One of the greatest poems in the English language, written during World War One, on the last day of which Owen was killed. Ostensibly a war poem, it nonetheless has remarkable resonance with those of us who have never known war directly, suggesting that we are more marked than we know by the bloody turmoil of an epoch from which, hopefully, we are now , at last, emerging.
Wilfred Owen
- 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.
In These New Times 