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The first selection of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, assembled by his friend and mentor Siegfried Sassoon, was published posthumously in 1920 under the title Poems. This volume follows the order, titles and text of the expanded edition, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, which was edited by Edmund Blunden and published in 1931.
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2017
Cover design and illustration: Coraline Bickford-Smith
ISBN: 978-0-241-30325-2
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
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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 …)
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.
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.
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 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.
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;