I saw his round mouth's crimson deepen as it fell

Wilfred Owen

I Saw His Round Mouth’s Crimson

I saw his round mouth’s crimson deepen as it fell,

Like a Sun, in his last deep hour;

Watched the magnificent recession of farewell,

Clouding, half gleam, half glower,

And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek.

And in his eyes

The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,

In different skies.

By Wilfred Owen

Owen was born in Shropshire in 1893, the eldest of four children. The family lived in his paternal grandfather’s house. Wilfred’s father worked on the railways, essentially Owen was from a working-class background but in those days that meant something different. When we say ‘working class’ now we tend to mean something gritty and somewhat poverty stricken.

Owen’s family believed in education and Wilfred passed the entrance exam for the University of London but without passing with first-class honours he was unable to take up his place because there was no money to pay for his University career.

He went to work as a lay assistant for the Vicar of Dunsden near Reading and was able to take some classes at University College, Reading, taking botany and later Old English. Then in 1913, he worked in France teaching English and French at the Berlitz school in Bordeaux. There’s tremendous bravery in all this, pushing himself into a different world from that of his family, one that was academic, literary and seemingly out of his reach. But I honestly think that a hundred and twelve years ago, aspiring to an education was not freighted with the same disdain or transactional expectations that it has today. We are spoilt. We are bigoted here in 2025. In Owen’s day, education must have seemed like a magical realm hard to enter but not impossible and always full of wonders, it was its own reward.

Wilfred Owen is regarded as the greatest poet of World War One though he wrote so few poems. His most famous is probably Anthem for Doomed Youth and he was doomed himself, fighting and dying in France. He was killed in action on the 4^th November 1918, a week before the Armistice was signed. Terrible bad luck.

Wilfred Owen said:

‘I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful.’

His poems were beautiful but also full of horror, giving a realistic picture of what it was really like in the trenches – What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

The poem above is short but visual, describing the moment a man is killed and dies, blood in his mouth and his eyes ‘old and bleak’. Someone young dying becoming old in front of you.

Is Wilfred Owen still taught in school?