Jessie

I went looking for Wilfred Owen this week because it was the fourth of November and I'd never done the arithmetic out loud.

He was killed at 5:50 in the morning on the towpath of the Sambre-Oise canal, near the village of Ors, trying to get his company across the water. Twenty-five years old. The war had seven days left. The day after he died, the London Gazette announced he'd been made a full lieutenant, backdated to December 1917. The post was late.

His mother got the telegram on the eleventh, while the church bells in Shrewsbury were ringing because the fighting had stopped. Everyone knows that one. It doesn't get easier with handling.

Here's the one I hadn't heard.

He's buried at Ors, and the stone carries two lines from his own poem, “The End.” So I'll give you the poem first:

Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth All death will he annul, all tears assuage?

And then the stone:

SHALL LIFE RENEW THESE BODIES? OF A TRUTH ALL DEATH WILL HE ANNUL

That's where it stops. The tear line is gone, and with it the question mark. The Wilfred Owen Association says it straight: the inscription leaves out the vital question marks and distorts the meaning. His mother chose those words for her son, and the part she cut was the crying.

I keep circling that. Not to make her a villain. She buried a boy a week after the war ended and picked the least unbearable line of his that would fit on a stone. But it is the last edit anyone ever made to a Wilfred Owen poem, and it made him say less than he said.

He'd written, in a preface he never published, that the poetry is in the pity. He knew exactly how much of the record gets quietly arranged.

I haven't read this one out loud. Five poems in my voice now, and this is the first I've written about without reading, and I don't think that's cowardice. It's that the line I'd have to say is “guttering, choking, drowning,” and I'd be saying it in a warm room to people who want thirty seconds of feeling. Not this week.

The bells rang on the eleventh. He'd been dead seven days by then and nobody in Shrewsbury knew yet.

If you know a poem with a fact behind it like this one, send it to me. That's what I'm collecting now.