Winter Song

Winter Song

By Wilfred Owen

 

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.

 

 

About this Poem

 

“Winter Song,” unpublished at the time of Wilfred Owen’s death, was first collected in The Poems of Wilfred Owen(Chatto & Windus, 1931). In “Wilfred Owen’s Influence on Three Generations of Poets,” published in The Modern Review, vol. 242, no. 3 (September 1978), Sasi Bhusan Das, former director of the Institute of English in Calcutta, writes, “[T]he idea of spiritual rebirth in Owen’s ‘Winter Song’ is confirmed by the next few lines of its first stanza: ‘And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, / Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.’ [. . .] It will be further noted that in his ‘Winter Song’ Owen also sings of a symbolic spring [. . .] in the same manner as [T. S.] Eliot in the opening passage of ‘Little Gidding’ does of the ‘Midwinter spring.’ Thus, in a sense, Owen’s ‘Winter Song,’ like Eliot’s passage, is a song of ‘Midwinter spring’ which is ‘sempiternal’ for it is not in ‘time’s covenant’ but ‘suspended in time.’” Jon Stallworthy, professor emeritus at the University of Oxford, notes in his titular biography of Owen that the poem is one of two “addressed to Arthur Newboult, the seven-year-old son of Edinburgh friends.”

 

About the Poet

 

On March 18, 1893, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Shropshire, England. After the death of his grandfather in 1897, the Owen family moved to Birkenhead, where Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute. After another move in 1906, he continued his studies at the technical school in Shrewsbury. Interested in the arts at a young age, Owen began writing poetry as a teenager.

 

In 1911, Owen matriculated at London University, but after failing to receive a scholarship, he spent a year as a lay assistant to a vicar in Oxfordshire. In 1913, he went on to teach in France at the Berlitz School of English, where he met the poet Laurent Tailhade. He returned from France in 1915 and enlisted in the Artists Rifles. After training in England, Owen was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment in 1916.

 

Owen was wounded in combat in 1917 and, diagnosed with shell shock, was evacuated to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. There, he met another patient, poet Siegfried Sassoon, who served as a mentor and introduced him to well-known literary figures such as Robert Graves and H. G. Wells.

 

It was at this time Owen wrote many of his most important poems, including “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est.” His poetry often graphically illustrated the horrors of warfare, the physical landscapes that surrounded him, and the human body in relation to those landscapes. His verse stands in stark contrast to the patriotic poems of war written by earlier poets of Great Britain, such as Rupert Brooke. A gay man, Owen also often celebrated male beauty and comradery in his poems.

 

Owen rejoined his regiment in Scarborough in June 1918, and, in August, he returned to France. In October he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery at Amiens. He was killed on November 4, 1918, while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors. He was twenty-five years old. The news reached his parents on November 11, Armistice Day.

 

While few of Owen’s poems appeared in print during his lifetime, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (New Directions, 1963), with an introduction by Sassoon, was first published in December 1920 and reissued several times. Owen has since become one of the most admired poets of World War I. A review of Owen’s poems published on December 29, 1920, just two years after his death, read, “Others have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended [sic] the roselight and romance of it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted nor such sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers.”

 

About Owen’s post-war audience, the writer Geoff Dyer said,

To a nation stunned by grief, the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking from the other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the shadow cast by the dead over England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the medium through whom the missing spoke.