draft I can trace. In certain other poems—Greater Love, Conscious, To My Friend—Blunden conflated two or more MS. drafts ; these, and other minor points, are mentioned in my notes.

The purpose of the notes is not to give a complete apparatus criticus, but chiefly to record such variants as show how Owen improved a line or a passage through successive workings, or variants which are of intrinsic interest. I have also, where possible, drawn upon his correspondence to comment upon the specific experience that went to the making of a given poem and thus fixes the date after which the poem was written.

Since it is not possible to date a great number of these poems, I have arranged them in a non-chronological order. Part One gives all the completed poems which are directly concerned with the war: first, those treating it in a more general, distanced way; then those which convey the soldier’s first experiences of war; then the poems which describe action and its aftermaths. In Part Two I have placed poems on other subjects, or not primarily concerned with the war, together with some fragments. Part Three offers a selection of Owen’s juvenilia and minor poems, chosen to illustrate some of the things I have said about his youthful work and sensibility.

C. DAY LEWIS

* Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Owen’s correspondence are from letters written to his mother.

* A family nickname.

* See Appendix 1.

* See Appendix 2.

* Wilfred Owen: a Critical Study (London: 1960).

† But no copy of Romains’ work was found amongst Owen’s books; and I can discover no reference to Romains in his correspondence.

* op. cit. Chapter Five.

PREFACE

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….)

WAR POEMS

Strange Meeting

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision’s face was grained;

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,

And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.

“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”

“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

Was my life also; I went hunting wild

After the wildest beauty in the world,

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

But mocks the steady running of the hour,

And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

For of my glee might many men have laughed,

And of my weeping something had been left,

Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled,

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery,

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:

To miss the march of this retreating world

Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now….”

BM has final draft, and five drafts of a passage leading up to and including the present 11. 28–39. HO had one early draft, which he presented to the editor of this edition.

1. 10: BM (a) has dead deleted: also, cancelled, Yet slumber droned all down that sullen hall. This line is omitted by S. S.

Between 11. 13 and 14 Owen wrote and cancelled But all was sleep. And no voice called for men.

1. 15 : EB the other,

1. 25: BM (a) has ‘the one thing war distilled’ altered to ‘the pity war distilled.’

1. 39: in BM (a) this line is circled and arrowed to become the final line of the poem. Let us sleep now appears to have been written in later and tentatively. HO ends poem with the present penultimate line, below which Owen has written But not in war.

1. 40: BM (b) gives I was a German conscript, and your friend.

Insensibility

I

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.

II

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.

III

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.

IV

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.

V

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.

VI

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 mourns in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears.

BM has one draft; HO has one draft, heavily corrected.

1.5: BM has Dances on the hard ground deleted.

Feel not

1. 8: BM has That one should , poetic deleted.

1.