pickOwen died a week before the WWI armistice, in 1918. Before that he had some harrowing experiences, and wrote some poetry based on this. But it wasn‘t until he met Siegfried Sassoon while hospitalized that he discovered his work was good. He worshipped Sassoon, reworked his poetry in his unique style of matching consonant endings (without rhyme). Then he returned to the front until his death, leaving us only his drafts.
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Such a great Poet and a waste of life. He died at the Battle of Sambre during WWI.
pick1947 Faber edition of Brooke's culturally significant poetry collection, containing his five-sonnet cycle of war poems published within weeks of his death on active duty in WWI. That he died from an infected mosquito bite and never saw combat was less mentioned at the time, and that he died in 1915, before the worst excesses of Industrialised War, made his elegiac poems a perfect propaganda memorialisation of the millions of Patriotic Dead. ⬇️
"And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?”
- The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
“I would think of a thousand things,
Lovely and durable, and taste them slowly,
One after one, like tasting sweet food.
I have need to busy my heart with quietude."
- The Busy Heart
“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home."
- The Soldier
A bit jingoistic for my taste, but still affecting ???????
"We have built a house that is not for Time's throwing,
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.
War knows no power, Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death's endeavour;
Safe though all safety's lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all."
- Safety
"Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!"
- Peace
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