1914 Poem by Wilfred Owen
1914
War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,
Is over all the width of Europe whirled,
Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled
Are all Art's ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin.
The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.
For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,
And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,
An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,
A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need
Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.
war is, is always dreadful far so ugly than beautiful tears is life but otherwise mangled flesh, blind eyes yet blood-thirsty ground insatiable craves crown
A great prophetic poem foreshadowing T S Eliot's 'The Wasteland' and the retreat of modern art after WWI into abstraction and subjectivity. The more I read Owen the bigger he gets as a poet.
For Auitumn, see The British Empire? For Winter, see Washington? For Spring see China?
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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4/18/2024 3:17:08 PM # 1.0.0.1119
It's really gross the way this smarmy poem avoids the issue of English responsibility for WW1