PENGUIN CLASSICS
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This selection published in Penguin Classics 2015
‘The Last Laugh’ and ‘The Letter’ copyright © the Executors of Harold Owen’s Estate, 1963, 1983
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-39761-0
1. 1914
2. Dulce et Decorum Est
3. Arms and the Boy
4. Inspection
5. From My Diary, July 1914
6. Apologia pro Poemate Meo
7. S.I.W.
8. The Last Laugh
9. The Send-Off
10. Exposure
11. Smile, Smile, Smile
12. The Letter
13. Anthem for Doomed Youth
14. With an Identity Disc
15. Le Christianisme
16. ‘Cramped in that funnelled hole’
17. Hospital Barge
18. At a Calvary near the Ancre
19. Conscious
20. Futility
21. Disabled
22. Miners
23. Insensibility
24. Strange Meeting
25. Asleep
26. The Show
27. Mental Cases
28. The Chances
29. The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
30. The End
31. A Terre
32. The Kind Ghosts
33. The Sentry
34. Spring Offensive
35. Greater Love
36. The Next War
37. Follow Penguin
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War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,
Is over all the width of Europe whirled,
Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled
Are all Art’s ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. Love’s wine’s thin.
The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.
For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,
And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,
An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,
A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need
Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.