I just found a marvellous new source for Wilfred Owen’s war poetry, thanks to Oxford University. It lets you view multiple manuscript versions of these poems.
And today’s poem is…
Insensibility
1
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.
2
And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling,
And Chance’s strange arithmetic
Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.
They keep no check on armies’ decimation.
3
Happy are these who lose imagination:
They have enough to carry with ammunition.
Their spirit drags no pack.
Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.
Having seen all things red,
Their eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
And terror’s first constriction over,
Their hearts remain small-drawn.
Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle
Now long since ironed,
Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.
4
Happy the soldier home, with not a notion
How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,
And many sighs are drained.
Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:
His days are worth forgetting more than not.
He sings along the march
Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,
The long, forlorn, relentless trend
From larger day to huger night.
5
We wise, who with a thought besmirch
Blood over all our soul,
How should we see our task
But through his blunt and lashless eyes?
Alive, he is not vital overmuch;
Dying,* not mortal overmuch;
Nor sad, nor proud,
Nor curious at all.
He cannot tell
Old men’s placidity from his.
6
But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
That they should be as stones.
Wretched are they, and mean
With paucity that never was simplicity.
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever moans in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.
Manuscript Sources
OEFL,
Fasc T, f328r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f329r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f330r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f328v |
BL,
MS 43720, f19a |
BL,
MS 43720, f20a |
* In the original text taken from the Oxford website, this was written “Drying”. But sense and a tiny bit of detective work in the ms. sources (see Comments) indicate alike that it should be “Dying”.
First — thank you. that’s completely wonderful, and an antidote to newspapers. Second, I think there may be a typo — shouldn’t “Drying” be “dying” in verse 5, line 6?
Andrew, it looks as though you might be right. I “lifted” the whole text, plus the manuscript versions at the bottom of it, from the Oxford University website linked to there… I just skimmed quickly through the fourth of the mss., which indicates you are right. I’ll amend the post. Thanks!