Top 82 Quotes & Sayings by Wilfred Owen
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English soldier Wilfred Owen.
Last updated on November 10, 2024.
When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to - it leaves nothing.
After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!
The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.
All a poet can do today is warn.
Be bullied, be outraged, be killed, but do not kill.
I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.
If I have got to be a soldier, I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable.
All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.
The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter.
Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.
A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.
All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want.
She is elegant rather than belle.
I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?
All theological lore is growing distasteful to me. All my recent excursions into such fields proves it to be a shifting, hypothetical, doubt-fostering, dusty, and unprofitable study.
Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.
We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death... The marvel is we did not all die of cold.
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.
I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.
I am marooned on a Crag of Superiority in an ocean of soldiers.
Futility Move him into the sun - Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields unsown. Always it woke him, even in France, Until this morning and this snow. If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know. Think how it wakes the seeds, - Woke, once, the clays of a cold star. Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides, Full-nerved -still warm -too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall? -O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all?
Strange friend,' I said,'here is no cause to mourn.' 'None,'said the other,'save the undone years, The hopelessness.Whatever hope is yours Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling
The war affects me less than it ought. But I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter.
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory. The old lie: It is sweet and fitting that you should die for your country.
My subject is war, and the pity of war.
If I have to be a soldier I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable
Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
I, too, saw God through mud - The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled. War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill.
No-man's land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.
The old Lie:Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
The marvel is that we did not all die of cold. As a matter of fact, only one of my party actually froze to death before he could be got back, but I am not able to tell how many have ended up in hospital. We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death.
All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.
Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds,
But here the thing's best left at home with friends.
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
As bronze may be much beautified by lying in the dark damp soil, so men who fade in dust of warfare fade fairer, and sorrow blooms their soul.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Winter Song The browns, the olives, and the yellows died, And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide, And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed. From off your face, into the winds of winter, The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing; But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter, When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing, And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled.
I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears; and caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts; and buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts; and rusted every bayonet with His tears.
The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.
I, too, saw God through mud
These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.
Those who, like the beasts, have no such Hope, pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.
Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.
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