- Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
- I
- Happy are men who yet before they are killed
- Can let their veins run cold.
- Whom no compassion fleers
- Or makes their feet
- Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
- The front line withers.
- But they are troops who fade, not flowers,
- For poets' tearful fooling:
- Men, gaps for filling:
- Losses, who might have fought
- Longer; but no one bothers.
- II
- And some cease feeling
- Even themselves or for themselves.
- Dullness best solves
- The tease and doubt of shelling,
- And Chance's strange arithmetic
- Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.
- They keep no check on armies' decimation.
- III
- Happy are these who lose imagination:
- They have enough to carry with ammunition.
- Their spirit drags no pack.
- Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.
- Having seen all things red,
- Their eyes are rid
- Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
- And terror's first constriction over,
- Their hearts remain small-drawn.
- Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle
- Now long since ironed,
- Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.
- IV
- Happy the soldier home, with not a notion
- How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,
- And many sighs are drained.
- Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:
- His days are worth forgetting more than not.
- He sings along the march
- Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,
- The long, forlorn, relentless trend
- From larger day to huger night.
- V
- We wise, who with a thought besmirch
- Blood over all our soul,
- How should we see our task
- But through his blunt and lashless eyes?
- Alive, he is not vital overmuch;
- Dying, not mortal overmuch;
- Nor sad, nor proud,
- Nor curious at all.
- He cannot tell
- Old men's placidity from his.
- VI
- But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
- That they should be as stones.
- Wretched are they, and mean
- With paucity that never was simplicity.
- By choice they made themselves immune
- To pity and whatever mourns in man
- Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
- Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
- Whatever shares
- The eternal reciprocity of tears.