs

  All Sounds Have Been as Music

  Voices

  Apologia pro Poemate meo

  À Terre

  Wild with All Regrets

  Winter Song

  Hospital Barge at Cérisy

  Six O’Clock in Princes Street

  The Roads Also

  This is the Track

  The Calls

  Miners

  And I Must Go

  The Promisers

  Training

  The Kind Ghosts

  To My Friend

  Inspection

  Fragment: A Farewell

  Fragment: The Abyss of War

  At a Calvary near the Ancre

  Le Christianisme

  Spring Offensive

  The Sentry

  Smile, Smile, Smile

  The End

  Strange Meeting

  Follow Penguin

  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, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.

  Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

  My subject is War, and the pity of War.

  The Poetry is in the pity.

  Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is 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 – survives Prussia – my ambition and those names will have achieved themselves fresher fields than Flanders …)

  From My Diary, July 1914

  Leaves

  Murmuring by myriads in the shimmering trees.

  Lives

  Wakening with wonder in the Pyrenees.

  Birds

  Cheerily chirping in the early day.

  Bards

  Singing of summer, scything through the hay.

  Bees

  Shaking the heavy dews from bloom and frond.

  Boys

  Bursting the surface of the ebony pond.

  Flashes

  Of swimmers carving through the sparkling cold.

  Fleshes

  Gleaming with wetness to the morning gold.

  A mead

  Bordered about with warbling water brooks.

  A maid

  Laughing the love-laugh with me; proud of looks.

  The heat

  Throbbing between the upland and the peak.

  Her heart

  Quivering with passion to my pressèd cheek.

  Braiding

  Of floating flames across the mountain brow.

  Brooding

  Of stillness; and a sighing of the bough.

  Stirs

  Of leaflets in the gloom; soft petal-showers;

  Stars

  Expanding with the starr’d nocturnal flowers.

  The Unreturning

  Suddenly night crushed out the day and hurled

  Her remnants over cloud-peaks, thunder-walled.

  Then fell a stillness such as harks appalled

  When far-gone dead return upon the world.

  There watched I for the Dead; but no ghost woke.

  Each one whom Life exiled I named and called.

  But they were all too far, or dumbed, or thralled;

  And never one fared back to me or spoke.

  Then peered the indefinite unshapen dawn

  With vacant gloaming, sad as half-lit minds,

  The weak-limned hour when sick men’s sighs are drained.

  And while I wondered on their being withdrawn,

  Gagged by the smothering wing which none unbinds,

  I dreaded even a heaven with doors so chained.

  To Eros

  In that I loved you, Love, I worshipped you,

  In that I worshipped well, I sacrificed

  All of most worth. I bound and burnt and slew

  Old peaceful lives; frail flowers; firm friends; and Christ.

  I slew all falser loves; I slew all true,

  That I might nothing love but your truth, Boy.

  Fair fame I cast away as bridegrooms do

  Their wedding garments in their haste of joy.

  But when I fell upon your sandalled feet,

  You laughed; you loosed away my lips; you rose.

  I heard the singing of your wing’s retreat;

  Far-flown, I watched you flush the Olympian snows

  Beyond my hoping. Starkly I returned

  To stare upon the ash of all I burned.

  My Shy Hand

  My shy hand shades a hermitage apart,

  O large enough for thee, and thy brief hours.

  Life there is sweeter held than in God’s heart,

  Stiller than in the heavens of hollow flowers.

  The wine is gladder there than in gold bowls.

  And Time shall not drain thence, nor trouble spill.

  Sources between my fingers feed all souls,

  Where thou mayest cool thy lips, and draw thy fill.

  Five cushions hath my hand, for reveries;

  And one deep pillow for thy brow’s fatigues;

  Languor of June all winterlong, and ease

  For ever from the vain untravelled leagues.

  Thither your years may gather in from storm,

  And Love, that sleepeth there, will keep thee warm.

  Storm

  His face was charged with beauty as a cloud

  With glimmering lightning. When it shadowed me

  I shook, and was uneasy as a tree

  That draws the brilliant danger, tremulous, bowed.

  So must I tempt that face to loose its lightning.

  Great gods, whose beauty is death, will laugh above,

  Who made his beauty lovelier than love.

  I shall be bright with their unearthly brightening.

  And happier were it if my sap consume;

  Glorious will shine the opening of my heart;

  The land shall freshen that was under gloom;

  What matter if all men cry aloud and start,

  And women hide bleak faces in their shawl,

  At those hilarious thunders of my fall?

  October 1916

  Music

  I have been urged by earnest violins

  And drunk their mellow sorrows to the slake

  Of all my sorrows and my thirsting sins.

  My heart has beaten for a brave drum’s sake.

  Huge chords have wrought me mighty: I have hurled

  Thuds of God’s thunder. An
d with old winds pondered

  Over the curse of this chaotic world,

  With low lost winds that maundered as they wandered.

  I have been gay with trivial fifes that laugh;

  And songs more sweet than possible things are sweet;

  And gongs, and oboes. Yet I guessed not half

  Life’s symphathy till I had made hearts beat,

  And touched Love’s body into trembling cries,

  And blown my love’s lips into laughs and sighs.

  October 1916–17

  Shadwell Stair

  I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.

  Along the wharves by the water-house,

  And through the dripping slaughter-house,

  I am the shadow that walks there.

  Yet I have flesh both firm and cool,

  And eyes tumultuous as the gems

  Of moons and lamps in the lapping Thames

  When dusk sails wavering down the pool.

  Shuddering the purple street-arc burns

  Where I watch always; from the banks

  Dolorously the shipping clanks,

  And after me a strange tide turns.

  I walk till the stars of London wane

  And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair.

  But when the crowing syrens blare

  I with another ghost am lain.

  Happiness

  Ever again to breathe pure happiness,

  The happiness our mother gave us, boys?

  To smile at nothings, needing no caress?

  Have we not laughed too often since with joys?

  Have we not wrought too sick and sorrowful wrongs

  For their hands’ pardoning? The sun may cleanse,

  And time, and starlight. Life will sing sweet songs,

  And gods will show us pleasures more than men’s.

  But the old Happiness is unreturning.

  Boy’s griefs are not so grievous as youth’s yearning,

  Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

  We who have seen the gods’ kaleidoscope,

  And played with human passions for our toys,

  We know men suffer chiefly by their joys.

  Exposure

  Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive 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 shivering ranks of grey,

  But nothing happens.

  Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.

  Less deathly than the air that shudders black with snow,

  With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew,

  We watch them wandering up and down the wind’s nonchalance,

  But nothing happens.

  Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces –

  We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,

  Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,

  Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses,

  Is it that we are dying?

  Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed

  With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;

  For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;

  Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed, –

  We turn back to our dying.

  Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;

  Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.

  For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid;

  Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,

  For love of God seems dying.

  Tonight, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,

  Shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp.

  The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,

  Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,

  But nothing happens.

  Fragment: ‘Cramped in that Funnelled Hole’

  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 middle 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.

  Fragment: ‘It is Not Death’

  It is not death

  Without hereafter

  To one in dearth

  Of life and its laughter,

  Nor the sweet murder

  Dealt slow and even

  Unto the martyr

  Smiling at heaven:

  It is the smile

  Faint as a [waning] myth,

  Faint, and exceeding small

  On a boy’s murdered mouth.

  The 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 stretchèd 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, –

  And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

  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-leads

  Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,

  Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,

  Sharp with 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.

  The Show

  We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living

  Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world,

  And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.

  W. B. YEATS

  My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,

  As unremembering how I rose or why,

  And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,

  Grey, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,

  And pitted with great pocks and scabs of plagues.

  Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,

  There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled.

&nbs
p; It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs

  Of ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed.

  By them had slimy paths been trailed and scraped

  Round myriad warts that might be little hills.

  From gloom’s last dregs these long-strung creatures crept,

  And vanished out of dawn down hidden holes.

  (And smell came up from those foul openings

  As out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening.)

  On dithering feet upgathered, more and more,

  Brown strings, towards strings of grey, with bristling spines,

  All migrants from green fields, intent on mire.

  Those that were grey, of more abundant spawns,

  Ramped on the rest and ate them and were eaten.

  I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten,

  I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flatten.

  Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean,

  I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather.

  And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.

  And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid

  Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,

  Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,

  And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.

  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.