"Miners" is a poem by Wilfred Owen. He wrote the poem in Scarborough in January 1918, a few weeks after leaving Craiglockhart War Hospital where he had been recovering from a shell-shock. Owen wrote the poem in direct response to the Minnie Pit Disaster in which 156 people (155 miners, 1 rescue worker) died. [1]
After his discharge from Craiglockhart and a short spell of leave, Owen rejoined his army unit (the 3/5th battalion the Manchester Regiment) in Scarborough. While his men were in stationed at Burniston Road Barracks a mile north-west of the town, Owen and other officers were billeted in the Clarence Gardens (now the Clifton) Hotel; Owen was the mess secretary. [2] [3] Owen had a unique room in the hotel: he occupied the five-windowed turret on the 5th floor, directly overlooking the sea. [4]
He wrote Miners in under an hour [5] in response to the Minnie Pit Disaster of 12 January 1918, in which 156 men and boys lost their lives as a result of a firedamp explosion, including 40 pit-lads under 16. Owen was unusually well-acquainted (for someone with a grammar school education) with working-class miner types. Aged nineteen, he had met a Northumberland pit-lad who made a particular impression on him at a nonconformist convention in Keswick in 1912. [6] Also, many of the men in his platoon had worked down the Lancashire pits before the war: in 1916, Owen had described his men as [7]
"hard-handed, hard-headed miners, dogged, loutish, ugly. (But I would trust them to advance under fire and to hold their trench;) blond, coarse, ungainly, strong, 'unfatiguable', unlovely, Lancashire soldiers, Saxons to the bone.
In addition, Owen was a keen geologist who had collected rocks and minerals since his youth, and in Miners he uses phrases like "smothered ferns" and "frond-forests", redolent of the imprints of fossil plants in coal.
The opening stanzas evoke the poet gazing into the fire imagining a primeval forest older than myth, "before the fauns". But his traumatic experiences on the Western Front intrude on his somewhat romantic meditation: "Wrote a poem on the Colliery Disaster: but I get mixed up with the War at the end. It is short, but oh! sour." [8] The gently hissing coals recall the moans of the dying miners "writhing for air"; Owen intertwines their deaths with those of soldiers at the front, imagining charred bodies reduced to ash. Owen laments that though people over the coming years will live on peacefully and doze by fires, their coals will have been formed of the toils of the dead soldiers and miners, now buried under the earth and forgotten.
For a projected volume of his work, Owen gave the poem the subtitle: How the future will forget the dead in war. [9]
There was a whispering in my hearth,
A sigh of the coal,
Grown wistful of a former earth
It might recall.
I listened for a tale of leaves
And smothered ferns,
Frond-forests, and the low sly lives
Before the fauns.
My fire might show steam-phantoms simmer
From Time's old cauldron,
Before the birds made nests in summer,
Or men had children.
But the coals were murmuring of their mine,
And moans down there
Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men
Writhing for air.
And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard,
Bones without number.
Many the muscled bodies charred,
And few remember.
I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed.
Comforted years will sit soft-chaired,
In rooms of amber;
The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered
By our life's ember;
The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned;
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground. [10]
Owen sent the poem to The Nation in the evening of the day he finished it. [11] The proofs arrived while Owen was preparing to attend Robert Graves' wedding (on 23 January at St. James's Church, Piccadilly). [12]
Miners was published on 26 January 1918, one of only five poems by Owen published in his lifetime. [13] [Note 1] The cheque arrived on 14 February. Owen, in one of his many letters to his mother, said he was "satisfied with the Two Guineas that half-hour's work brought me." [5]
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was an English war poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and satirized the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war with his "Soldier's Declaration" of July 1917, which resulted in his being sent to the Craiglockhart War Hospital. During this period he met and formed a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was greatly influenced by him. Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume, fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the Sherston trilogy.
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English poet and soldier. He was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was much influenced by his mentor Siegfried Sassoon and stood in contrast to the public perception of war at the time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Among his best-known works – most of which were published posthumously – are "Dulce et Decorum est", "Insensibility", "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Futility", "Spring Offensive" and "Strange Meeting". Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918, a week before the war's end, at the age of 25.
Edmund Charles Blunden was an English poet, author, and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong. He ended his career as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.
Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet and artist. His Poems from the Trenches are recognized as some of the most outstanding poetry written during the First World War.
Not About Heroes is a drama by Stephen MacDonald about the real-life relationship between the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon first performed in 1982 at the Edinburgh Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Ivor Bertie Gurney was an English poet and composer, particularly of songs. He was born and raised in Gloucester. He suffered from bipolar disorder through much of his life and spent his last 15 years in psychiatric hospitals. Critical evaluation of Gurney has been complicated by this, and also by the need to assess both his poetry and his music. Gurney himself thought of music as his true vocation: "The brighter visions brought music; the fainter verse".
"Dulce et Decorum est" is a poem written by Wilfred Owen during World War I, and published posthumously in 1920. Its Latin title is from a verse written by the Roman poet Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. In English, this means "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country". The poem is one of Owen's most renowned works; it is known for its horrific imagery and its condemnation of war. It was drafted at Craiglockhart in the first half of October 1917 and later revised, probably at Scarborough, but possibly at Ripon, between January and March 1918. The earliest known manuscript is dated 8 October 1917 and is addressed to the poet's mother, Susan Owen, with the note "Here is a gas poem done yesterday ."
Jon Howie Stallworthy, was a British literary critic and poet. He was Professor of English at the University of Oxford from 1992 to 2000, and Professor Emeritus in retirement. He was also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1986, where he was twice acting president. From 1977 to 1986, he was the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University.
Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff was a Scottish writer and translator, most famous for his English translation of most of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, which he published under the Shakespearean title Remembrance of Things Past. His family name is the double-barrelled name "Scott Moncrieff".
"Mental Cases" is one of Wilfred Owen's more graphic poems. It describes war-torn men suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, otherwise known as shell shock. Owen based the poem on his experience of Craiglockhart Military Hospital, near Edinburgh, where he was invalided in the summer of 1917 with neurasthenia, and became the patient of Dr A.J. Brock. Using imagery of death and violence, Owen presents a chilling portrait of men haunted by their experiences.
John William Dominic Hibberd FRSL was an English freelance author, academic and broadcaster, best known for his biographies of the poets Wilfred Owen and Harold Monro and his collections of First World War poetry. He was an Honorary Fellow of the War Poets Association and contributed numerous articles to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Halmer End is a small village in the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, neighbouring the small hamlet of Alsagers Bank and the larger village of Audley.
William Harold Owen was the younger brother and biographer of the English poet and soldier, Wilfred Owen. He was born at the home of his paternal grandparents in Canon Street, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, where his parents and older siblings then lodged before his father moved on promotion to a station master's post at Birkenhead in 1898.
"Futility" is a poem written by Wilfred Owen, one of the most renowned poets of World War I. The poem was written in May 1918 and published as no. 153 in The Complete Poems and Fragments. The poem is well known for its departure from Owen's famous style of including disturbing and graphic images in his work; the poem instead has a more soothing, somewhat light-hearted feel to it in comparison. A previous secretary of the Wilfred Owen Association argues that the bitterness in Owen's other poems "gives place to the pity that characterizes his finest work". "Futility" details an event where a group of soldiers attempts to revive an unconscious soldier by moving him into the warm sunlight on a snowy meadow. However, the "kind old sun" cannot help the soldier – he has died.
"Wild With All Regrets" is a poem by Wilfred Owen. It deals with the atrocities of World War I.
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"Apologia Pro Poemate Meo" is a poem by Wilfred Owen. It deals with the atrocities of World War I. The title means "in defence of my poetry" and is often viewed as a rebuttal to a remark in Robert Graves' letter "for God's sake cheer up and write more optimistically - the war's not ended yet but a poet should have a spirit above wars."
With an Identity Disc is a poem written by English poet Wilfred Owen. The poem was drafted on 23 March 1917.
Soldier's Dream is a poem written by English war poet Wilfred Owen. It was written in October 1917 in Craiglockhart, a suburb in the south-west of Edinburgh (Scotland), while the author was recovering from shell shock in the trenches, inflicted during World War I. The poet died one week before the Armistice of Compiègne, which ended the conflict on the Western Front.
Poems was a quarto volume of poetry by Wilfred Owen published posthumously by Chatto and Windus in 1920. Owen had been killed on 4 November 1918. It has been described as "perhaps the finest volume of anti-war poetry to emerge from the War".