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Insensibility

Happy are men who yet before they are

Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion

Or makes their

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

The front line withers,

But they are troops who fade, not

For poets' tearful fooling:

Men, gaps for

Losses who might have

Longer; but no one bothers.

And some cease

Even themselves or for themselves.

Dullness best

The tease and doubt of shelling,

And Chance's strange

Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.

They keep no check on Armies' decimation.

Happy are these who lose imagination:

They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Their spirit drags no pack.

Their old wounds save with cold can not more ache.

Having seen all things red,

Their eyes are

Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.

And terror's first constriction over,

Their hearts remain small drawn.

Their senses in some scorching cautery of

Now long since ironed,

Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.

Happy the soldier home, with not a

How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,

And many sighs are drained.

Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:

His days are worth forgetting more than not.

He sings along the

Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,

The long, forlorn, relentless

From larger day to huger night.

We wise, who with a thought

Blood over all our soul,

How should we see our

But through his blunt and lashless eyes?

Alive, he is not vital overmuch;

Dying, not mortal overmuch;

Nor sad, nor proud,

Nor curious at all.

He cannot

Old men's placidity from his.

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones.

Wretched are they, and

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves

To pity and whatever mourns in

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever

The eternal reciprocity of tears.

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Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, MC (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918) was an English poet and soldier. He was one of the leading poets of the First W…

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