Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO THE MEMORY OF WILFRED OWEN, by CHARLES NORMAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO THE MEMORY OF WILFRED OWEN, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Into the sunset of their youth they strode
Last Line: When lads before them paced to pave the ground.
Subject(s): Death; Honor; Memory; Military; Owen, Wilfred (1893-1918); Poetry & Poets; Soldiers; Youth; Dead, The


Into the sunset of their youth they strode,
Resolved to horror splendidly, and brave;
Oh, brave they were upon war's final road
To bring irresolution to the grave,
Firmly, in the staccato scene of war
Where the huge guns abode whose speech has blown
To twilight beaches of the evening star
Since Flanders and the fields of France were sown
With youth, and the sad world forgot to weep.
Oh, these were lads with singing in their blood,
And lips too fond of kissing love to sleep,
And loathing their last mistress of moist mud.

These, in the world's far cities, walked so proud,
Tingling when twilight glimmered, and their eyes
Saw glad-faced girls unto whose eyes they vowed
The fleet, immortal moments of the wise.
Oh, these were lovers and beloved of many,
The nights glowed with their ardor, days dawned bright;
Now where they sleep, they are unknown to any;
The trailing seeds thrust through them toward the light.
And these were song-makers and full of dreaming,
Who brooded in late hours of endeavor,
Until they saw war's lurid flowers streaming
In the shocked sky, and shut their eyes forever.

Now, in the streets they trod, the shadows lie
In deep, spilled heaps of gloom that cats disturb
Probing the midnight and the fleece of sky
That glitters in the pool beside the curb.
And not their sons walk here, but tired, old men;
And women old for sorrow of those years
That tried their souls, and will not try again,
Having but once inured their souls to tears,
Horror and loneliness, and perished dreams.
Oh, here, before bright bugles called to death,
Lads paused for kissing the entangled gleams
Of moonlight in girls' hair; their souls drew breath.

But not for long; for then the summons came,
The glamorous treachery of bugles blowing,
And banners beating in their hearts like flame
That were not on the roads when they were going
In solemn march abreast to stain the ground,
And spill their years for petals' sustenance;
This was the final glory that they found,
In dark or twilight on the soil of France.
And lads fell there that will not ever know
Those seeds they brooded on had come to bud
On barren ground and ground beneath the snow
In the astounding blossom of their blood.

Their hearts, the harps of sorrow, are unwrought,
Are stilled forever, and will sound no more;
And all their visioning has come to nought;
Their ships of dreaming foundered by the shore.
Their songs and stories and their sculpturing,
Painting, and all the arts of their distress,
Blow with the wind from seas of evening,
Beyond the sea-towns of forgetfulness.
And we forget the grandeur of their ways
Before spring labored in the earth to speed
The tragic flowers of these empty days
That bloom upon the highway of new greed.

O slender shadows of the cross that hide
The little grass upon lads' graves, but not
The folly of our elders in their pride
Whose souls are crucified on gleams of thought:
What of the living lads—oh, what of these,
Who face the sunrise of exulting times,
Aware of the bright buds of ecstasies,
Splendor of art, and love that chants in rhymes?
There is no voice that answers, but the moan
Of winds mourning in twilight, and the sound
Of those manoeuvered guns again that shone
When lads before them paced to pave the ground.





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