The Sunday Night Poem: Wilfred Owen

[Editor's note: the narrator hosted a large family gathering over Thanksgiving and apologizes for posting The Sunday Poem on Tuesday. He also is looking for ways to disguise reheated leftovers from his children, alas, to no avail.]

Wilfred Owen will forever be known as the most acclaimed poet who wrote about "The Great War," or World War I. Born in 1893, he enlisted in the British army in 1915 at the age of 22. In 1917 while hospitalized in England recovering from shell shock he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged Owen to expand his poetic voice to include his experiences in the war. Owen took this advice and over a period from August 1917 to September 1918 he wrote some of the best war poetry ever.

He was killed by German machine gun fire on November 4, 1918 while wading across the Sambre-Oise Canal in northern France. His mother received the telegram announcing his death one week later, on Armistice Day. The poem below is titled after John 15:13: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Greater Love

Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude
Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce love they bear
Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

Your voice sings not so soft, -
Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft, -
Your dear voice is not dear,
Gentle, and evening clear,
As theirs whom none now hear,
Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

-Wilfred Owen (published posthumously, 1920)