Wilfred Owen quotes

Quotes from the Wilfred Owen poems for the OCR English Lit exam 2011

(Lots, more than you need tbh. However, it's better to be safe than sorry)

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Anthem for Doomed Youth.

  • "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?"
  • "stuttering rifles' rapid rattle"
  • "shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;"
  • "not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes/shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes"
  • "each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds"
  • "no mockeries for them; on prayers nor bells"
  • "monstrous anger of the guns."
  • "hasty orisons"
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Arms and the Boy

  • "let the boy try along this bayonet-blade"
  • "how cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood"
  • "blind, blunt bullet-leads"
  • "nuzzle in the hearts of lads"
  • "are sharp with the sharpness of greif and death"
  • "God will grow no talons at his heels"
  • "his teeth seem for laughing round an apple"
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The Sentry

  • "Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime"
  • "left their curses in the den,/if not their corpses...."
  • "there we herded from the blast"
  • "eyeballs huge-bulged like squids"
  • "watch my dreams still, - yet I forgot him there"
  • "shrieking air"
  • "those other wretches, how they bled and spewed"
  • "I try not to remember these things now."
  • "we heard him shout/'I see your lights!' - but ours had long died out."
  • "dense din"
  • "Let Dread hark back for one word only: how,/half listening to that Sentry's moans and jumps,/and the wild chattering of his shivered teeth"
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A Terre

  • "being the philosophy of many soldiers"
  • "both arms have mutinied against me - brutes!
  • "my fingers fidget like ten idle brats"
  • "one dies of war like any old disease"
  • "I have my medals? - discs to make my eyes close./My glorious ribbons? - ripped from my own back/in scarlet shreds. (That's for your poetry book)"
  • "We used to say we'd hate to live dead old,-/yet now....I'd willingly be puffy bald/and patriotic"
  • "shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting./Well, that's what I learnt, - that, and making money"
  • "For one year/to help myself to nothing more than air!/One spring!"
  • "grow me legs as quick as lilac shoots"
  • "here in this mummy case"
  • "Yes, or a muckman. Must I be his load?"
  • "O Life, Life, let me breathe"
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A Terre (cont.)

  • "Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned:/the dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now"
  • "not worse than ours the lives rats lead"
  • "do you think the Boche will ever stew man soup?/some day, no doubt if..."
  • "I shall be better off with plants that share/more peaceably the meadow and the shower"
  • "soft rains will touch me"
  • "your guns may crash around me, I'll not hear"
  • "Don't take my soul's comfort for jest"
  • "My soul's a little grief, grappling at your chest/to climb your throat on sobs; easily chased/on other sighs and wiped by fresher winds."
  • "Carry my crying spirit, till it's weaned/to do without what blood remained these wounds"
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Dulce et Decorum Est

  • "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,/knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge" 
  • "men marched asleep"
  • "on the haunting flares we turned our backs"
  • "All went lame; all blind;/drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots/of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind"
  • "flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...."
  • "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 we flung him in"
  • "white eyes writhing in his face"
  • "his hanging face like a devil's sick of sin"
  • "froth corrupted lungs"
  • " 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"
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Miners

  • "A sigh of coal,/grown wistful of a former earth"
  • "I listened for a tale of leaves/and smothered ferns"
  • "my fire might show steam-phantoms simmer"
  • "Time's old cauldron"
  • "boys that slept wry sleep, and men/writhing for air"
  • "I saw white bones in the cinder-shard"
  • "Bones without number"
  • "many the muscled bodies charred,/and few remember"
  • "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"
  • "they will not dream of us poor lads,/left in the ground"
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Exposure

  • "our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knives us...."
  • "worried by the silence"
  • "we keep awake because the night is silent..."
  • "but nothing happens"
  • "watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,/like twitching agonies of men among its brambles"
  • "a dull rumour of some other war"
  • "what are we doing here?"
  • "the poignant misery of dawn begins to grow..."
  • "we only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy"
  • "flights of bullets streak the silence"
  • "the wind's nonchalance" 
  • "pale flakes with ********* stealth come feeling for our faces-/we cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare"
  • "-Is it that we are dying?"
  • "slowly our ghosts drag home"
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Exposure (cont.)

  • "on us the doors are closed"
  • "we turn back to our dying"
  • "for love of God seems dying"
  • "Tonight, this frost will fasten this mud and us,/shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp"
  • "pause over half known faces. All their eyes are ice./but nothing happens"
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The Show

  • Reference to "W.B. Yeats"
  • "My soul looked down from a vague height, with Death"
  • "ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed."
  • "I saw their bitten backs curve, loop and straighten/I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flatten"
  • "and Death fell with me, like a deepening moan."
  • "Showed me its feet, the feet of many men, and the fresh severed head of it, my head"
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Insensibility

  • "happy are men who yet before they are killed/can let their veins run cold"
  • "with their brothers"
  • "they are troops who fade, not flowers"
  • "for poets' tearful fooling"
  • "men, gaps for filling"
  • "Chance's strange arithmetic" 
  • "Happy are these who lose imagination"
  • "they have enough to carry with ammunition/their spirits drag no pack"
  • "Their eyes are rid/of the hurt of the colour of blood forever"
  • "Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned" 
  • "Happy the lad whose mind was never trained"
  • "The long forlorn, relentless trend/from large day to huger night"
  • "blood over all our soul"
  • "by choice they made themselves immune/to pity and whatever mourns in man"
  • "hapless stars"
  • "the eternal reciprocity of tears"
  • "alive, he is not vital overmuch;/dying, not mortal overmuch"
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Apologia pro Poemate Meo

  • "I, too, saw God through mud"
  • "mud cracked on their cheeks when wretches smiled"
  • "war brought more glory to their eyes than blood/and gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child"
  • "death becomes absurd and life absurder"
  • "for power was on us as we slashed bones bare/not to feel sickness or remorse of murder"
  • "dead as my platoon"
  • "hopes lay strewn"
  • "I have made fellowships"
  • "For love is not the binding of fair lips"
  • "I have perceived much beauty/in hoarse oaths that kept courage straight;/heard music in the silentness of duty;/found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate."
  • "hell the sorrowful dark of hell"
  • "heaven but as the highway for a shell"
  • "you shall not hear their mirth:/you shall not come to think them well content/by any jest of mine."
  • "These men are worth/your tears. You are not worth their merriment"
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Strange Meeting

  • "out of battle I escaped"
  • "encumbered sleepers groaned"
  • "I probed them, one sprang up"
  • "piteous recognition in fixed eyes"
  • "lifting distressful hands as if to bless"
  • "by his dead smile I knew we stood in hell"
  • "no guns thumped, or down flues made moan"
  • "save the undone years/the hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,/was my life also"
  • "the pity of war, the pity war distilled"
  • "courage was mine and I has mystery/wisdom was mine and I had mastery"
  • "miss the march of this retreating world"
  • "much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels"
  • "cess of war"
  • "foreheads of men have bled where no wound were."
  • "let us sleep now..."
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Mental Cases

  • "purgatorial shadows"
  • "dropping tongues from jaws that slob their relish/baring teeth that leer like shills' teeth wicked"
  • "gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets"
  • "surely we have perished/sleeping, and walk; but who these hellish?"
  • "minds the Dead have ravished"
  • "multitudinous murders they once witnessed"
  • "treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter"
  • "batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles"
  • "carnage incomparable, and human squander"
  • "their eyeballs shrink tormented/back into their brains"
  • "sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black"
  • "dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh"
  • "set-smiling corpses"
  • "snatching after us who smote them, brother/pawing us who dealt them war and madness"
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Disabled

  • "he sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark/and shivered in his ghastly suit of grey"
  • "legless, sewn short at elbow"
  • "voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn"
  • "before he threw away his knees"
  • "all of them touch him like some queer disease"
  • "younger than his youth, last year/not, he is old; his back will never brace"
  • "poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry"
  • "half his lifetime, lapsed in the hot race"
  • "he thought he'd better join"
  • "smiling they wrote his lie"
  • "no fears/of fear came yet"
  • "drafted out with drums and cheers"
  • "some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal"
  • "he will spend a few sick years in institutes"
  • "what things the rules consider wise"
  • "take whatever pity they may dole"
  • "passed from him to the strong men that were whole"
  • "how cold and late it is" Why don't they come,/and put him to bed? Why don't they come?"
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Futility

  • "whispering of fields half-sown"
  • "the kind old sun will know"
  • "woke once the clays of a cold star"
  • "are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides,/full nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?"
  • "was it for this day the clay grew tall?"
  • "-O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/to break earth's sleep at all?"
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The Last Laugh

  • "he said; and died"
  • "whether he vainly cursed or prayed indeed"
  • "the bullets chirped - In vain! Vain! Vain!/machine guns chuckled"
  • "then smiled, at nothing, childlike being dead."
  • "the lofty Shrapnel-cloud/leisurely gestured, - Fool!"
  • "splinters spat, and tittered"
  • "'my love!' one moaned. Love languid seemed his mood"
  • "his whole face kissed the mud"
  • "bayonets' long teeth grinned"
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Comments

Jasmine

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Great quotes :)

Though one of your quotes for the Sentry is slightly off, it should be: ''I see you lights!' - But ours had long gone out.' 

Rachael Bewick

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Oh, mine copy from school says 'died out'.....idk though.

Thank you

Kate Freuchen

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Found this through tumblr lol. thanks so much and good luck all in the exam tomorrow ahhhh :) **

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