“But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
That they should be as stones.”
from Insensibility by Wilfred Owen
When I was a young girl, I was in the Cleveland Orchestra Children’s Choir. We performed Benjamin Britton’s War Requiem.
War Requeim was written for the church’s reconsecration
As a girl, I was too young to be curious about what we were singing. It was in Latin and we were entirely focused on pronunciation and the music. There was pressure for our female choirmaster to be successful, too, which she passed on to us.
Now I know that Benjamin Britten incorporated eight of Owen’s poems into War Requiem.
“This day, this day of wrath
Shall consume the world in ashes.“
Owen’s war experiences on the front line in France in early 1916 resulted in shell-shock, described more recently as chronic fatigue syndrome. The vast number of soldiers affected, especially after the batlle of the Somme in 1916, required some form of psychiatric help.
Owen was treated at Craiglockhart Hydropathic. once a therapeutic spa hotel and now part of Napier University, Edinburgh. It was requisitioned by the War Office in 1916 as a hospital for shell-shocked officers and remained open for over two years. Owen was released the end of 1917 and returned to the Western front in France, summer, 1918.
The Poetry is in the pity’
Now regarded by most as the greatest poet of World War I, Wilfred Owen was only 25-years-old when he was killed in action, one week before the signing of the Armistice. His poems express the physical and mental trauma of combat, “the pity of War.” On Armistice Day, 1985, Owen was one of the 16 Great War poets commemorated on a Westmoreland slate stone unveiled in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey.
,
“To which protector shall I appeal
When even the just man is barely safe? “
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