__Few pence in purse had I,
And long I used to stand and look __At things I could not buy.
Now times are altered: if I care __To buy a thing, I can;
The pence are here and here's the fair, __But where's the lost young man?
--- To think that two and two are four __And neither five nor three
The heart of man has long been sore __And long 'tis like to be.
"XXXV" or "When first this way to fair I took" is taken from A.E. Housman's Last Poems, first published in 1922. Housman is best known for his great cycle of poems, The Shropshire Lad(1896). His sparse, simple verse made "XIII" ("When I was one and twenty," a similar poem in many ways to "XXXV" from Last Poems) and war-themed poems hugely popular in the early 1900s. Last Poems is a less structured and consistent collection, put together by Housman as his lifelong love lay dying. It was the last collection he published in his life. Like the poems in Shropshire Lad, those in Last Poems display a deep and honest sentimentality.
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
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.
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) is the most famous and greatest of all "war poets" (with perhaps his close friend Siegried Sassoon), but he is far more than that. The terse forcefulness of his verse marks it as truly modern. His influence is immense; he is the most studied of English writers after only Shakespeare. This is his most well-read poem, written not long before his death, which came during the final week of World World I, the war whose horrors are so associated with his poetry. The title and last line "...Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori" come from an ode of Homer and mean "it is sweet and right to die for your country." The line was used by propogandists of the war.
A reading of "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen:
Online place to put a few of my favorite poems. I'll try to put a half-dozen or dozen up soon and then add when I remember or come across another favorite.
