55: EB gives moans. BM has mourns cancelled and moans substituted. I prefer mourns, as did SS.

Apologia Pro Poemate Meo

I, too, saw God through mud,—

The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.

War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,

And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

Merry it was to laugh there—

Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.

For power was on us as we slashed bones bare

Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

I, too, have dropped off fear—

Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,

And sailed my spirit surging light and clear

Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn;

And witnessed exultation—

Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,

Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,

Seraphic for an hour; though they were foul.

I have made fellowships—

Untold of happy lovers in old song.

For love is not the binding of fair lips

With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,

By Joy, whose ribbon slips,—

But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;

Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;

Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong.

I have perceived much beauty

In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;

Heard music in the silentness of duty;

Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

Nevertheless, except you share

With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,

Whose world is but the trembling of a flare,

And heaven but as the highway for a shell,

You shall not hear their mirth:

You shall not come to think them well content

By any jest of mine. These men are worth

Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

November 1917.

BM has two drafts, the earlier unfinished and entitled Apologia pro Poema Disconsolatia Mea. HO has three early drafts, one entitled

The Unsaid.

1. 4: HO And glee, that almost made the gloom worth while.

1. 8: HO For God forgets Christ then, and blesses murder.

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.

BM has five drafts, two of them cancelled. The text given here follows a fair copy, with last-moment changes, made by Owen, and presented to E. Blunden by S. Sassoon.

1. 4: BM (a) has seems weak (not cancelled), and shame in the margin.

1. 8: all BM drafts have beautiful: exquisite is given by EB.

1. 10: earlier drafts give Where God seems not to care; BM (a) substitutes skies for God

1. 18: BM (a) has gagged

The Parable of the Old Man 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.

BM has one draft. OS has one draft.

EB and SS give MEN in title: BM gives MAN.

I. 8: BM has And built a parapet of earth and wood, deleted.

II. 12–16: OS gives

Neither do anything to him, thy son.

Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns

A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

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

1. 16: omitted by SS.

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 the 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.

BM has two drafts. OS has one draft, dated 3.5.18.

1. 5: EB gives bullet-heads

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.

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.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

BM has four drafts. HO has two, together with a draft of the first six lines. LG has one draft.

The poem is entitled Anthem for Dead Youth in the earlier drafts: in the final one, Dead is cancelled and Doomed substituted.

1. 5: EB gives No mockeries for them from prayers or bells. The line appears thus in the final draft, but with form and or cancelled, and no and nor written above; also, now is inserted below mockeries.

1. 13: BM (a) has alternatives, silent and patient, together with a deleted variant, sweet white. The previous drafts show a large number of variants for the epithet. Owen did not hit upon silent till the final draft: patient was then pencilled in, presumably at SS’s suggestion when Owen showed him the poem at Craiglockhart in September, 1917.

Silent contrasts with the various loud noises featured in the octave, and chimes with the plangent long i’s of the sestet—Owen’s sweet white suggests that he needed this sound here.