Wilfred Owen Quotes

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores: Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity of tears.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.

Was it for this the clay grew tall? -O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth’s sleep at all?

If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know.

Move him into the sun- Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields unsown.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

‘Strange friend,’ I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’ ‘None,’ said the other, ‘save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world.’

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.

Red lips are not so red As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons.