greykit.poetry — Wilfred Owen

• 1920 [wilfred-owen] Anthem for Doomed Youth
  Poems

  What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns — no mockeries, no prayers; their only memorial the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

  #war#WWI#sonnet#elegy#1910s
• 1920 [wilfred-owen] Dulce et Decorum Est
  Poems

  Owen's soldiers march exhausted through sludge; a gas attack takes one too slow with his helmet; the speaker inverts Horace's old lie — you would not glorify war if you had watched this man drown in his own lungs.

  #war#WWI#gas#anti-war#1910s
• 1920 [wilfred-owen] Futility
  Poems

  Move him into the sun — it woke him always, even in France, until this morning and this snow; was it for this the clay grew tall? — O what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all?

  #war#WWI#elegy#free-verse#1910s