• Home
  • Product
  • About Us
  • Series
  • Weltschmerz
  • Song-a-Day
  • Apocryphal Histories
  • Three Things
  • Of a Garish Amateur
  • My Asinine Life
  • Tao Te Ching
  • Bedroom Theater
  • The Excerpt Series
  • Austrians in April
  • Mutable Radio Show
  • Twilight at the Lady
  • Features
  • Letter from the Editor
  • Manifesto of the Month
  • Sound of the Month
  • This is Not a Review
  • Stories & Poems
  • Interviews & Press
  • In the Mutableye
  • Artists
  • AD Jameson
  • Animal Hospital
  • Beta Male
  • Box Kites
  • Colin Winnette
  • Crank Sturgeon + Lineland
  • Gabriel Boyer
  • Happiness Island
  • Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
  • Liszts
  • Normal Feelings
  • OTL Summer Music Project
  • Paplib
  • The Thousand Eyes
  • The Mannerists
  • Menu

Mutable

  • Home
  • Product
  • About Us
  • Series
  • Weltschmerz
  • Song-a-Day
  • Apocryphal Histories
  • Three Things
  • Of a Garish Amateur
  • My Asinine Life
  • Tao Te Ching
  • Bedroom Theater
  • The Excerpt Series
  • Austrians in April
  • Mutable Radio Show
  • Twilight at the Lady
  • Features
  • Letter from the Editor
  • Manifesto of the Month
  • Sound of the Month
  • This is Not a Review
  • Stories & Poems
  • Interviews & Press
  • In the Mutableye
  • Artists
  • AD Jameson
  • Animal Hospital
  • Beta Male
  • Box Kites
  • Colin Winnette
  • Crank Sturgeon + Lineland
  • Gabriel Boyer
  • Happiness Island
  • Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
  • Liszts
  • Normal Feelings
  • OTL Summer Music Project
  • Paplib
  • The Thousand Eyes
  • The Mannerists

shutterstock-248200399.jpg

Wilfred Owen's War

January 12, 2021 in Poetry, Story

Poetry

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

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 rumor 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 non-
   chalance,
   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; therfore 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.

February 1917

The Show

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 bear, 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 are 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.

Mental Cases

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, — but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hands’ palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

— These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable, and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.
— Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
— Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

Smile, Smile, Smile

Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned
Yesterday’s Mail; the casualties (typed small)
And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.
Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned
“For,” said the paper, “when the war is done
The men’s first instinct will be making homes.
Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes,
It being certain war has but begun.
Peace would do wrong to our undying dead, —
The sons we offered might regret they died
If we got nothing lasting in their stead.
We must be solidly indemnified.
Though all be worthy Victory which all bought,
We rulers sitting in this ancient spot
Would wrong our very selves if we forgot
The greatest glory will be theirs who fought,
Who kept this nation in integrity.”
Nation? — The half-limbed readers did not chafe
But smiled at one another curiously
Like secret men who know their secret safe.
(This is the thing they know and never speak,
That England one by one had fled to France,
Not many elsewhere now, save under France.)
Pictures of these broad smiles appear each week,
And people in whose voice real feeling rings
Say, How they smile! They’re happy now, poor things.

23rd September 1918

HaK537.jpg

The first world war was the first science fiction war. That’s to say, the first war in which technology transformed the landscape to such a degree that the battlefield no longer was comprehensible to its human participants. Not that war is anything but incomprehensible. Think of Tolstoy’s descriptions of the Napoleonic wars, but this is different. Gas masks on horses, and streaks of light sort of different. Hell was no longer a place of fire and brimstone, but of chemical warfare. That having been said, Wilfred Owen captured this eerie and impossible landscape in a smattering of remarkable poems before his untimely death two days before the end of the war. This week, we thought we might present a few of them to you.

Tags: Wilfred Owen
Prev / Next

Product

Featured
Untitled.jpg
American Darlings
Secret Griefs
American Darlings
American Darlings
DifferentDirectionsCover_02.jpg
Gabriel Boyer
Different Directions
Gabriel Boyer
Gabriel Boyer
FBDownload.gif
Outside the Lines Studio
Falling Boxes
Outside the Lines Studio
Outside the Lines Studio
noplacetodie2.0.jpg
Gabriel Boyer, Normal Feelings
No Place to Die
Gabriel Boyer, Normal Feelings
Gabriel Boyer, Normal Feelings
SpinyFront.jpg
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
Spiny Retinas
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
coverweltschmerz-e1373760787674.jpg
Gabriel Boyer
Welcome to Weltschmerz
Gabriel Boyer
Gabriel Boyer
twilightart.jpg
Gabriel Boyer
Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies
Gabriel Boyer
Gabriel Boyer
geebee.jpg
Various
A Mutable Decade
Various
Various
Revelation.jpg
Colin Winnette
Revelation
Colin Winnette
Colin Winnette
Cast_and_Costumes_large.jpg
Paplib
Cast and Costumes
Paplib
Paplib
Other_Occasions_Not_Minded_large.jpg
Crank Sturgeon, Lineland
Other Occasions Not Minded
Crank Sturgeon, Lineland
Crank Sturgeon, Lineland
AmazingAdultFantasy1.jpg
A D Jameson
Amazing Adult Fantasy
A D Jameson
A D Jameson
BOX_KITES_Glitter_Tracks.jpg
Box Kites
Glitter Tracks
Box Kites
Box Kites
liveatthepiehouse1.jpg
The Mannerists
Live at the Pie House
The Mannerists
The Mannerists
surveyweb1.jpg
Gabriel Boyer
A Survey of my Failures This Far
Gabriel Boyer
Gabriel Boyer
big_troubel_cover.jpg
Liszts
Big Trouble in Little China
Liszts
Liszts
Good or Plenty, Streets + Avenues
Animal Hospital
Good or Plenty, Streets + Avenues
Animal Hospital
Animal Hospital
7nightscover.jpg
Gabriel Boyer
Seven Nights in the Bedroom
Gabriel Boyer
Gabriel Boyer
noplacetodie2.0.jpg
Beta Male
Battery Power
Beta Male
Beta Male
living_from_the_dead2.jpeg
Gabriel Boyer
How to Tell the Living from the Dead
Gabriel Boyer
Gabriel Boyer
textbookcover.jpg
Gabriel Boyer, The Thousand Eyes
The Textbook Tapes
Gabriel Boyer, The Thousand Eyes
Gabriel Boyer, The Thousand Eyes
manifestoi.jpg
Various Authors
Manifesto I
Various Authors
Various Authors
journeyfront.jpg
Happiness Island
A Journey to… Happiness Island
Happiness Island
Happiness Island

Enjoymutable.com is the website of Mutable, a loose conglomeration of artists making books, music and other products, as well as sharing their ideas on the web and in the world. You can read more about us here.