The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen

[Jenna]

The poems I found most haunting among the non-martial ones included "Maundy Thursday," "The Rime of the Youthful Mariner," and "Who Is the God of Canongate?" It was also interesting to see, after my dip into Hans Christian Andersen's tales last year, that Owen saw Andersen as a kind of forefather, honing his craft by writing English verse renderings of both "The Little Mermaid" and "Little Claus and Big Claus."

I love Owen's use of pararhyme and feel inspired to try my own hand at it sometime. I wonder what other poets have been notable for using it?

Another thing that's been on my mind is Owen's sparing and meaningful use of the word "friend." I'm thinking, for example, of how much work the phrase "my friend" does in the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est," where it is bitingly satirical but maybe also a little desperate in its effort to win over, to convince. Or how spine-tingling the word "friend" is when it is used by the two dialogists, each once, in "Strange Meeting": there, the early spoken words "Strange, friend" could just as well be read as "Strange friend," foreshadowing the poem's final revelation of ghostliness; later, in the oxymoronic sentence "I am the enemy you killed, my friend," the use of the word drives home the paradox of death and its transcendence of national boundaries. In "Spring Offensive," there is the rather intriguingly vague line "The sun, like a friend with whom their love is done" -- what sort of "love" is being spoken of in this metaphor, and how comes it to be "done," one wonders? And then there is the poem "Wild With All Regrets," dedicated to Siegfried Sassoon, wherein the speaker, on his deathbed (prefiguring Owen's own premature death less than a year later), toys with the vampiric idea of transforming into a flea so that he can "find another body" to prolong his waning life, ending with these startlingly direct and eroticism-mingled lines:

"A flea would do. If one chap wasn't bloody,
Or went stone-cold, I'd find another body.

Which I shan't manage now. Unless it's yours.
I shall stay in you, friend, for some few hours.
You'll feel my heavy spirit chill your chest,
And climb your throat on sobs, until it's chased
On sighs, and wiped from off your lips by wind.

I think on your rich breathing, brother, I'll be weaned
To do without what blood remained me from my wound."


Owen only foresaw his speaker's life being prolonged for "some few hours" by this imaginative method, but today, over a century later, he still "stay[s] in" us, palpable on our lips and in our chests and throats, the lines of his poetry still buoyed "on [our] breathing." Our human species still must grapple with the spiritual ramifications of having killed him, of continuing to kill innocents like him, even today.

[J.S.]

Owen has always been one of my "go to" poets.