The Life and Work of Wilfred Owen

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Wilfred Owen was born in Oswestry in Shropshire on 18th March 1893 to Thomas and Susan Owen. He was the eldest of four children and was schooled at the Birkenhead Institute and Shrewsbury Technical School, he worked at Wyle Cop School while preparing for the exam for the University of London. When he missed getting a scholarship he took a job teaching English and French at the Belitz School in France.

In October 1915 he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles. He made 2nd Lieutenant and joined the Manchester Regiment in France in January 1917. While in France Wilfred Owen began writing poems about his war experiences. He was only in the war zone for some four months, but most of his work stems from this horrendous experience. After being injured and left in a bomb crater for days, Owen was transported to the hospital suffering from shell shock.

He met his dear friend, poet Siegfried Sassoon while recovering at Craiglockhart War Hospital. Owen showed his poetry to Sassoon and Robert Graves, who advised and encouraged him. Over the next few months, Owen wrote a series of poems, including Anthem for Doomed Youth, Disabled, Dulce et Decorum Est and Strange Meeting. Owen met H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett through Sassoon and some of his poems published in The Nation. Owen also had talks with William Heinemann about the publication of a collection of his poems. Owen and Sassoon became quite close friends.

In July 1918, Owen returned to active service in France, although he might have stayed on home duty indefinitely. His decision was almost wholly the result of Sassoon’s being sent back to England. Sassoon, who had been shot in the head in a so-called friendly fire incident, was put on sick leave for the remaining duration of the war. Owen saw it as his patriotic duty To take Sassoon’s place at the front, that the horrific realities of the war might continue to be told. Sassoon was violently opposed To the idea of Owen’s returning to the trenches, threatening to” stab [him] in the leg” if he tried it. Aware of his attitude, Owen did not inform him of his action until he was once again in France. Owen won the Military Cross, then was killed by machine-gun fire on 4th November 1918, one week before the Armistice. All but five of his poems were published posthumously by his friend, Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems (1920). (Spartacus Educational, 2008)

The bulk of Owen’s work was written in Craiglock hart hospital, Scotland, in 1917while suffering from shell-shock. It was while he was there that he met Siegfried Sassoon, already an established poet. (“War Poet Owen Died” 18) One wonders what he might have produced had he lived. Owen’s primary subject was the war since it was the most near to him at the time. He used powerful images to paint the horrors of WWI, especially the things like Mustard Gas. It haunted him at a time when many people were ignorant of the true horrors of warfare. Owen’s poetry cut through much of the propaganda which fired these misconceptions and provided a counterbalance to the overtly patriotic work of fellow poet Rupert Brooke.

Owen’s language is a bit biblical, but that does not detract, since it does not interfere with the meaning. Sassoon helped Owen to make his poetry a bit less formal and more accessible, but, sadly, the poet only produced a few more poems before he died. Bidney (2006) calls Owen’s return to the front a victory, since shell shock is caused by the desire to escape the madness, and a return to battle means that this unconscious retreat has been overcome, and the person is healed.

Does he begin the poem with a line that asks what bells will toll the death of those who “die like cattle”?

The most popular of his poems is the Anthem for Doomed Youth. It is a powerfully written poem about the environment of war. He uses sharply defined images with rhythmic sound words to recreate the ordered chaos of the front. His alliteration “Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle “ (line 3) using heavily staccato words mimics the sound of rapid rifle fire. It is these rifles who “patter out” prayers for these dead. Nobody else can help them now.

Owen says that the only mourning here, and the only voices of prayer are the “shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells” It reminds one of the Scottish or Irish bagpipes here, especially as he finishes the line with “bugles calling for them from sad shires”. It is no doubt a huge killing field he is witnessing as he hints at a slaughterhouse in the first line. One might note that Owen used sight and sound, but avoided any mention of the smell here, which must have been almost overpowering.

In the next lines, we see that many of the dead die with their eyes open, and there has been nobody to close them, ad Owen mentions candles “not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes”. We can imagine the bodies laying on the ground with open eyes reflecting the wavering flashes of gun and cannon fire.

Owen finishes the poem with the mention of the girls left behind as the pallor to match the pall these boys shall not have since they will be buried where they fell. The only flowers they will have been imagined, as dusk falls and the blinds are drawn down. The blinds are generally drawn on the room where a person is laid out, so here, Owen draws them figuratively. The falling of dusk and the drawing of the blinds are also symbolic of the end of days for these youth. We should note that Owen says “each slow dusk”, so we know this went on for some time and was not just the observation of one day. The date of the poem coincides with the time when Wilfred Owen was wounded and lying in the hole left by a shell next to a dead soldier. He was there for days until someone found him and took him to the hospital.

Dulce Et Decorum Est is Owen’s best-known poem. The title may have an undercurrent of hidden dialogue because the poem’s content is more about suffering than dying. Owen never says it, but he shows us soldiers who have no hope for recovery after being heavily exposed to mustard gas, yet there is little the doctors and nurses can do to ease their dying.

Owen begins the poem with an image of a long line of exhausted soldiers “bent double” under heavy packs, slogging through the mud, their knees knocking from near collapse, cursing the sludge. They were leaving the front to go to a rest camp, turning away from the flares of shells. Owen shows us, men, with no shoes and bleeding feet, marching asleep, lame, blind, and thinking they are safely out of range of the shells.

The next lines describe the gas attack. The soldiers apparently think they are out of danger, being beyond the reach of the ordinary ordinance, but gas shells are lighter and fly further. So the soldier’s fumble and are slow to react. However, all but one get their gas masks on. The one who does not make it flounders like a man in fire or lime. Owen sees him “drowning” through a green haze of gas. He lunges at Own “guttering” (like a dying candle), “choking” “drowning”. This image is powerful, and the poet says it follows him in all his dreams.

Owen finished the poem by addressing the audience, describing the sight of the wagon of dying men that they “flung him in” and the sounds of the men choking and drowning in their blood. We see powerful images of dying men with “white eyes writhing”. Their eyes turn up into their heads as they have no control over anything. The man’s face is slack, and he gurgles blood at every jolt, the blood coming from his “froth corrupted” lungs, mortally damaged by the gas.

The final line confirms that Owens title is not meant seriously but as an ironic reminder that we wave our flags and cheer our soldiers as if there is glory in war. His last lines say to the audience that if they could see this suffering they would not tell their children that it is sweet and right to die for one’s country. All Owen sees at this point is suffering. Dying would be a blessing.

Owen is rightly considered as possibly the greatest war poet of all time. His poetry carries even more power than a full-color video with surround sound could do. We wonder what he might have written on other subjects has he lived. His death was a great loss to literature. I think it unusual to find such a tender soul inside such a strong and brave man who believed in doing his duty, however lacking glory. WWI in the trenches in France was horrific for the foot soldiers. Many lost their feet from rot. Sickness probably killed as many as actual enemy fire. The use of mustard gas was banned by the Geneva Convention and eventually, this included all biological weaponry.

References

Bidney, Martin. “The Poetry of Shell Shock.” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 49.3 (2006): 350+.

Owen, Wilfred. Selected Letters. Ed. John Bell. Oxford: Oxford University, 1998.

Anthem to Doomed Youth (1917).

Dulce et Decorum Est (1917).

Spartacus Educational, 2008, Willfred Owen, Web.

“War Poet Owen Died a Hero..” Liverpool Echo (Liverpool, England). 2007: 18.

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The Life and Work of Wilfred Owen

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