O World of many worlds, O life of lives,
    What centre hast thou? Where am I?
O whither is it thy fierce onrush drives?
    Fight I, or drift; or stand; or fly?

The loud machinery spins, points work in touch;
    Wheels whirl in systems, zone in zone.
Myself having sometime moved with such,
    Would strike a centre of mine own.

Lend hand, O Fate, for I am down, am lost!
    Fainting by violence of the Dance...
Ah thanks, I stand— the floor is crossed,
    And I am where but few advance.

I see men far below me where they swarm...
    (Haply above me— be it so!
Does space to compass-points conform,
    And can we say a star stands high or low?)

Not more complex the millions of the stars
    Than are the hearts of mortal brothers;
As far remote as Neptune from small Mars
    Is one man's nature from another's.

But all hold course unalterably fixed;
    They follow destinies foreplanned:
I envy not these lives in their faith unmixed,
    I would not step with such a band.

To be a meteor, fast, eccentric, lone,
    Lawless; in passage through all spheres,
Warning the earth of wider ways unknown
    And rousing men with heavenly fears...

This is the track reserved for my endeavour;
    Spanless the erring way I wend.
Blackness of darkness is my meed for ever?
    And barren plunging without end?

O glorious fear! Those other wandering souls
    High burning through that outer bourne
Are lights unto themselves. Fair aureoles
    Self-radiated these are worn.

And when in after times those stars return
    And strike once more earth's horizon,
They gather many satellites astern,
    For they are greater than this system's Sun.

O World of many worlds (April 1913)

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1914

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
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 the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

"1914" (1914), manuscript

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ASLEEP

Under his helmet, up against his pack,
After so many days of work and waking,
Sleep took him by the brow and laid him back.

There, in the happy no-time of his sleeping,
Death took him by the heart. There heaved a quaking
Of the aborted life within him leaping,
Then chest and sleepy arms once more fell slack.

And soon the slow, stray blood came creeping
From the intruding lead, like ants on track.

Whether his deeper sleep lie shaded by the shaking
Of great wings, and the thoughts that hung the stars,
High-pillowed on calm pillows of God's making,
Above these clouds, these rains, these sleets of lead,
And these winds' scimitars,
—Or whether yet his thin and sodden head
Confuses more and more with the low mould,
His hair being one with the grey grass
Of finished fields, and wire-scrags rusty-old,
Who knows? Who hopes? Who troubles? Let it pass!
He sleeps. He sleeps less tremulous, less cold,
Than we who wake, and waking say Alas!

(November 14, 1917)

"Asleep" (1917), manuscript

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FUTILITY

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
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 the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

(published in The Nation in June 1918)

"Futility" (1918), manuscript

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918),
War Poems and Others,
(Edited by Dominic Hibberd)
Chatto & Windus, London, 1973, pp. 58, 81-82, 98, 52-53