The Shropshire Lad

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WILFRED OWEN edited by C. Day Lewis. 191 pages. New Directions. $4.75.

In 1914, a month before the guns of August began to thunder, a 21-year-old Englishman wrote some verse:

Leaves murmuring by myriads in the

shimmering trees. Lives wakening with wonder in the

Pyrenees. Birds cheerily chirping in the early

day Bards singing of summer, scything

thro' the hay.

It was charming, Keatsian and somehow like every other poem tossed off by a carefree youth in the flush of summer.

Then Wilfred Owen went to war, and in the muck and death of the trenches wrote a different sort of poem:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the

blood

Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, 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.

Owen's poems seemed to speak for all the war's suffering and brought English poetry down to earth with blunt, homely words. Auden, Spender, T. S. Eliot and a whole generation of English poets acknowledged their debt to Owen. Now Owen's poems have been published in the most complete edition to date. Editor Lewis has added several un published poems that were written in Owen's youth and were in his brother's possession; in addition many other poems have been corrected.

A War of Caterpillars. Owen was born in sleepy Shropshire. His father was a railway engineer; his mother had a taste for culture. Shy, moody, frail, Owen began writing melancholy, softly sensuous verse in his teens, dealing generally with "golden gardens and sweet glooms." Since his family did not have the money to send him to college, he went to France as a tutor. While there, war broke out. Owen had no desire to get involved. He wrote his mother: "I feel my own life all the more precious and dear in the presence of this deflowering of Europe."

But he changed his mind and was commissioned an infantry officer in June 1916. Under fire, he matured fast as a man and as a poet. "Hideous landscape here," he wrote home. "Vile poisons, foul language. Everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dugout all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious."

Owen was soon calling these sights by their right names in his own poetry. He wanted people at home to feel the suffering of the maimed, the blind, the dying and the mad, the muddy horror of no man's land where

Across its beard, that horror of harsh

wire, There moved thin caterpillars, slowly

uncoiled. It seemed they pushed themselves to

he as plugs Of ditches, where they writhed and

shrivelled, killed.

Swelling of the Sea. Owen narrowly escaped death many times. One night, he fell into a well, suffering a concussion. He was sent to a hospital in Edinburgh, where he met Siegfried Sassoon, who read Owen's poems and encouraged him. Owen left the hospital convinced of his profession. "I go out of this year a poet, my dear mother, as which I did not enter it. I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon." Friends tried to get him a job in London, but Owen decided to return to the front. He believed that he could convey the suffering of his fellow men only by sharing it. He won the Military Cross for capturing a number of machine guns and German prisoners: "I only shot one man with my revolver; the others I took with a smile." A week before the Armistice, Owen was leading his company across the Sambre Canal when he was hit and killed.

Shortly before his death at 25, he wrote, in effect, his own epitaph:

Move him into the sun.

Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields unsown.

Always it woke him, even in France, Until this morning and this snow.

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

Think how it wakes the seeds, Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides Full-nerved--still warm--too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.