Poem of the week: The Last Laugh: Wilfred Owen

This week's poem comes from 'The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen,' Edited by C. Day Lewis. I will share with you the Preface:

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.

Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

(If I thought the letter of this book would last, I might have a use for proper names; but if the spirit of it survives Prussia-my ambition and those names will have achieved themselves fresher fields than Flanders....)

Anna Airy: A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes, London (1918)

The Last Laugh

'O Jesus Christ! I'm hit,' he said; and silently died.

Whether he vainly cursed, or prayed indeed, 

The bullets chirped-in vain! vain! vain!

Machine-guns chuckled,-Tut-tut! Tut-tut!

And the Big Gun guffawed.

Another sighed,-'O Mother, mother! Dad!'

Then smiled, at nothing, childlike, being dead.

And the lofty shrapnel-cloud

Leisurely gestured,-Fool!

And the falling splinters tittered.

'My Love!' one moaned. Love-languid seemed his mood,

Till, slowly lowered, his whole face kissed the mud.

And the Bayonets' long teeth grinned;

Rabbles of Shells hooted and groaned; And the Gas hissed.

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893-1918)

Born in Oswestry, and educated at Birkenhead Institute and Shrewsbury Technical School. Worked as a lay assistant to an Evangelical vicar at Dunsden 1911-1913, and as a language tutor in France 1913-1915. Returned to England and enlisted in Artists' Rifles in October 1915. Commissioned in June 1915 as a 2nd Lieutenant in 5th Battalion, Manchester Regiment. Attached to 2nd Battalion in France in December 1915. Severely shell-shocked in May 1916 and invalided to Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh in August, where he met Siegfried Sassoon. Later met Rupert Graves, Osbert Sitwell, C. K. Scott Moncreiff and Philip Bainbrigge. Promoted to Lieutenant in December 1917. Returned to France in August 1918 and rejoined 2nd Battalion. Awarded MC in October and killed in action at the Sambre Canal on 4 November 1918. Editions of poems: Poems edited by Siegfried Sassoon (1920), Poems edited by Edmund Blunden (1931), Collected Poems edited by C. Day-Lewis (1963), War Poems and Others edited by Dominic Hibberd (1973) and Complete Poems and Fragments edited by Jon Stallworthy (1983).