1 Re-Drafting the Draft: Wilfred Owen`s `The Send-Off` re

Re-Drafting the Draft: Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’ re-considered
One Saturday in May 1918, as he often did, Wilfred Owen wrote home to his mother.1 It’s a chatty letter
- he grumbles about his teeth:
I discovered that one of my teeth wanted mending, so I stayed in my flea-bag until the Dr came
round . . .
I went to the dentist in the afternoon.
He mentions some plays he has seen; he recommends a book. And then - almost in passing – he
mentions one of his poems:
I have long ‘waited’ for a final stanza to ‘the Draft’ (which begins:
I
‘Down the deep, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the waiting train,
And filled its doors with faces grimly gay,
And heads & shoulders white with wreath & spray
As men’s are, slain.’ )
Having thus reminded his mother of something she has presumably seen before, he omits the next two
stanzas and sends her his newly-arrived conclusion:
IV
Will they return, to beatings of great bells,
In wild train-loads ?
- A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May walk back, silent, to their village wells,
Up half-known roads.
What Owen here calls ‘the Draft’ is of course recognisably the poem known since his death, in all
published editions of his work, as ‘The Send-Off’.2
Since early March 1918, Owen had been based at Northern Command Depot, Ripon. The Depot was in
effect a vast transit camp, just outside the city, complete with its own railway siding, and in the weeks
he had spent there Owen must have watched soldiers departing by train every day. And, of course, he
had first-hand experience of what awaited those men at the other end of the line.
In his recent biography of Owen, Guy Cuthbertson has identified what was almost certainly a prompt
for this poem - an article in The Times on 27 March, 1918, calling for more stirring send-offs for the
troops:
Why should we not give the lads a real send-off, instead of smuggling them out of
the country, to which, perhaps, some of them will never return ? 3
This sounds like fruitful territory for Owen’s war poetry – the gulf between press rhetoric and the
soldier’s experience. But the Times article had appeared in March - now it’s May and somehow, as he
tells his mother, his poem seems to have got stuck.
Here’s the poem as it is familiar to us now:
1
The Send-Off
Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent;
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
Shall they return to beating of great bells
In wild train-loads ?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to village wells,
Up half-known roads.
It’s a kind of ‘over the top’ moment, as the soldiers move beyond our reach. But Owen has relocated the
scene to the landscape of the home front and there’s something not just poignant but subtly unsettling
about it all – to use Owen’s term, ‘half-known’. Nothing is quite as straightforward as it appears.
Or, not quite everything. There are a couple of lines in the poem that have always seemed to me rather
unsatisfactory:
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
That’s surely rather too straightforward - less ‘half-known’, more trying too hard. The idea is clear
enough: flowers for the living that make them look already like the dead. But ‘mock’ seems out of key too polemical in an otherwise carefully unpolemical poem - and ‘what women meant’ a too-casual swipe
at a too-easy target.
So I’m rather pleased to have discovered that Owen agrees with me. Significantly enough, it seems
these lines are precisely where he got stuck – immediately before that final stanza that he had to ‘wait’
for. After that side-swipe at women, where to go ? As I’ll show, Owen was in fact extremely unhappy
with these lines. And it’s my contention that what we read today is almost certainly not the poem that
he wanted us to have.
Owen’s manuscripts clearly demonstrate that although eventually he may have found a final stanza, this
did not resolve his problem. There are five surviving manuscript drafts of a complete poem. All are
preserved in two folios (0, 1) in the British Library, numbered Bl.0.18, Bl.1.33, Bl.1.33v (on the verso of
33), Bl.1.34 and Bl.1.35.4 All include the new ‘final stanza’ which Owen announces in his letter, so none
can be dated earlier than May 1918.
2
Of these, the draft which is closest to the version in Owen’s letter – and so the earliest of the five - is Bl.1.
33 (fig. i).5 Comparison of the first stanza in Owen’s letter and a transcription of what he first wrote on
Bl.1.33 (before his amendments) shows that the two versions are virtually identical:
Down the deep darkening lanes they sang their way
To the waiting train,
And filled its doors with faces grimly gay.
And heads & shoulders white with wreath & spray
As men's are, slain.
(Letter, 4 May, 1918)
Down the deep darkening lanes they sang their way
To the waiting train,
And filled its doors with faces grimly gay.
And shoulders laden white with wreath and spray
As men's are, slain.
(Bl.1.33)
There is a ‘tweak’ to the fourth line, but a significant detail confirms that Bl.1.33 is indeed the version
closest to the letter: these are the only two manuscripts on which the word ‘slain’ appears. Bl.1.33
shows how Owen changed this: first to ‘died’, rhyming with ‘train side’, then to ‘dead’, rhyming with
‘shed’. ‘Shed/dead’ then appears on all the other manuscripts. 6
fig. i. Manuscript Bl.1.33
3
The stanza with the lines about the women and the flowers doesn’t appear in Owen’s letter. On
manuscript Bl.1.33, though, we can see that what he wrote here first was not ‘women’, but ‘what
cowards meant’ (fig. ii). He then tried several alternatives: ‘what we mourners meant’, ‘what we had
meant’, ‘what wives had meant’, ‘the thing [ ] meant’, before leaving it as ‘women’.
fig. ii. Manuscript Bl.1.33 (part)
‘Women’ and ‘cowards’ are both rather knee-jerk responses, though, harking back to autumn 1917
polemics such as ‘The Dead-Beat’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. By May 1918, Owen surely realised this
wasn’t good enough. And so he got stuck.
The amended or ‘final’ version of Bl.1.33 (i.e. everything that Owen leaves un-crossed-out) takes us to
the first draft (what lies beneath the amendments) on Bl.0.18 (fig. iii).
fig. iii. Manuscript Bl.0.18
4
The poem as it is familiar today (with the title ‘The Send-off’) is taken from this manuscript: it’s the
preferred text of all of Owen’s major editors, from Sitwell through to Stallworthy. It’s not hard to see
why: it’s neat, there are relatively few revisions - and it makes a pretty good poem. However, my
analysis indicates that Bl.0.18 is not Owen’s latest draft: it is in fact only second in the chronology of the
five surviving manuscripts. Perhaps almost as soon as he’d written it out, Owen knew that he wasn’t
satisfied with it and – rather than spending time revising it – moved on to a fresh draft. This impression
of a sudden decision is reinforced by the fact that his next version appears, not on a new sheet, but on
the back of number 33 - Bl.1.33v (fig. iv): no time to find more paper, just turn over the previous one
and re-draft on the verso.
On Bl.1.33v Owen brings over ‘women’ from 18, then deletes it and reverts to ‘cowards’. Then, on the
lower part of the sheet, he ventures something different for this line - ‘They knew what the . . .’ But this
line is incomplete and it’s evident that he has a problem. The most striking feature of the manuscript is
the additional work scribbled diagonally across the corner of the page: repeated attempts to re-cast, not
just the line about women (or cowards), but the whole of stanza three. This work is evidently later than
the main body of the manuscript, as shown by its mixture of ink and pencil. In fact, it appears to be
linked to the next draft in the sequence – again, Owen has turned back from a later version to scribble
ideas here, just as he went back from BL.0.18 to redraft on the verso of number 33. I’ll return to this
section.
fig. iv. Manuscript Bl.1.33v
5
In the main body of 33v there aren’t too many changes. They give an amended version that takes us to
the earliest version on number 34 (fig. v). In my proposed sequence, we are now several drafts on from
the version in Owen’s letter: 33, 18, 33v, now 34. But on 34, Owen is still wrestling with the same
problem – the lines about the women, the cowards and the flowers. He brings over ‘cowards’ from the
body of 33, but then puts his pencil not just through words and phrases, as before, but through whole
lines. Then he tries it all again, in pencil, at the bottom of his page where – lo and behold – ‘women’
reappears. ‘Cowards’, ‘women’, ‘cowards’, ‘women’ – he must have begun to feel he was going around
in circles. And this, I think, is the point at which Owen went back from 34 to 33v - it must still have
been sitting on his desk – to experiment with even more versions of those same few lines, scribbling
across the corner of his previous manuscript.
It is in these lines of additional work, at the bottom of 34 and across the corner of 33v, that Owen seems
at last to have sensed a way forward. In the pencil work on 34 (fig vi) , above ‘what women meant’, he
writes ‘what we meant’. . 7
fig. v. Manuscript Bl.1.34
6
fig. vi. Manuscript Bl.1.34 (part)
At first he’s not fully committed to a change: both versions remain undeleted on 34. But what he takes
back across to the corner of 33v (fig. vii) is:
fig. vii. Manuscript Bl.1.33v (part)
‘Or there how soon they found out what we meant / With our false flowers’. These lines are written in
pencil and then crossed out; the sequence appears to be that Owen made another attempt, above them,
in ink, and then had yet another go (also in ink) underneath, squeezed almost illegibly into the corner of
his page. But it is the first person plural that he continues to work on: ‘our false, mournful flowers’
(above), ‘our heavy silence’ (below).
The change to first person plural is of course significant because it shifts the position of the speaker in
the poem. ‘What women [or ‘cowards’] meant / Who gave them flowers’ positions the speaker as a
watcher outside the main tableau of the civilians (women and cowards) and the departing soldiers
(‘them’). Perhaps the speaker is another soldier, one (like Owen himself) amongst those still remaining
in the camp, sniping at the civilians. But ‘what we meant’ and ‘our … flowers’ must be spoken by
someone within the tableau: one of the civilians who have hitherto been the target of these lines.
There is one more manuscript: Bl.1.35 (fig vii). This is on paper of a type different from the other four,8
suggesting that perhaps Owen needed another ‘wait’ before he could move his poem forward again.
There are still some unresolved crossings-out and replacements here, but this is a pretty clean, clear
draft. And in the context of my argument it’s a significant manuscript, because it’s the only draft where
neither ‘women’ nor ‘cowards’ appear at all, crossed out or not.
7
fig. viii. Manuscript Bl.1.35
Here is my transcription of Bl.1.35:
The Draft
Softly down darkening lanes they sang their way
And no word said.
They filled the train with faces vaguely gay
And shoulders covered white with wreath & spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the summer camp;
Then, stiffly, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So quietly, like wrongs hushed up, they went;
[All glad, all young.]
They guessed not what our fair false flowers meant
With their own songs they went away content
And no flags hung.
Shall they return to beatings of great bells,
In wild train loads ?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells
May creep back, silent, to still village wells,
Up half-known roads.
8
There are some uncertainties still (around ‘flags … hung’ / ‘all young’ / ‘chimes …rung)’, but Owen here
seems committed to the idea he was developing in his scribble across the corner of 33v.9 His focus has
shifted to the civilians and how they perceive the soldiers. The critical note has not entirely
disappeared – the flowers are still ‘false. But ‘our fair false flowers’ is now the single indicator in the
poem of an identifiable speaker or point of view. The rest of the poem is like a camera, panning around,
but ‘our ... flowers’ must place the speaker pretty definitely amongst the civilians.
What happens in Owen’s drafts is one of the most interesting things about his writing – and it’s
probably the aspect of his work least critically explored. There’s a great deal more to be said about the
manuscripts of ‘The Draft’ (about the evolution of the poem’s title, for example, and of line-length and
stanza-formation). But the change on which I have focused is perhaps the most significant: I can’t think
of another war poem in which Owen attempts to write specifically through the eyes of a civilian. Even
when he stands apart from the soldiers as an observer, Owen always writes from his own experience as
a soldier. Here, in this late version of the poem he most frequently entitles ‘The Draft’, he seems to be
attempting something genuinely new.
Some of what Owen wrote in 1917-18 was remarkable. But, like ‘The Draft’, a great deal of it is not in a
final state. He set about the poetry of his final year with an admirable seriousness: ‘my duty … towards
war’, as he described it in one of his letters.10 It’s time now, perhaps, that this seriousness was repaid
with a sustained critical exploration of exactly what Owen’s drafts tell us about his poetry.
9
NOTES
(Eds).Harold Owen & John Bell, ‘Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters’ (OUP, 1967), p.550. Letter 616, dated 4 May,
1918.
2 (Ed.) Jon Stallworthy, ‘Wilfred Owen: the Collected Poems and Fragments’ (Chatto & Windus, 1983, p.172. ‘The
Send-Off’ (no.165).
3 Guy Cuthbertson, ‘Wilfred Owen’ (Yale U.P., 2014), p.270.
4 The numbering is not by Owen but by his editors: in this case Blunden and Sassoon, who organised a public
subscription that enabled the manuscripts to be purchased from the Owen family.
5 All the images in this article are taken from The First World War Digital Poetry Archive
(http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/owen) and are reproduced here by kind permission of [?the
Owen estate ?]
6 In the space available here, I must ask readers to take it on trust that similar evidence can be adduced to support
the rest of my proposed sequence.
7 All added emphases are mine.
8 Bl.0.18, Bl.1.33 and 33v and Bl.1.34 all appear on the paper coded ‘23’ by Stallworthy in ‘Collected Poems and
Fragments’, while Bl.1.35 and Bl.1.36 (see below, n.9) are on paper coded 'NM'.
9 Manuscript Bl.1.36 contains a fragment of further working which appears to follow on from Bl.1.35 and is on
similar paper.
10 ‘Collected Letters’, p.534. Letter 592, dated 18 February 1918.
1
Re-Drafting The Draft: Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’ re-considered
One Saturday in May 1918, as he often did, Wilfred Owen wrote home to his mother.10 It’s a chatty
letter - he grumbles about his teeth:
I discovered that one of my teeth wanted mending, so I stayed in my flea-bag until the Dr came
round . . .
I went to the dentist in the afternoon.
He mentions some plays he has seen; he recommends a book. And then - almost in passing – he
mentions one of his poems:
I have long ‘waited’ for a final stanza to ‘the Draft’ (which begins:
I
‘Down the deep, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the waiting train,
And filled its doors with faces grimly gay,
And heads & shoulders white with wreath & spray
As men’s are, slain.’ )
Having thus reminded his mother of something she has presumably seen before, he omits the next two
stanzas and sends her his newly-arrived conclusion:
IV
Will they return, to beatings of great bells,
10
In wild train-loads ?
- A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May walk back, silent, to their village wells,
Up half-known roads.
What Owen here calls ‘the Draft’ is of course recognisably the poem known since his death, in all
published editions of his work, as ‘The Send-Off’.10
Since early March 1918, Owen had been based at Northern Command Depot, Ripon. The Depot was in
effect a vast transit camp, just outside the city, complete with its own railway siding, and in the weeks
he had spent there Owen must have watched soldiers departing by train every day. And, of course, he
had first-hand experience of what awaited those men at the other end of the line.
In his recent biography of Owen, Guy Cuthbertson has identified what was almost certainly a prompt
for this poem - an article in The Times on 27 March, 1918, calling for more stirring send-offs for the
troops:
Why should we not give the lads a real send-off, instead of smuggling them out of
the country, to which, perhaps, some of them will never return ? 10
This sounds like fruitful territory for Owen’s war poetry – the gulf between press rhetoric and the
soldier’s experience. But the Times article had appeared in March - now it’s May and somehow, as he
tells his mother, his poem seems to have got stuck.
Here’s the poem as it is familiar to us now:
The Send-Off
Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent;
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
Shall they return to beating of great bells
In wild train-loads ?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to village wells,
Up half-known roads.
11
It’s a kind of ‘over the top’ moment, as the soldiers move beyond our reach. But Owen has relocated the
scene to the landscape of the home front and there’s something not just poignant but subtly unsettling
about it all – to use Owen’s term, ‘half-known’. Nothing is quite as straightforward as it appears.
Or, not quite everything. There are a couple of lines in the poem that have always seemed to me rather
unsatisfactory:
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
That’s surely rather too straightforward - less ‘half-known’, more trying too hard. The idea is clear
enough: flowers for the living that make them look already like the dead. But ‘mock’ seems out of key too polemical in an otherwise carefully unpolemical poem - and ‘what women meant’ a too-casual swipe
at a too-easy target.
So I’m rather pleased to have discovered that Owen agrees with me. Significantly enough, it seems
these lines are precisely where he got stuck – immediately before that final stanza that he had to ‘wait’
for. After that side-swipe at women, where to go ? As I’ll show, Owen was in fact extremely unhappy
with these lines. And it’s my contention that what we read today is almost certainly not the poem that
he wanted us to have.
Owen’s manuscripts clearly demonstrate that although eventually he may have found a final stanza, this
did not resolve his problem. There are five surviving manuscript drafts of a complete poem. All are
preserved in two folios (0, 1) in the British Library, numbered Bl.0.18, Bl.1.33, Bl.1.33v (on the verso of
33), Bl.1.34 and Bl.1.35.10 All include the new ‘final stanza’ which Owen announces in his letter, so none
can be dated earlier than May 1918.
Of these, the draft which is closest to the version in Owen’s letter – and so the earliest of the five - is Bl.1.
33 (fig. i).10 Comparison of the first stanza in Owen’s letter and a transcription of what he first wrote on
Bl.1.33 (before his amendments) shows that the two versions are virtually identical:
Down the deep darkening lanes they sang their way
To the waiting train,
And filled its doors with faces grimly gay.
And heads & shoulders white with wreath & spray
As men's are, slain.
(Letter, 4 May, 1918)
Down the deep darkening lanes they sang their way
To the waiting train,
And filled its doors with faces grimly gay.
And shoulders laden white with wreath and spray
As men's are, slain.
(Bl.1.33)
There is a ‘tweak’ to the fourth line, but a significant detail confirms that Bl.1.33 is indeed the version
closest to the letter: these are the only two manuscripts on which the word ‘slain’ appears. Bl.1.33
shows how Owen changed this: first to ‘died’, rhyming with ‘train side’, then to ‘dead’, rhyming with
‘shed’. ‘Shed/dead’ then appears on all the other manuscripts. 10
12
fig. i. Manuscript Bl.1.33
The stanza with the lines about the women and the flowers doesn’t appear in Owen’s letter. On
manuscript Bl.1.33, though, we can see that what he wrote here first was not ‘women’, but ‘what
cowards meant’ (fig. ii). He then tried several alternatives: ‘what we mourners meant’, ‘what we had
meant’, ‘what wives had meant’, ‘the thing [ ] meant’, before leaving it as ‘women’.
fig. ii. Manuscript Bl.1.33 (part)
‘Women’ and ‘cowards’ are both rather knee-jerk responses, though, harking back to autumn 1917
polemics such as ‘The Dead-Beat’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. By May 1918, Owen surely realised this
wasn’t good enough. And so he got stuck.
The amended or ‘final’ version of Bl.1.33 (i.e. everything that Owen leaves un-crossed-out) takes us to
the first draft (what lies beneath the amendments) on Bl.0.18 (fig. iii).
13
fig. iii. Manuscript Bl.0.18
The poem as it is familiar today (with the title ‘The Send-off’) is taken from this manuscript: it’s the
preferred text of all of Owen’s major editors, from Sitwell through to Stallworthy. It’s not hard to see
why: it’s neat, there are relatively few revisions - and it makes a pretty good poem. However, my
analysis indicates that Bl.0.18 is not Owen’s latest draft: it is in fact only second in the chronology of the
five surviving manuscripts. Perhaps almost as soon as he’d written it out, Owen knew that he wasn’t
satisfied with it and – rather than spending time revising it – moved on to a fresh draft. This impression
of a sudden decision is reinforced by the fact that his next version appears, not on a new sheet, but on
the back of number 33 - Bl.1.33v (fig. iv): no time to find more paper, just turn over the previous one
and re-draft on the verso.
On Bl.1.33v Owen brings over ‘women’ from 18, then deletes it and reverts to ‘cowards’. Then, on the
lower part of the sheet, he ventures something different for this line - ‘They knew what the . . .’ But this
line is incomplete and it’s evident that he has a problem. The most striking feature of the manuscript is
the additional work scribbled diagonally across the corner of the page: repeated attempts to re-cast, not
just the line about women (or cowards), but the whole of stanza three. This work is evidently later than
the main body of the manuscript, as shown by its mixture of ink and pencil. In fact, it appears to be
linked to the next draft in the sequence – again, Owen has turned back from a later version to scribble
ideas here, just as he went back from BL.0.18 to redraft on the verso of number 33. I’ll return to this
section.
14
fig. iv. Manuscript Bl.1.33v
In the main body of 33v there aren’t too many changes. They give an amended version that takes us to
the earliest version on number 34 (fig. v). In my proposed sequence, we are now several drafts on from
the version in Owen’s letter: 33, 18, 33v, now 34. But on 34, Owen is still wrestling with the same
problem – the lines about the women, the cowards and the flowers. He brings over ‘cowards’ from the
body of 33, but then puts his pencil not just through words and phrases, as before, but through whole
lines. Then he tries it all again, in pencil, at the bottom of his page where – lo and behold – ‘women’
reappears. ‘Cowards’, ‘women’, ‘cowards’, ‘women’ – he must have begun to feel he was going around
in circles. And this, I think, is the point at which Owen went back from 34 to 33v - it must still have
been sitting on his desk – to experiment with even more versions of those same few lines, scribbling
across the corner of his previous manuscript.
It is in these lines of additional work, at the bottom of 34 and across the corner of 33v, that Owen seems
at last to have sensed a way forward. In the pencil work on 34 (fig vi) , above ‘what women meant’, he
writes ‘what we meant’. . 10
15
fig. v. Manuscript Bl.1.34
fig. vi. Manuscript Bl.1.34 (part)
At first he’s not fully committed to a change: both versions remain undeleted on 34. But what he takes
back across to the corner of 33v (fig. vii) is:
fig. vii. Manuscript Bl.1.33v (part)
‘Or there how soon they found out what we meant / With our false flowers’. These lines are written in
pencil and then crossed out; the sequence appears to be that Owen made another attempt, above them,
in ink, and then had yet another go (also in ink) underneath, squeezed almost illegibly into the corner of
16
his page. But it is the first person plural that he continues to work on: ‘our false, mournful flowers’
(above), ‘our heavy silence’ (below).
The change to first person plural is of course significant because it shifts the position of the speaker in
the poem. ‘What women [or ‘cowards’] meant / Who gave them flowers’ positions the speaker as a
watcher outside the main tableau of the civilians (women and cowards) and the departing soldiers
(‘them’). Perhaps the speaker is another soldier, one (like Owen himself) amongst those still remaining
in the camp, sniping at the civilians. But ‘what we meant’ and ‘our … flowers’ must be spoken by
someone within the tableau: one of the civilians who have hitherto been the target of these lines.
There is one more manuscript: Bl.1.35 (fig vii). This is on paper of a type different from the other
four,10 suggesting that perhaps Owen needed another ‘wait’ before he could move his poem forward
again. There are still some unresolved crossings-out and replacements here, but this is a pretty clean,
clear draft. And in the context of my argument it’s a significant manuscript, because it’s the only draft
where neither ‘women’ nor ‘cowards’ appear at all, crossed out or not.
fig. viii. Manuscript Bl.1.35
Here is my transcription of Bl.1.35:
The Draft
Softly down darkening lanes they sang their way
And no word said.
They filled the train with faces vaguely gay
17
And shoulders covered white with wreath & spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the summer camp;
Then, stiffly, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So quietly, like wrongs hushed up, they went;
[All glad, all young.]
They guessed not what our fair false flowers meant
With their own songs they went away content
And no flags hung.
Shall they return to beatings of great bells,
In wild train loads ?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells
May creep back, silent, to still village wells,
Up half-known roads.
There are some uncertainties still (around ‘flags … hung’ / ‘all young’ / ‘chimes …rung)’, but Owen here
seems committed to the idea he was developing in his scribble across the corner of 33v. 10 His focus has
shifted to the civilians and how they perceive the soldiers. The critical note has not entirely
disappeared – the flowers are still ‘false. But ‘our fair false flowers’ is now the single indicator in the
poem of an identifiable speaker or point of view. The rest of the poem is like a camera, panning around,
but ‘our ... flowers’ must place the speaker pretty definitely amongst the civilians.
What happens in Owen’s drafts is one of the most interesting things about his writing – and it’s
probably the aspect of his work least critically explored. There’s a great deal more to be said about the
manuscripts of ‘The Draft’ (about the evolution of the poem’s title, for example, and of line-length and
stanza-formation). But the change on which I have focused is perhaps the most significant: I can’t think
of another war poem in which Owen attempts to write specifically through the eyes of a civilian. Even
when he stands apart from the soldiers as an observer, Owen always writes from his own experience as
a soldier. Here, in this late version of the poem he most frequently entitles ‘The Draft’, he seems to be
attempting something genuinely new.
Some of what Owen wrote in 1917-18 was remarkable. But, like ‘The Draft’, a great deal of it is not in a
final state. He set about the poetry of his final year with an admirable seriousness: ‘my duty … towards
war’, as he described it in one of his letters.10 It’s time now, perhaps, that this seriousness was repaid
with a sustained critical exploration of exactly what Owen’s drafts tell us about his poetry.
18