From “The Age of Aquarius”
By Roy G. Guzmán

Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in. I have learned to repeat these words to myself whenever I feel stuck.

Fear rustles mantras out of my body. I have risked a motherland. Why not also seduce the foreigner who implores nativity if loneliness can be broken and shared?

♒︎

When Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical debuts on Broadway in April of 1968, it becomes the first production to include a nude scene with its entire cast.

Around the same time, Star Trek has popularized the phrase, Where no man has gone before.

Our bodies contain elements of outer space. So that when we’re naked we are gazing at the universe.

♒︎

The night of my second panic attack, after getting released from the hospital and determined to change my mental health’s course, I dream of a nebula in the shape of an octopus, holding an astronaut in each tentacle. From my perspective, the cosmonauts feed on all my arms.

♒︎

No more falsehoods or derisions. Golden living dreams of visions. Mystic crystal revelation and the mind’s true liberation.

♒︎

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, plurality overtakes singularity. History becomes bored by its self-referentialism. Triangles burrow into single lines. Equal signs collapse on the spikes of other equal signs.

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, we give birth to information and information delivers us. I make a fist and my fist speaks in four languages. Letters enter me and suddenly I experience flavors few before me have.

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, gender is a tree is a building is a cloud. It is anything that hasn’t been said. The truest instinct one listens to more and more.

About this Poem

“Literature on mental illness, written by queer and trans BIPOC authors, is hard to come about. Adding to that unique legacy, this excerpt is part of a longer piece about mental health, queer love, pop culture, and decolonial worldmaking. I am interested in the various connections between the individual and what we gather under the umbrella term ‘collective.’ As you read this excerpt, play The 5th Dimension’s version of the medley ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In’ and imagine what a better tomorrow might look like.”—Roy G. Guzmán

About the Poet

Roy G. Guzmán was born in Honduras and raised in Miami, Florida. They received an MFA from the University of Minnesota.

Guzmán is the author of the full-length collection Catrachos (Graywolf Press, 2020) and the chapbook Restored Mural for Orlando (Queerodactyl Press, 2016). The recipient of a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and a 2016 Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship, among other awards, Guzmán is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative studies in discourse and society at the University of Minnesota. They live in Minneapolis.

Cold War
By Randall Mann

If you can remember the cold war, you’re too old for me.
    —Grindr profile

Because you’re twenty-two, and in your prime,
you silently refuse to date, or “date.”
When war was cold, I had a lovely time.

I messaged you and sent a shot of grime,
then shot some more. It must have been too late.
Because you’re twenty-two, and in your prime?

Perhaps. I’m shifting like a paradigm.
And all the new assumptions formulate
as if our war were cold. A lovely time:

I’ll exercise my stock, internal rhyme—
the currency is yours to circulate.
I’m forty-nine; my interest rate is prime.

Suppose that poverty is not a crime.
Suppose you more or less accommodate,
like war. When cold, we’ll have a lovely time.

Perhaps you’ll click on me in wintertime.
Proximity is constant; so is fate.
Was I twenty-two? Before my prime
the war was cold. I had a lovely time.

About this Poem

“When I read this epigraph on a Grindr profile, I laughed, dryly, and then wrote it down in my notebook. When I returned to it, the villanelle just sort of wrote itself. This poem is in conversation with, and takes a few gestures from, an uncollected villanelle, ‘Complaint,’ that I published in 2002.” —Randall Mann

About the Poet

Randall Mann is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Deal: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), as well as Proprietary (Persea Books, 2017) and Straight Razor (Persea Books, 2013). He lives in San Francisco.

A Note about Villanelles

The villanelle is a highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. Besides sonnets, the villanelle is my favorite poetic form.

Rules of the Villanelle Form

The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.

History of the Villanelle Form

Strange as it may seem for a poem with such a rigid rhyme scheme, the villanelle did not start off as a fixed form. During the Renaissance, the villanella and villancico (from the Italian villano, or peasant) were Italian and Spanish dance-songs. French poets who called their poems “villanelle” did not follow any specific schemes, rhymes, or refrains. Rather, the title implied that, like the Italian and Spanish dance-songs, their poems spoke of simple, often pastoral, or rustic themes.

While some scholars believe that the form as we know it today has been in existence since the sixteenth century, others argue that only one Renaissance poem was ever written in that manner—Jean Passerat’s “Villanelle,” or “J’ay perdu ma tourterelle”—and that it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that the villanelle was defined as a fixed form by French poet Théodore de Banville.

Regardless of its provenance, the form did not catch on in France, but it has become increasingly popular among poets writing in English. An excellent example of the form is Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

Contemporary poets, such as Randall Mann, have not limited themselves to the pastoral themes originally expressed by the free-form villanelles of the Renaissance and have loosened the fixed form to allow variations on the refrains. Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” is another well-known example; other poets who have penned villanelles include W. H. Auden, Oscar Wilde, Seamus Heaney, David Shapiro, and Sylvia Plath.

The Song of the Highest Tower
by Arthur Rimbaud

Let it come, let it come
The day when hearts love as one.

I’ve been patient so long
I’ve forgotten even
The terror and suffering
Flown up to heaven,
A sick thirst again
Darkens my veins.

Let it come, let it come
The day when hearts love as one.

So the meadow
Freed by neglect,
Flowered, overgrown
With weeds and incense,
To the buzz nearby
Of foul flies.

Let it come, let it come
The day when hearts love as one.

About the Poem

The longing in these verses is palpable; maybe Arthur Rimbaud was hoping for a little harmony in his relationship with Paul Verlaine. Whatever the true story may be, it certainly expresses that feeling after a difficult stretch in a relationship when you’re hoping to finally see the light.

About the Poet

Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born October 20, 1854, in the small French town of Charleville. His father, an army captain, abandoned the family when he was six. By the age of thirteen, he had already won several prizes for his writing and was adept at composing verse in Latin. His teacher and mentor Georges Izambard nurtured his interest in literature, despite his mother’s disapproval.

Rimbaud began writing prolifically in 1870. That same year, his school shut down during the Franco-Prussian War, and he attempted to run away from Charleville twice but failing for lack of money. He wrote to the poet Paul Verlaine, who invited him to live in Paris with him and his new wife. Though Rimbaud’s moved out soon after, as a result of his harsh manners, he and Verlaine became lovers. Shortly after the birth of his son, Verlaine left his family to live with Rimbaud.

During their affair, which lasted nearly two years, they associated with the Paris literati and traveled to Belgium and England. While in Brussels in 1873, a drunk Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the hand. Verlaine was imprisoned, and Rimbaud returned to Charleville, where he wrote a large portion of Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). The book was published in 1873 in Brussels, but the majority of the copies sat in the printer’s basement until 1901 because Rimbaud could not pay the bill.

Rimbaud wrote all of his poetry in a span of about five years, concluding around the year 1875. His only writing after 1875 survives in documents and letters. In his correspondence with family and friends, Rimbaud indicates that he spent his adulthood in a constant struggle for financial success. He spent the final twenty years of his life working abroad, and he took jobs in African towns as a colonial tradesman.

In 1891, Rimbaud traveled to Marseilles to see a doctor about a pain in his knee. The doctors were forced to amputate his leg, but the cancer continued to spread. Rimbaud died on November 10, 1891, at the age of thirty-seven. Verlaine published his complete works in 1895.

Stars in Alabama
By Jessie Redmon Fauset

In Alabama
Stars hang down so low,
So low, they purge the soul
With their infinity.
Beneath their holy glance
Essential good
Rises to mingle with them
In that skiey sea.

At noon
Within the sandy cotton-field
Beyond the clay, red road
Bordered with green,
A Negro lad and lass
Cling hand in hand,
And passion, hot-eyed, hot-lipped,
Lurks unseen.

But in the evening
When the skies lean down,
He’s but a wistful boy,
A saintly maiden she,
For Alabama stars
Hang down so low,
So low, they purge the soul
With their infinity.

About the Poem

“Stars in Alabama” appears in The Crisis, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1928). In Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer(The Whitston Publishing Company, 1981), literary biographer Carolyn Wedin Sylvander writes, “‘Stars in Alabama,’ in The Crisis in January 1928, contrasts in three stanzas the passionate heat of noon cotton-fields with the pure holiness of the Alabama night. [. . .] The first lines are again repeated as evening returns. Fauset has moved through this poem from personal feeling to a quietly effective comment on passion and its context.” In “The Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance,” published in The Harlem Renaissance (Chelsea House Publishers, 2004), Maureen Honey, former professor of English and director of women’s studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, remarks, “While poets looked to natural settings in general for space in which to savor the abandonment of confining roles, night was sought most frequently as it was a time when the objectifying gaze was covered by sleep and the freedom to be at one with the darkness could be safely enjoyed.” 

About the Poet

Jessie Redmon Fauset was born on April 27, 1882, in Camden County, New Jersey. She grew up in Philadelphia and attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls. She received a scholarship to study at Cornell University, where she was likely the first Black female student, and she graduated with a BA in classical languages in 1905. After college, she worked as a teacher in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

In 1912, Fauset began to write for the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis, which was cofounded and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. After several years contributing poems, essays, and reviews to The Crisis, Fauset became the journal’s literary editor in 1919, moving to New York City for the position.

In her role as literary editor, Fauset introduced then-unknown writers, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Anne Spencer, to a national audience. In his memoir The Big Sea, Hughes writes, “Jessie Fauset at The Crisis, Charles Johnson at Opportunity, and Alain Locke in Washington were the three people who midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being. Kind and critical—but not too critical for the young—they nursed us along until our books were born.”

Along with her poetry and short fiction in The Crisis, Fauset published several novels known for their portrayal of middle-class African American life, including There Is Confusion (Boni and Liveright, 1924) and Plum Bun (Matthews & Marrot, 1928). She also edited The Brownies’ Book, a periodical for African American children, from 1920 to 1921.

Fauset left The Crisis in 1926 to teach French at a high school in the Bronx. She married Herbert Harris, a businessman, in 1929, and they lived together in New Jersey until his death in 1958. Fauset then returned to Philadelphia, where she lived until her death on April 30, 1961.

Love’s Growth
By John Donne

I scarce believe my love to be so pure
  As I had thought it was,
  Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grass;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more.

But if medicine, love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not only be no quintessence,
But mixed of all stuffs paining soul or sense,
And of the sun his working vigor borrow,
Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use
To say, which have no mistress but their muse,
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.

And yet no greater, but more eminent,
  Love by the spring is grown;
  As, in the firmament,
Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown,
Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough,
From love’s awakened root do bud out now.

If, as water stirred more circles be
Produced by one, love such additions take,
Those, like so many spheres, but one heaven make,
For they are all concentric unto thee;
And though each spring do add to love new heat,
As princes do in time of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate the spring’s increase.

About this Poem

“Love’s Growth” was originally published in Poems (John Marriott, 1633), the first comprehensive publication of John Donne’s poetry. In the poem, Donne examines the true nature of love and finds that it is mixed stuff, a mixture of both physical and spiritual elements. True love is both of the body and the mind, and to prove his point Donne gives a number of arguments and brings together a number of most disparate and varied elements. In “The Muse in Donne and Jonson: A Post-Lacanian Study,” published in Modern Language Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (Fall 1991), Mark Fortier, a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada, writes (commenting on the last four lines of the second stanza), “The relation of poet and Muse is contrasted, derisively, to the relation between real lovers, which is Donne’s true subject. Where real love is complex and organic, love of the Muse is unreal, devoid of complexity, devoid of life. Love of the Muse is inactive: those who love, do; those who can’t, call on the Muse. Paradoxically the poetic ego identifies itself, at least here, with those who can. There is an estrangement from the Muse, an inability to sympathize with those who value her. To a large extent this will be the primary relationship between the poet and the Muse throughout Donne’s work: the poet never feels close to, never values his own Muse, although sometimes he can respect the Muse of others.”

Donne says that love is not a personification nor is love made of pure and simple elements that have sustaining and life-giving properties. Rather, it is a mixture of different elements, both spiritual and physical. The abstract nature of love is why it affects both the body and the soul. It causes both spiritual and physical suffering. It does cure not because it is the quintessence, but on the homeopathic principle, of “like curing the like.” It cures all sorrow only by giving more of it. Love is neither infinite nor “pure stuff,” but has a mixed nature like grass which grows with spring. Though like the grass in this respect, love is different from it in another way. While the grass loses its life and vitality with the winter, there is no such loss in the power of love. In this respect, it may be likened to taxes levied in an emergency, but never withdrawn even when the emergency is over.

About the Poet

John Donne was born in 1572 in London, England. He is known as the founder of the Metaphysical Poets, a term created by Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and philosopher. The loosely associated group also includes George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and John Cleveland. The Metaphysical Poets are known for their ability to startle the reader and coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit. Donne reached beyond the rational and hierarchical structures of the seventeenth century with his exacting and ingenious conceits, advancing the exploratory spirit of his time.

Donne entered the world during a period of theological and political unrest for both England and France; a Protestant massacre occurred on Saint Bartholomew’s day in France; while in England, the Catholics were the persecuted minority. Born into a Roman Catholic family, Donne’s personal relationship with religion was tumultuous and passionate, and at the center of much of his poetry. He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities in his early teen years. He did not take a degree at either school, because to do so would have meant subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles, the doctrine that defined Anglicanism. At age twenty he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. Two years later he succumbed to religious pressure and joined the Anglican Church after his younger brother, convicted for his Catholic loyalties, died in prison. Donne wrote most of his love lyrics, erotic verse, and some sacred poems in the 1590s, creating two major volumes of work: Satires and Songs and Sonnets.

In 1598, after returning from a two-year naval expedition against Spain, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton. While sitting in Queen Elizabeth’s last Parliament in 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, the sixteen-year-old niece of Lady Egerton. Donne’s father-in-law disapproved of the marriage. As punishment, he did not provide a dowry for the couple and had Donne briefly imprisoned.

This left the couple isolated and dependent on friends, relatives, and patrons. Donne suffered social and financial instability in the years following his marriage, exacerbated by the birth of many children. He continued to write and published the Divine Poems in 1607. In Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, Donne displayed his extensive knowledge of the laws of the Church and state, arguing that Roman Catholics could support James I without compromising their faith. In 1615, James I pressured him to enter the Anglican Ministry by declaring that Donne could not be employed outside of the Church. He was appointed Royal Chaplain later that year. His wife died in 1617 at thirty-three years old shortly after giving birth to their twelfth child, who was stillborn. The Holy Sonnets are also attributed to this phase of his life.

In 1621, he became dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. In his later years, Donne’s writing reflected his fear of his inevitable death. He wrote his private prayers, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, during a period of severe illness and published them in 1624. His learned, charismatic, and inventive preaching made him a highly influential presence in London. Best known for his vivacious, compelling style and thorough examination of mortal paradox, John Donne died in London on March 31, 1631.

Furry Bear
By A. A. Milne

If I were a bear,
  And a big bear too,
I shouldn’t much care
  If it froze or snew;
I shouldn’t much mind
  If it snowed or friz—
I’d be all fur-lined
  With a coat like his!

For I’d have fur boots and a brown fur wrap,
And brown fur knickers and a big fur cap.
I’d have a fur muffle-ruff to cover my jaws,
And brown fur mittens on my big brown paws.
With a big brown furry-down up to my head,
I’d sleep all the winter in a big fur bed.

About this Poem

“Furry Bear” appears in A. A. Milne’s collection of children’s verse Now We Are Six (E. P. Dutton & Co., 1927), illustrated by E. H. Shephard. In Three Cheers for Pooh: A Celebration of the Best Bear in All the World (Egmont, 2001), writer and radio broadcaster Brian Sibley remarks, “A. A. Milne told a friend that his son’s encounter at London Zoo with the American black bear, Winnie, had inspired him to write a couple of poems and, possibly, even a story. True or not, Now We Are Six, published in 1927, contained ‘Furry Bear,’ a verse in which the poet imagines what it would be like to be a bear.” Describing the poem’s accompanying illustration, Sibley later writes, “Thanks to E. H. Shepherd, [Winnie the Pooh] is discovered coming face to face with his famous namesake at the London Zoo in the illustrations to a remarkably Poohish ‘Hum,’ entitled ‘Furry Bear.’”

About the Poet

Alan Alexander Milne, born on January 18, 1882, in Kilburn, London, was a children’s writer, poet, playwright, and novelist. He is best known for his character Winnie-the-Pooh, whose first appearance by that name was in the children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh (Methuen, 1926). He died on January 31, 1956.

Phragmites
By Kyle Carrero Lopez

I’ve crashed a party with an infinity pool and several nude men:
a Fire Island home at the back of a walkway long enough to
outlast a pop song’s bridge and some chorus, flanked by
phragmites on either side, tall and same-faced, so all
but reed bulk hides out from the exterior. Myself
included, close to everyone here has a body of
one approximate build. What would it say if I
stay? Comfort’s not so comfy here, but I stay
and try to have a good time: periodic beach
guest, mainly through favors from men
whose wealth eclipses mine and most
of humankind. I know firsthand why
queers come to this place, obliterate
coherence, take, go, take, till
we’ve consumed enough
to leave.
Someone riding the stiffest
substance cocktail he can muster
GROANS he’s got to pee and can’t,
his functions stalled in the twist and now.
What he can still swing is a smile. Excess
soaks the sundecks and each redwood inch
of the mini villa with a sweet-hot stickiness.
There’s much more to take in, with nowhere to go.

About this Poem

“Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines—historic, adjoining gay communities on Fire Island—are beautiful, easy to reach from New York City, a blast if you’re with trusted friends, and a hotbed of race and class conflict. The ferries stop operating overnight, so you’re stuck once the last one leaves. One time, while discussing rental price-gouging in the Pines and suggesting that the safety Fire Island offers queer people should be accessible to all income levels, a gay man told me, ‘It’s Long Island, not insulin.’ I’m interested in what we willingly permit for the sake of our own enjoyment.” —Kyle Carrero Lopez

About the Poet

Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of MUSCLE MEMORY ([PANK] Books, 2022), winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest. He co-founded LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists. Lopez is a 2022 Tin House Scholar.

Silentium Amoris
By Oscar Wilde

AS oftentimes the too resplendent sun
    Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon
Back to her sombre cave, ere she hath won
    A single ballad from the nightingale,
    So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail,
And all my sweetest singing out of tune.

And as at dawn across the level mead
    On wings impetuous some wind will come,
And with its too harsh kisses break the reed
    Which was its only instrument of song,
    So my too stormy passions work me wrong,
And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.

But surely unto Thee mine eyes did show
    Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung;
Else it were better we should part, and go,
    Thou to some lips of sweeter melody,
    And I to nurse the barren memory
Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.

About the Poem

“Silentium Amoris” is Latin for “The Silence of Love,” a suiting title for the love of nature and the nature of love, but also the unsaid love. It also pairs well with the other Latin titles from The Fourth Movement, all which center around the theme of love and its beauty and costs.

“Silentium Amoris” is heartfelt and simply beautiful. Wilde is the voice of a lover who is confessing to the one he loves. (A quick note: some who have analyzed the poem refer to the love as that of a woman, but as most of you probably know, it is most likely another man that he writes this poem about. After, the title says it is the silence of love, and Wilde was famous for his quote from his trial for being homosexual describing his sexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name.”) He wishes to sing to his love whose beauty is enough to make him dumb. He finds he cannot sing the songs that he could sing so sweetly, and he notices he cannot even speak, “his lips fail him.”

However, he tells his love that he must have understood by looking into his eyes, the reason for his silence and his “unstrung lute.” If he didn’t, he would rather part ways with him for that would mean he could not read his eyes and judge how speechless his presence made him.

His love could then go to some man who would not stammer or lose his words or his tune while singing to him while he would nurse the memory he had of his love, dreaming of “unkissed kisses.”

This poem portrays two very strong emotions- love and self-respect. Although he loves this man, he would rather he left to be with another man than stay with Wilde if he did not reciprocate.

About the Poet

Oscar Wilde was an Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the Victorian Era. In his lifetime he wrote nine plays, one novel, and numerous poems, short stories, and essays.

Wilde was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement, which emphasized aesthetic values more than moral or social themes. This doctrine is most clearly summarized in the phrase “art for art’s sake.”

Besides literary accomplishments, he is also famous, or perhaps infamous, for his wit, flamboyance, and affairs with men. He was tried and imprisoned for his homosexual relationship (then considered a crime) with the son of an aristocrat.

In 1891, Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed “Bosie,” who became both the love of his life and his downfall. Wilde had been married, but the marriage ended in 1893.

In April 1895, Oscar sued Bosie’s father for libel as the Marquis of Queensberry had accused him of homosexuality. Oscar’s case was unsuccessful, and he was himself arrested and tried for gross indecency. He was sentenced to two years of hard labor for the crime of sodomy. During his time in prison he wrote De Profundis, a dramatic monologue and autobiography, which was addressed to Bosie.

Upon his release in 1897, he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. He spent the rest of his life wandering Europe, staying with friends and living in cheap hotels. He died of cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900, penniless, in a cheap Paris hotel.

Winter Song
By Wilfred Owen

The browns, the olives, and the yellows died,
And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed
Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide,
And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed,
Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.

From off your face, into the winds of winter,
The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing;
But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter,
When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing,
And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going.

About this Poem

“Winter Song,” unpublished at the time of Wilfred Owen’s death, was first collected in The Poems of Wilfred Owen (Chatto & Windus, 1931). In “Wilfred Owen’s Influence on Three Generations of Poets,” published in The Modern Review, vol. 242, no. 3 (September 1978), Sasi Bhusan Das, former director of the Institute of English in Calcutta, writes, “[T]he idea of spiritual rebirth in Owen’s ‘Winter Song’ is confirmed by the next few lines of its first stanza: ‘And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, / Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.’ [. . .] It will be further noted that in his ‘Winter Song’ Owen also sings of a symbolic spring [. . .] in the same manner as [T. S.] Eliot in the opening passage of ‘Little Gidding’ does of the ‘Midwinter spring.’ Thus, in a sense, Owen’s ‘Winter Song,’ like Eliot’s passage, is a song of ‘Midwinter spring’ which is ‘sempiternal’ for it is not in ‘time’s covenant’ but ‘suspended in time.’” Jon Stallworthy, professor emeritus at the University of Oxford, notes in his titular biography of Owen that the poem is one of two “addressed to Arthur Newboult, the seven-year-old son of Edinburgh friends.”

About the Poet

On March 18, 1893, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Shropshire, England. After the death of his grandfather in 1897, the Owen family moved to Birkenhead, where Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute. After another move in 1906, he continued his studies at the technical school in Shrewsbury. Interested in the arts at a young age, Owen began writing poetry as a teenager.

In 1911, Owen matriculated at London University, but after failing to receive a scholarship, he spent a year as a lay assistant to a vicar in Oxfordshire. In 1913, he went on to teach in France at the Berlitz School of English, where he met the poet Laurent Tailhade. He returned from France in 1915 and enlisted in the Artists Rifles. After training in England, Owen was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment in 1916.

Owen was wounded in combat in 1917 and, diagnosed with shell shock, was evacuated to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. There, he met another patient, poet Siegfried Sassoon, who served as a mentor and introduced him to well-known literary figures such as Robert Graves and H. G. Wells.

It was at this time Owen wrote many of his most important poems, including “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est.” His poetry often graphically illustrated the horrors of warfare, the physical landscapes that surrounded him, and the human body in relation to those landscapes. His verse stands in stark contrast to the patriotic poems of war written by earlier poets of Great Britain, such as Rupert Brooke. A gay man, Owen also often celebrated male beauty and comradery in his poems.

Owen rejoined his regiment in Scarborough in June 1918, and, in August, he returned to France. In October he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery at Amiens. He was killed on November 4, 1918, while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors. He was twenty-five years old. The news reached his parents on November 11, Armistice Day.

While few of Owen’s poems appeared in print during his lifetime, TheCollected Poems of Wilfred Owen (New Directions, 1963), with an introduction by Sassoon, was first published in December 1920 and reissued several times. Owen has since become one of the most admired poets of World War I. A review of Owen’s poems published on December 29, 1920, just two years after his death, read, “Others have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended [sic] the roselight and romance of it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted nor such sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers.”

About Owen’s post-war audience, the writer Geoff Dyer said,

To a nation stunned by grief, the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking from the other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the shadow cast by the dead over England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the medium through whom the missing spoke.