But patient gives the stronger sense, and carries on the alliteration of the previous line and the first five lines of the octave.

An early BM draft, substituting you for these, makes the poem more directly personal—

Anthem for Dead Youth

What passing-bells for you who die in herds?

—Only the monstrous anger of the guns!

—Only the stuttering rifles’ rattled words

Can patter out your hasty orisons.

No chants for you, nor balms, nor wreaths, nor bells,

Nor any voice of mourning, save the choirs,

And long-drawn sighs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for you from sad shires.

What candles may we hold to speed you all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine [the] holy lights of our goodbyes.

The pallor of girls’ brows must be your pall.

Your flowers, the tenderness of comrades’ minds,

And each slow dusk, a drawing-down of blinds.

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 beatings of great bells

In wild train-loads?

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

May creep back, silent, to still village wells

Up half-known roads.

BM has five drafts, three entitled The Draft. HO has one part-draft.

Owen evidently had difficulty in deciding the form of this poem: the earlier drafts begin, respectively—

(i) Softly down darkening lanes they sang their way

And no word said.

They filled the train with faces vaguely gay

And shoulders covered all white with wreath and spray

As men’s are, dead.

(ii) Low-voiced through darkening lanes they sang their way to the cattle-shed.

And filled the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray, as men’s are, dead.

(iii) Down the wet darkening lanes they sang their way to the cattle-shed

And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray

As men’s are, dead.

1. 19: all five drafts have to still village wells. In the final draft, however, followed by EB, still is cancelled, as is an alternative, strange. Both metre and rhythm require a monosyllable here, and it seems probable that Owen would have inserted one in a final revision. I have therefore restored still.

The part-draft appears in a letter home, dated May 4, 1918, in which Owen writes, I have long ‘waited’ for a final stanza to The Draft (which begins—

1

“Down the deep, darkening lanes they sang their way

To the waiting train,

And filled its doors with faces grimly gay,

And heads and shoulders white with wreath and spray,

As men’s are, slain.”

4

Will they return, to beatings of great bells,

In wild train-loads?

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

May walk back, silent, to their village wells,

Up half-known roads.

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 gray,

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.

To-night, 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.

BM has two drafts and several part-drafts. Owen dated this poem, February 1916: EB points out that this must be a slip of the pen for February 1917.

I. 17 : EB gives deadly

II. 38–9: The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp,

{Look dumbly on their faces,—bricks; their stark eyes,—ice Pause over half—known faces; all their eyes are red}.

I am indebted to Dr. Welland for the following notes on the last six lines of this poem.

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

Shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp.

This is a pencilled correction (above the line) of a previously inserted the. I am sure that it is this, but there is just enough ambiguity about it to justify retaining EB’s preferable reading. Similarly, the pencilled correction to the last line of the previous stanza appears to have the inserted between for and love, but the horizontal line may be read either as the crossing of the t or as a cancellation.

1. 39: It is possible to read the last word as red because of an ink loop above the final letter, but it is surely a slip of the pen: the half-rhyme demands ice which he uses in two previous attempts at this line (once on each sheet).”

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,

Gray, 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 gray, with bristling spines,

All migrants from green fields, intent on mire.

Those that were gray, 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.

BM has one draft: HO has one early draft, heavily corrected and untitled.

II. 1–5: HO, He looked down, from the great height of death,

Having forgotten how he died, and why.

He saw the earth face grey and sunk with dearth

And cratered like the moon’s with hollow woe,

All pitted with great pocks and scabs of plague.

I. 6: BM has, Across {the horror of its beard of wire, deleted. its horrid beard of prickly wire,}

In a letter to his mother, dated January 19, 1917, Owen writes that No Man’s Land is pockmarked like a body of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer … No Man’s Land under snow is like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.

Spring Offensive

Halted against the shade of a last hill,

They fed, and lying easy, were at ease

And, finding comfortable chests and knees,

Carelessly slept. But many there stood still

To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,

Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.

Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled

By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge,

For though the summer oozed into their veins

Like an injected drug for their bodies’ pains,

Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass,

Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.

Hour after hour they ponder the warm field—

And the far valley behind, where the buttercup

Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up,

Where even the little brambles would not yield,

But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands;

They breathe like trees unstirred.

Till like a cold gust thrills the little word

At which each body and its soul begird

And tighten them for battle. No alarms

Of bugles, no high flags, no clamorous haste—

Only a lift and flare of eyes that faced

The sun, like a friend with whom their love is done.

O larger shone that smile against the sun,—

Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned.

So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together

Over an open stretch of herb and heather

Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned

With fury against them; earth set sudden cups

In thousands for their blood; and the green slope

Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space.

Of them who running on that last high place

Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up

On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,

Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,

Some say God caught them even before they fell.

But what say such as from existence’ brink

Ventured but drave too swift to sink,

The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,

And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames

With superhuman inhumanities,

Long-famous glories, immemorial shames—

And crawling slowly back, have by degrees

Regained cool peaceful air in wonder—

Why speak not they of comrades that went under?

BM has one draft: SS has one part-draft, ending But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing arms, and with a footnote by Owen, Is this worth going on with? / I don’t want to write anything to which a soldier would say No Compris!

I. 10: SS. Like the injected drug for their bones’ pains,

I. 14: SS. buttercups

I. 18: BM has All their strange day cancelled at the beginning of this line. The words weaken the line: on the other hand, Owen would probably have written a substitute for them in a final revision, since the other short lines in BM (39, 45) also have indications of being unfinished.

II. 30—1: SS.