Complete Works of Wilfred Owen Read online

And witnessed exultation —

  Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,

  Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,

  Seraphic for an hour; though they were foul.

  I have made fellowships —

  Untold of happy lovers in old song.

  For love is not the binding of fair lips

  With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,

  By Joy, whose ribbon slips, —

  But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;

  Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;

  Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong.

  I have perceived much beauty

  In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;

  Heard music in the silentness of duty;

  Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

  Nevertheless, except you share

  With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,

  Whose world is but the trembling of a flare,

  And heaven but as the highway for a shell,

  You shall not hear their mirth:

  You shall not come to think them well content

  By any jest of mine. These men are worth

  Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.

  November 1917.

  The Show

  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,

  Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,

  And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.

  Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,

  There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled.

  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 gray, with bristling spines,

  All migrants from green fields, intent on mire.

  Those that were gray, 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.

  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,

  Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,

  Carnage incomparable and human squander

  Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.

  Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented

  Back into their brains, because on their sense

  Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;

  Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh

  — Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,

  Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.

  — Thus their hands are plucking at each other;

  Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;

  Snatching after us who smote them, brother,

  Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

  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 stretched 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. . . .

  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.

  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.

  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 r />
  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.

  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 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.

  IV

  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.

  V

  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.

  VI

  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 mourns in man

  Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

  Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

  Whatever shares

  The eternal reciprocity of tears.

  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 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

  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.

  The Sentry

  We’d found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew,

  And gave us hell, for shell on frantic shell

  Hammered on top, but never quite burst through.

  Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime

  Kept slush waist high, that rising hour by hour,

  Choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb.

  What murk of air remained stank old, and sour

  With fumes of 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 splashing 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 him up, for killed, 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 he’d get all right.

  “I can’t,” he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids

  Watch my dreams still; but I forgot him there

  In posting next for duty, and sending a scout

  To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering 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 broken 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 died out.

  The Dead-Beat

  He dropped, — more sullenly than wearily,

  Lay stupid like a cod, heavy like meat,

  And none of us could kick him to his feet;

  Just blinked at my revolver, blearily;

  — Didn’t appear to know a war was on,

  Or see the blasted trench at which he stared.

  “I’ll do ‘em in,” he whined, “If this hand’s spared,

  I’ll murder them, I will.”

  A low voice said,

  “It’s Blighty, p’raps, he sees; his pluck’s all gone,

  Dreaming of all the valiant, that AREN’T dead:

  Bold uncles, smiling ministerially;

  Maybe his brave young wife, getting her fun

  In some new home, improved materially.

  It’s not these stiffs have crazed him; nor the Hun.”

  We sent him down at last, out of the way.

  Unwounded; — stout lad, too, before that strafe.

  Malingering? Stretcher-bearers winked, “Not half!”

  Next day I heard t
he Doc.’s well-whiskied laugh:

  “That scum you sent last night soon died. Hooray!”

  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 shivering ranks of gray,

  But nothing happens.

  Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.

  Less deadly 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.

  II

  Pale flakes with lingering 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;

  Now 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.

  To-night, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,

  Shrivelling many hands and 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.