OWEN ~ Lt Wilfred Owen MC ~ PURPLE (1916)

PURPLE

by

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893-1918)

(Lieutenant W E S Owen MC)

Vividly gloomy, with bright darkling glows

Of nebulae and warm, night-shimmering shores!

Stain of full fruits, wines, passions, and the cores

Of all quick hearts! Yet from its deeps there blows

Aroma and romance of violets;

 

Softness of far land, hazed; pacific lift

Of smoke through quiet trees; and that wild drift

Of smoulder when the flare of evening sets.

 

Solemn, columnar, thunder-throning cloud

Wears it so stately that therein the King

Stands before men, and lies in death's hand, proud.

 

Purest, it is the diamond dawn of spring;

And yet the veil of Venus, whose rose skin,

Mauve-marbled, purples Eros’ mouth for sacred sin.

Dominic Hibberd, in his definitive biography of Wilfred Owen and first published in November 2003, remarks that this was one of the first sonnets written by Wilfred Owen. Owen now held the King’s Commission, ‘sonnets would be easier for a busy officer to cope with than an endless epic on Perseus.’

Although Owen is gazetted in the rank of Lieutenant, the Artists’ Rifles Regiment in the First World War, in their Regimental Memoriam, listed all in the rank in which they might have temporarily served. Thus, Wilfred Owen is listed as Captain Wilfred Owen MC, and this truly accords that respect to Wilfred Owen that one or two senior officers chose otherwise. In reading the Hibberd definitive work on Owen (ibid) one is left in no doubt about Wilfred Owen’s exemplary service in combat. As in all ages, human nature prefers that characters and personalities be defined on the basis of whether “the face fits.”

Author Note

The Great Poets

Launching this platform ~ The Great Poets ~ is exciting and befits the pending arrival of Spring, that Season wherein each year we hope, and many pray in whichever way they so wish and to whom they so wish, that somehow, Humankind will step back from the abyss, the brink upon which we teeter.

I choose Purple because this is Wilfred Owen’s favourite colour. And the Digital Artwork derives directly from Owen’s writing, concentrating upon both the colour and the depiction of Eros, the god of love, as the poet penned him.

The next poem will be one from the vast Collected Works of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and the portrait below, again, I use my imagination by referring to his vast work under the title Letters to a Young Poet. The portrait is fictitious.

This digital artwork loosely frames the young man to whom the Austrian Poet and Writer Rainer Maria Rilke corresponded, but using artistic licence by imagining that the young poet to whom Rilke writes ~ and it was a very long and detailed correspondence ~ might be the young Rilke, as he might see himself in his mind’s eye many decades on from his youth.

Any likeness to the poet is entirely coincidental. I have used Rilke’s style of writing to provide a hint of the recipient of Rilke’s expert poetic guidance.

This digital artwork loosely frames the Young Man to whom the Austrian Poet and Writer Rainer Maria Rilke corresponded in the volume entitled Letters to a Young Poet. Any likeness to the poet is entirely coincidental. I have used Rilke’s style of writing to provide a hint of the recipient of Rilke’s guiding hand.

24 April 2024
All Rights Reserved

LIVERPOOL

© 2024 Kenneth Thomas Webb © Ian Bradley Marshall


First published 25 February 2024