greykit.poetry — Wilfred Owen/poems-1920
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns — no mockeries, no prayers; their only memorial the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Dulce et Decorum Est
Owen's soldiers march exhausted through sludge; a gas attack takes one too slow with his helmet; the speaker inverts Horace's old lie — you would not glorify war if you had watched this man drown in his own lungs.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Exposure
Not the guns but the weather is the enemy — merciless iced east winds that knife them, sentries whispering, dawn massing in the east — and after every stanza the same shrug: but nothing happens.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Futility
Move him into the sun — it woke him always, even in France, until this morning and this snow; was it for this the clay grew tall? — O what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all?
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Insensibility
Happy are men who can lose imagination — the ode works through every kind of merciful deadening the front supplies, then curses those who by choice made themselves immune to the eternal reciprocity of tears.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Strange Meeting
Escaping down a tunnel out of battle, the speaker meets a sleeper who springs up and turns out to be the man he killed — and who mourns not his own death but the truth untold, the pity of war, the pity war distilled.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
The Send-off
A draft entrained in secret, sung down the close darkening lanes and wreathed as if already a corpse — and the question of how many will come back, up half-known roads, to village wells.