Poetry
Poems
Wilfred Owen · 1920
Opening lines
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Twenty-three poems, several of them found among their author's papers. Exhausted soldiers return from the front, bent double like old beggars under their sacks, and march in their sleep; a gas attack surprises one of them, too slow to put on his mask, who drowns in a green light. A funeral bell tolls for those who die like cattle, and only the rattle of rifles answers it. A soldier who has come out of the battle goes down into a deep tunnel and meets a stranger there who calls him his friend. A soldier is carried into the sun, which used to wake him every morning.
Context
Only five poems had appeared in their author's lifetime, two of them in the journal of the hospital where shell-shock cases were treated; seven others appeared in 1919 in an annual anthology. The collection, a slim volume of thirty-three pages, was put together by the poet who had encouraged him at that hospital, with the help of a woman of letters, and appeared in December 1920 with a portrait of the author. The preface printed in it was found unfinished among his papers: it announces that the book is not about heroes, that English poetry is not yet worthy to speak of them, and that its subject is war and the pity of war. A reprint of 1921 added a poem, and a greatly expanded edition appeared in 1931.
Who it is for
Short poems, some unfinished, as the author died before revising them; in French, only selections of the poems.
Prizes and reception
Britten set several of these poems to music, along with others by the same author, in his War Requiem of 1962.
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