Poems pdf Wilfred Owen Free Download

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 …)

From My Diary, July 1914

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.

The Unreturning

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And while I wondered on their being withdrawn,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.

To Eros

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

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.

Storm

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;

What matter if all men cry aloud and start,

And women hide bleak faces in their shawl,

At those hilarious thunders of my fall?

October 1916

Music

I have been urged by earnest violins

And drunk their mellow sorrows to the slake

Of all my sorrows and my thirsting sins.

My heart has beaten for a brave drum’s sake.

Huge chords have wrought me mighty: I have hurled

Thuds of God’s thunder. And with old winds pondered

Over the curse of this chaotic world,

With low lost winds that maundered as they wandered.

I have been gay with trivial fifes that laugh;

And songs more sweet than possible things are sweet;

And gongs, and oboes. Yet I guessed not half

Life’s symphathy till I had made hearts beat,

And touched Love’s body into trembling cries,

And blown my love’s lips into laughs and sighs.

October 1916–17

Shadwell Stair

I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.

Along the wharves by the water-house,

And through the dripping slaughter-house,

I am the shadow that walks there.

Yet I have flesh both firm and cool,

And eyes tumultuous as the gems

Of moons and lamps in the lapping Thames

When dusk sails wavering down the pool.

Shuddering the purple street-arc burns

Where I watch always; from the banks

Dolorously the shipping clanks,

And after me a strange tide turns.

I walk till the stars of London wane

And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair.

But when the crowing syrens blare

I with another ghost am lain.

Happiness

Ever again to breathe pure happiness,

The happiness our mother gave us, boys?

To smile at nothings, needing no caress?

Have we not laughed too often since with joys?

Have we not wrought too sick and sorrowful wrongs

For their hands’ pardoning? The sun may cleanse,

And time, and starlight. Life will sing sweet songs,

And gods will show us pleasures more than men’s.

But the old Happiness is unreturning.

Boy’s griefs are not so grievous as youth’s yearning,

Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

We who have seen the gods’ kaleidoscope,

And played with human passions for our toys,

We know men suffer chiefly by their joys.

Exposure

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us …

Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent …

Low, drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient …

Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,

But nothing happens.

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,

Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.

Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,

Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.

What are we doing here?

The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow …

We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.

Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army

Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey,

But nothing happens.

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.

Less deathly than the air that shudders black with snow,

With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew,

We watch them wandering up and down the wind’s nonchalance,

But nothing happens.

Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces –

We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,

Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,

Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses,

Is it that we are dying?

Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed

With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;

For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;

Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed, –

We turn back to our dying.

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;

Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.

For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid;

Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,

For love of God seems dying.

Tonight, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,

Shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp.

The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,

Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,

But nothing happens.

Fragment: ‘Cramped in that Funnelled Hole’

Cramped in that funnelled hole, they watched the dawn

Open a jagged rim around; a yawn

Of death’s jaws, which had all but swallowed them

Stuck in the middle of his throat of phlegm.

They were in one of many mouths of Hell

Not seen of seers in visions; only felt

As teeth of traps; when bones and the dead are smelt

Under the mud where long ago they fell

Mixed with the sour sharp odour of the shell.

Fragment: ‘It is Not Death’

It is not death

Without hereafter

To one in dearth

Of life and its laughter,

Nor the sweet murder

Dealt slow and even

Unto the martyr

Smiling at heaven:

It is the smile

Faint as a [waning] myth,

Faint, and exceeding small

On a boy’s murdered mouth.

The Parable of the Old Men and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

And builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him. Behold,

A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son, –

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Arms and the Boy

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade

How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;

Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;

And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads

Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,

Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,

Sharp with sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.

There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;

And God will grow no talons at his heels,

Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

The Show

We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living

Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world,

And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.

W. B. YEATS

My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,

As unremembering how I rose or why,

And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,

Grey, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,

And pitted with great pocks and scabs of plagues.

Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,

There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled.

It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs

Of ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed.

By them had slimy paths been trailed and scraped

Round myriad warts that might be little hills.

From gloom’s last dregs these long-strung creatures crept,

And vanished out of dawn down hidden holes.

(And smell came up from those foul openings

As out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening.)

On dithering feet upgathered, more and more,

Brown strings, towards strings of grey, with bristling spines,

All migrants from green fields, intent on mire.

Those that were grey, of more abundant spawns,

Ramped on the rest and ate them and were eaten.

I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten,

I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flatten.

Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean,

I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather.

And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.

And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid

Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,

Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,

And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.

The Send-Off

Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way

To the siding-shed,

And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray

As men’s are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp

Stood staring hard,

Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.

Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp

Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.

They were not ours:

We never heard to which front these were sent;

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant

Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beating of great bells

In wild train-loads?

A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,

May creep back, silent, to village wells,

Up half-known roads.

Greater Love

Red lips are not so red

As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

Kindness of wooed and wooer

Seems shame to their love pure.

O Love, your eyes lose lure

When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude

Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,

Rolling and rolling there

Where God seems not to care;

Till the fierce Love they bear

Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.

Your voice sings not so soft, –

Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft, –

Your dear voice is not dear,

Gentle, and evening clear,

As theirs whom none now hear,

Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

Heart, you were never hot

Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;

And though your hand be pale,

Paler are all which trail

Your cross through flame and hail:

Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

Insensibility

1

Happy are men who yet before they are killed

Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion fleers

Or makes their feet

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

The front line withers.

But they are troops who fade, not flowers,

For poets’ tearful fooling:

Men, gaps for filling:

Losses who might have fought

Longer; but no one bothers.

2

And some cease feeling

Even themselves or for themselves.

Dullness best solves

The tease and doubt of shelling,

And Chance’s strange arithmetic

Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.

They keep no check on armies’ decimation.

3

Happy are these who lose imagination:

They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Their spirit drags no pack.

Their old wounds save with cold can not more ache.

Having seen all things red,

Their eyes are rid

Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.

And terror’s first constriction over,

Their hearts remain small-drawn.

Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle

Now long since ironed,

Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.

4

Happy the soldier home, with not a notion

How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,

And many sighs are drained.

Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:

His days are worth forgetting more than not.

He sings along the march

Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,

The long, forlorn, relentless trend

From larger day to huger night.

5

We wise, who with a thought besmirch

Blood over all our soul,

How should we see our task

But through his blunt and lashless eyes?

Alive, he is not vital overmuch;

Dying, not mortal overmuch;

Nor sad, nor proud,

Nor curious at all.

He cannot tell

Old men’s placidity from his.

6

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones;

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever moans in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears.

Dulce et Decorum est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And floundering like a man in fire or lime. –

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

The Dead-Beat

He dropped, – more sullenly than wearily,

Lay stupid like a cod, heavy like meat,

And none of us could kick him to his feet;

Just blinked at my revolver, blearily;

– Didn’t appear to know a war was on,

Or see the blasted trench at which he stared.

‘I’ll do ’em in,’ he whined. ‘If this hand’s spared,

I’ll murder them, I will.’

A low voice said,

‘It’s Blighty, p’raps, he sees; his pluck’s all gone,

Dreaming of all the valiant, that aren’t dead:

Bold uncles, smiling ministerially;

Maybe his brave young wife, getting her fun

In some new home, improved materially.

It’s not these stiffs have crazed him; nor the Hun.’

We sent him down at last, out of the way.

Unwounded; – stout lad, too, before that strafe.

Malingering? Stretcher-bearers winked, ‘Not half!’

Next day I heard the Doc’s well-whiskied laugh:

‘That scum you sent last night soon died. Hooray!’

The Chances

I mind as ’ow the night afore that show

Us five got talking, – we was in the know, –

‘Over the top to-morrer; boys, we’re for it.

First wave we are, first ruddy wave; that’s tore it.’

‘Ah well,’ says Jimmy, – an’ ’e’s seen some scrappin’ –

‘There ain’t no more nor five things as can ’appen; –

Ye get knocked out; else wounded – bad or cushy;

Scuppered; or nowt except yer feeling mushy.’

One of us got the knock-out, blown to chops.

T’other was hurt like, losin’ both ’is props.

An’ one, to use the word of ’ypocrites,

’Ad the misfortoon to be took by Fritz.

Now me, I wasn’t scratched, praise God Amighty

(Though next time please I’ll thank ’im for a blighty),

But poor young Jim, ’e’s livin’ an’ ’e’s not;

’E reckoned ’e’d five chances, an’ ’e ’ad;

’E’s wounded, killed, and pris’ner, all the lot,

The bloody lot all rolled in one. Jim’s mad.

Asleep

Under his helmet, up against his pack,

After the many days of work and waking,

Sleep took him by the brow and laid him back.

And in the happy no-time of his sleeping,

Death took him by the heart. There was a quaking

Of the aborted life within him leaping …

Then chest and sleepy arms once more fell slack.

And soon the slow, stray blood came creeping

From the intrusive lead, like ants on track.

Whether his deeper sleep lie shaded by the shaking

Of great wings, and the thoughts that hung the stars,

High-pillowed on calm pillows of God’s making

Above these clouds, these rains, these sleets of lead,

And these winds’ scimitars;

– Or whether yet his thin and sodden head

Confuses more and more with the low mould,

His hair being one with the grey grass

And finished fields of autumns that are old …

Who knows? Who hopes? Who troubles? Let it pass!

He sleeps. He sleeps less tremulous, less cold,

Than we who must wake, and waking, say Alas!

S. I. W.

I will to the King,

And offer him consolation in his trouble,

For that man there has set his teeth to die,

And being one that hates obedience,

Discipline, and orderliness of life,

I cannot mourn him.

W. B. YEATS

I THE PROLOGUE

Patting goodbye, doubtless they told the lad

He’d always show the Hun a brave man’s face;

Father would sooner him dead than in disgrace, –

Was proud to see him going, aye, and glad.

Perhaps his mother whimpered; how she’d fret

Until he got a nice safe wound to nurse.

Sisters would wish girls too could shoot, charge, curse;

Brothers – would send his favourite cigarette.

Each week, month after month, they wrote the same,

Thinking him sheltered in some Y.

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Poems Read Online

Wilfred Owen

POEMS

Contents

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

1

2

3

4

5

6

Dulce et Decorum est

The Dead-Beat

The Chances

Asleep

S. I. W.

I THE PROLOGUE

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