WWI commemoration - the poetry of Wilfred Owen

[charlie_cochrane]

Most of you will know how much I love the poetry of Wilfred Owen. My admiration of him goes back to when we studied his poems for English O Level; it broke my heart that he had died so close to the end of the war. Many of his poems have become very familiar to all of us, especially "Strange Meeting" and "Dulce et Decorum Est", but it's "Disabled" which chills me the most. Such powerful images of a life wasted.

The poems they didn't share at school were the strongly homo-erotic ones, such as "Page eglantine", "Who is the God of Canongate" and "I am the Ghost of Shadwell stair". (The last one apparently is a play on words between ghost and infantryman, with a suggestion that Owen himself is the ghost.)

Some poems were never finished, such as "Lines to a Beauty seen in Limehouse". To me, it reads as though the handsome bloke he sees with the lovely knees is a mirror image to the man in "Disabled".

Comments

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

I love Page Eglantine. Such a beautifully ambiguous and powerful piece of writing.

[charliecochrane.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. That ambiguity flows through several of his poems. Nothing ambiguous about Canongate, though. :)