The WWI War Poems of Wilfred Owen: The Poetry is in the Pity

The First World War is always seen through the lens of time or propaganda.

It's something which happened elsewhere, permeated now with visions of cratered landscapes and endless rows of neat, white gravestones. If it comes alive at all, then it's remotely glimpsed through the jerky images of grainy, black and white footage; or the photographs of a muddied Somme.

Wilfred Owen changes all that. His words reach back through time to drag us into the reality.

This twenty-something boy from rural Shropshire was killed just days before the end of the war. His parents received the telegram on Armistice Day. Before that, Owen had a close call when he'd been blown sky-high during a mortar attack. He'd suffered shell-shock. He'd lain for days on an embankment surrounded by the scattered remains of an officer.

Owen had also wrestled an enemy machine gun from an isolated position and used it to fire back across the lines. He had led several units in an assault near the village of Joncourt, France; and taken those points. He received the Military Cross for Valor.

Wilfred Owen needn't have been on the front line at all in 1918. Having been injured and sent home for recuperation, he opted to return to France. His fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon had narrowly survived being shot in the head, and that left no 'voice' to tell these stories.

Owen went back because he felt his duty lay in ensuring the truth was told. The poetry had to be written. (Though Sassoon threatened to 'stab him in the leg', if Owen volunteered to return to the front. And the poet soon regretted his 'foolishness', once he was back in the trenches.)

Wilfred Owen was desperate to do his part to ensure that something like this could never happen again. Because people reading his verse, understanding the reality, would grasp the pity of war. How then could they send more men into it?

He was shot and killed, on November 4th 1918, while attempting to cross the Sambre Canal. 2nd Lieutenant Owen, of the Manchester Regiment, was only twenty-five years old.

Like Jeremy Paxman, I was also exposed to Wilfred Owen's poetry for the first time at school.

It was through pouring over poetry like Anthem for Doomed Youth and Futility that I learned the power of words. Not as an abstract, being worked upon as a reader without knowing why, but as something which could be crafted to become more than the sum of their definition.

Wilfred Owen selects words not merely for their meaning, but the way that they sound when spoken aloud. His poems were never written to be silently scanned, but to be shouted with passion from the roof-tops.

Speak aloud these lines from Anthem for Doomed Youth, and listen to how the machine guns can be heard behind them.

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons

Two volleys splutter through the first two lines, then shocked silence lingers through the third. It's in the choice of words and the speed of the syntax. There's the repetition of 'only the' signalling another round. Then the softer sounds of 'can patter out' to apply the literary brakes. Before the sibilance kicks in with 'their hasty orisons', spitting bitterness into the lull.

This kind of thing is the genius of Wilfred Owen. It's what renders his poetry less a straight narrative description, and more an actual experience of war. His readers don't just register a report, we hear the guns, smell the gas, flinch from the mortars, get deafened by the shells and shiver in exposure to the wind and snow.

Sometimes we die.

'This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.'

Wilfred Owen did not live to see his poems published together in a collection. But he planned for that to happen. In May 1918, he even wrote the preface for it.  The above is how it began.

A heart-breaking humanity runs an undercurrent through every one of Owen's snapshot glimpses into the front line. He mentions courage and heroism, but more so the fact that no-one would willingly be there. They are living, breathing, thinking, feeling men pushed right to the limits of endurance, then past them.

Owen describes what he sees all around him with a deep compassion. Nor is this solely reserved for those on his own side.

In Strange Meeting, it is a German soldier who tells of what the war has cost him. The richness of his own life, mind and personality ('I went hunting wild after the wildest beauty..') has been extinguished in 'the pity of war, the pity war distilled.' There's guilt too for the Englishman, as the ghostly German tells how sheer exhaustion meant that he couldn't even save his own life.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now ...

If time and propaganda would dehumanize those individuals fighting on both sides of the conflict, then Wilfred Owen strikes back with a resounding 'no'. This happened to people just like him, and just like me and you.

Now, for pity's sake, stop it happening ever again.