The Real Siegfried Sassoon

Regeneration (1991) by Pat Barker is the first in the trilogy of novels on the First World War. The excerpt below narrates the first meeting of poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The stuttering Owen asks the older, established poet to sign five copies of Sassoon's book:

Owen, feeding the names, would have given anything to say one sentence without stammering. No hope of that--he was far too nervous. Everything about Sassoon intimidated him. His status as a published poet, his height, his good looks, the clipped aristocratic voice, sometimes quick, sometimes halting, but always cold, the bored expression, the way he had of not looking at you when you spoke--shyness, perhaps but it seemed like arrogance. Above all, his reputation for courage. owen had his owen reasons for being sensitive about that. Sassoon reached the last book. Owen felt the meeting begin to slip away from him. Rather desperately, he said, 'I l-liked "The D-Death B-Bed" b-best.' And suddenly he relaxed. It doesn't matter what this Sassoon thought about him, since the real Sassoon was in the poems.

The Death-Bed from The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1918):

He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped
Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;
Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,
Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.
Silence and safety; and his mortal shore
Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.

Someone was holding water to his mouth.
He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped
Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot
The opiate throb and ache that was his wound.
Water--calm, sliding green above the weir.
Water--a sky-lit alley for his boat,
Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers
And shaken hues of summer; drifting down,
He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.

Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,
Blowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.
Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars
Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;
Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,
Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes.

Rain--he could hear it rustling through the dark;
Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;
Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers
That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps
Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace,
Gently and slowly washing life away.

He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain
Leapt like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore
His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.
But someone was beside him; soon he lay
Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.
And death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and stared.

Light many lamps and gather round his bed.
Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
He's young; he hated War; how should he die
When cruel old campaigners win safe through?

But death replied: 'I choose him.' So he went,
And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.

More from the Siegfried Sassoon collection at Bartleby.

Wilfred Owen in Edinburgh

[old] Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (2002) by Dominic Hibberd.

[Wilfred Owen] was almost ready to begin his annus mirabilis. Identifying himself with other people was not only an ergotherapeutic discipline but also what poets had to do. Keats had said that a poet should be 'continually informing and filling some other body', and Shelley had argued that it was through exercise of the poetic imagination that people could learn morality and love, putting themselves 'in the place of another and of many others', making the pains and pleasures of humanity their own. Wilfred wrote a little poem, 'Six O'Clock in Princes Street', imagining how he could join the happy crowds in town.... But his old ambition to be a meteor-poet, flying above the ordinary, meant he had to follow his own course, not keeping step with the crowd but following 'gleams unsafe, untrue', 'tiring after beauty through star-crowds'.

Six O'Clock in Princes Street from The Collected Poems (1963):

In twos and threes, they have not far to roam,
       Crowds that thread eastward, gay of eyes;
Those seek no further than their quiet home,
       Wives, walking westward, slow and wise.

Neither should I go fooling over clouds,
       Following gleams unsafe, untrue,
And tiring after beauty through star-crowds,
       Dared I go side by side with you;

Or be you in the gutter where you stand,
       Pale rain-flawed phantom of the place,
With news of all the nations in your hand,
       And all their sorrows in your face.

More from The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.

James Fenton on Wilfred Owen

'Wilfred Owen's Juvenilia' by James Fenton (The Strength of Poetry, 2001):

...a complicated set of forces combined to release [Owen] from the spirit of his juvenilia. When reasoning about our creativity, we cannot assume that causality is going to behave in thew ay causality normally behaves. There must be such a thing as causality, we assume; but we cannot expect to understand its workings. In the writing of poetry we may say that the thing we predict will not happen. If we can predict it, it is not poetry. We have to surprise ourselves. We have to outpace our colder calculations.

To-- from The Collected Poems (1963):

Three rompers run together hand in hand.
The middle boy stops short, the others hurtle:
What bumps, what shrieks, what laughter turning turtle.
Love, racing between us two, has planned
A sudden mischief: shortly he will stand
And we shall shock. We cannot help but fall;
What matter? Why, it will not hurt at all,
Our youth is supple, and the world is sand.

Better our lips should bruise our eyes, than He,
Rude Love, outrun our breath; you pant, and I,
I cannot run much farther; mind that we
Both laugh with love; and having tumbled, try
To go forever children, hand in hand.
The sea is rising... and the world is sand.

More from The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.