The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan.
10 They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman, And shells go crying over them From night till night and now.
Earth has waited for them,
is All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last! In the strength of their strength Suspended?stopped and held.
20 What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? Earth! have they gone into you? Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their soul's sack,
25 Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. Who hurled them out? Who hurled?
None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass, Or stood aside for the half-used life to pass Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
so When the swift iron burning bee Drained the wild honey of their youth.
What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, Our lucky limbs as on ichor2 fed,
35 Immortal seeming ever? Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, A fear may choke in our veins And the startled blood may stop.
1. Two-wheeled carts, here carrying barbed wire. 2. In Greek mythology the ethereal fluid that flowed in the veins of the gods.
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197 0 / VOICE S FROM WORL D WA R 1 4045The air is loud with death, The dark air spurts with fire, The explosions ceaseless are. Timelessly now, some minutes past, These dead strode time with vigorous life, Till the shrapnel called 'An end!' But not to all. In bleeding pangs Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts. 50A man's brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer's face; His shook shoulders slipped their load, But when they bent to look again The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness. 55They left this dead with the older dead, Stretched at the crossroads. 60Burnt black by strange decay Their sinister faces lie; The lid over each eye, The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences. Here is one not long dead; His dark hearing caught our far wheels, And the choked soul stretched weak hands 6570 To reach the living word the far wheels said, The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels Swift for the end to break, Or the wheels to break, Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight. 75Will they come? Will they ever come? Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, The quivering-bellied mules, And the rushing wheels all mixed With his tortured upturned sight. So we crashed round the bend, We heard his weak scream, We heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face. 1917 1922
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1971
WILFRED OWEN 1893-1918
Wilfred Owen was brought up in the backstreets of Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, and on leaving school he took up a post as lay assistant to a country vicar. Removed from the influence of a devout mother, he became increasingly critical of the Church's role in society. His letters and poems of this period show an emerging awareness of the poor's sufferings and the first stirrings of the compassion that was to characterize his later poems about the Western Front. In 1913 he broke with the vicar and went to teach English in France.
For more than a year after the outbreak of war, Owen could not decide whether he ought to enlist. Finally he did, and from January to May 1917 he fought as an officer in the Battle of the Somme. Then, suffering from shell shock, he was sent to a hospital near Edinburgh, where he had the good fortune to meet Siegfried Sassoon, whose first fiercely realistic war poems had just appeared. The influence of Sassoon's satiric realism was a useful tonic to Owen's lush, Keatsian Romanticism. Throughout his months in the hospital, Owen suffered from the horrendous nightmares symptomatic of shell shock. The experience of battle, banished from his waking mind, erupted into his dreams and then into poems haunted with obsessive images of blinded eyes ('Dulce et Decorum Est') and the mouth of hell ('Miners' and 'Strange Meeting'). The distinctive music of such later poems owes much of its power to Owen's mastery of alliteration, onomatopoeia, assonance, half-rhyme, and the para- rhyme that he pioneered. This last technique, the rhyming of two words with identical or similar consonants but differing, stressed vowels (such as groined / groaned, killed / cold, hall / hell), of which the second is usually the lower in pitch, produces effects of dissonance, failure, and unfulfillment that subtly reinforce his themes.
Echoing Dante, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, and the Bible, Owen puts literary and religious language into jarring new relationships with the absurdities of modern war experience. He recuperates but distorts the conventions of pastoral elegy, relocating them to scenes of terror, extreme pain, and irredeemable mass death.
In the year of life left to him after leaving the hospital in November 1917, Owen matured rapidly. Success as a soldier, marked by the award of the Military Cross, and as a poet, which had won him the recognition of his peers, gave him a new confidence. He wrote eloquently of the tragedy of young men killed in battle. In his later elegies a disciplined sensuality and a passionate intelligence find their fullest, most moving, and most memorable expression.
Owen was killed in action a week before the war ended.
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.0 prayers 5 No mockeries now 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.0 counties
What candles may be held to speed them all?
10
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
