Wilfred Owen and the Poetry of Remembrance: Reading Armistice Season

Wilfred Owen was killed on 4 November 1918, during the crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal in northern France, one week before the Armistice. His mother received the telegram on Armistice Day itself, while church bells in Shrewsbury rang in celebration. Few facts in English literature so sharply expose the gap between public rejoicing and private loss, and it is partly why Owen returns each November: as the season of remembrance arrives, his poems are the ones most often read aloud. The question for a thoughtful reader is how to read them well rather than merely ritually.

A poet made almost entirely after death

Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, near Oswestry. Only five of his poems were published in his lifetime, one of them in fragmentary form, which means the Owen of the anthologies is a posthumous construction. His first collection, Poems, appeared from Chatto and Windus in 1920 with an introduction by his friend Siegfried Sassoon, who edited it with help from Edith Sitwell. It carried 23 poems, among them “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est.” A fuller edition by Edmund Blunden followed in 1931.

The editorial history matters because the reputation was assembled by other writers. Owen’s own unfinished preface, found among his papers, contains the statement most quoted about his work: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” The line is inscribed on his stone in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, unveiled on 11 November 1985, and it works as both manifesto and caution. Owen is not arguing a strategy or a politics so much as insisting on a way of seeing.

Craiglockhart and the education of a poet

The turning point was Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where Owen was treated for shell shock and met Sassoon, already known for his protest against the war. The two parted on the evening of 3 November 1917, when Owen was discharged. The following year was brief and intense. Owen composed or revised some of his strongest work, including “Futility” and “Strange Meeting,” in Ripon in 1918, then returned to the front, earned the Military Cross for action near Joncourt on 1 October 1918, and was dead five weeks later.

The sequence complicates a common story. Owen was not simply a victim-poet: he was an officer who went back to France knowing what he would see, and who wrote, at least in part, so that others would see it too. The poems that result are not free of the conventions of their time. They have a sensuous ear for sound that owes something to the Romantics, and a feeling for the language of liturgy that the best of them turn against itself.

How to read the famous poems

“Dulce et Decorum Est” takes its title from a line of Horace, the Latin tag that the poem calls a lie, and its force is that of an argument made through a single experience, a gas attack observed at close range. It is among the most anthologised poems in English, which creates a risk of over-familiarity: a poem taught as a slogan loses what is particular in it. Reading it slowly, with attention to rhythm and to where the sentences break, restores some of the original shock.

“Anthem for Doomed Youth” works differently. It borrows the language of church ritual, bells, choirs, prayers, to ask what rites the deaths of soldiers actually receive. Read in November, with the season’s public ceremonies in mind, it asks a pointed question about what remembrance is for, and whether the ritual is adequate to the loss.

A short list of less-anthologised poems repays the effort. “Futility” is a very brief lyric about the sun and a dead man, and it asks a question that no ceremony answers. “Strange Meeting” is a dialogue in half-rhyme between a soldier and the man he killed, set in a place that is neither battlefield nor afterlife. Both move away from the anecdotal into something closer to elegy, and both show a poet whose range was wider than the two titles that most readers know.

Armistice season, read honestly

Remembrance Sunday falls on 8 November this year and Armistice Day on 11 November, and Owen will be quoted at both. Some of that quotation will be thoughtful, and some will use him to say things he might have contested. A fair reading resists both sanctification and simplification. Owen is neither a peace slogan nor a patriotic relic. What survives in his best poems is a method, in which witnessing is the ethical act and pity is the material the poem is made from.

It helps, too, to keep the dates in view. This week brings the 108th anniversary of Owen’s death, and the gap between that date and the Armistice is the whole of his posthumous career in miniature: he missed the peace by days, and the poems arrived only after the world had moved on to mourning. Reading him in this window is less an act of nostalgia than of attention to a particular silence, the one in which he was still writing and no one yet knew he would be read.

A practical way to read this season: choose three poems and read each aloud once, on separate days. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, first performed in 1962, makes extensive use of Owen’s poetry and is a good companion once the words are familiar. Then return to the facts with which this article began. A poet dies a week before the war he wrote against is over, and the bells ring on the day his mother opens the telegram. The poems are what he left, and they are better read slowly than recited.

Sources: Poets.org, Wilfred Owen · Wikipedia, Wilfred Owen · Wikipedia, Poems (Wilfred Owen)