Wilfred Owen – Poems (1920)
Poetry – read via iBooks app on the iPhone, May 2011
- 5 nods out of 5 -
The war poets are a revered bunch. Combining what are often seen as conflicting pursuits – the bloodiness of war and the craft of poetry – during the First World War. Over the past one hundred years their names and work have echoed down the decades with vibrancy and strength: Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves to name but a few. The Worm’s favourite is the focus of this brief review; his name? Wilfred Owen.
Having found inspiration from the front line in France during 1917, Owen wrote a batch of beautiful and eye-opening poems; all before dying a week before Armistice Day in 1918 in a truly tragic end. And there is much in this collection that harks of tragedy, just browse the titles alone: Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wild with all Regrets, The Dead-Beat and Futility.
But it is such tragedy that breathes such life into these poems. Owen has the knack of getting to the core of the matter, exposing war for all its terrifying horror; as shown in Disabled, when a boy lies about his age to join the army, only to end by losing his legs. Or as in SIW, when a man shots himself to spare him from the atrocity on the front line:
‘One dawn, our wire patrol
Carried him. This time, Death had not missed.
We could do nothing, but wipe his bleeding cough
Could it be accident? Rifles go off
Not sniped? No. (Later they found the English ball.)’
Before concluding:
‘It was the reasoned crisis of his soul.
Against the fires that would not burn him whole.’
Such command of language ensures Owen’s place as one of the premier war poets. The Worm would even venture to suggest Wilfred Owen has a place amongst the very elite of English poets. The continuing sadness is the early end of his life, leaving us only wondering at what poetry might have come in later life. As he himself, perhaps somewhat erroneously, wrote in The End: ‘Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified; Nor my titanic tears the sea be dried.’
