Sunday 22 February 2015

Sunday War Poet ...

This is the last of my WW1 love poems

in February.






Greater Love


by 



Wilfred Owen




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 Edward Salter Owen

(1893- 1918) 


Was born in Oswestry, Shropshire. In 1913 he went to France for two years to work as a language tutor. He began writing poetry as a teenager. In 1915 he returned to England to enlist in the army and was commissioned into the Manchester Regiment.

 On 4 November 1918 he was killed while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre canal at Ors. The news of his death reached his parents on 11 November, Armistice Day



 

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