As the bells rang throughout London marking the armistice ending WWI, Wilford Owen’s family received notice that he had been killed in action. He was himself, a doomed youth.
Yes, it's almost too much to think about for me. Fortunately for us at least, he didn't procrastinate committing to paper the ingenious verses buzzing about in his head "until the war is over."
@SimoLInk1698 for unlucky substitute tragic Your unlucky if you lose a prized possession but losing life is both tragic and heinous in this case Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori NOT 😢
I love the War Poets and, in particular, this poem by Wilfred Owen. The imagery is so powerful, that I use it in my public speaking training. Superb recital by Sean Bean. Brings the text to life.
@@Jack-vp9kl to "do" maybe. To "die" is another matter indeed. One needs more assurance than just the mere prattle of some petty deceiver, ardent to enlist bodies for liquifying in the cuisinart of war, regardless of moral intentions or outcomes.
@@BrucknerMotet That’s the ‘old lie’ the initial comment was talking about. It’s a line from the Roman poet, Horace. Wilfred Owen quotes it in the poem ‘dulce et decorum est’ calling it a lie.
ive always like sean bean, but this reading of a very haunting poem to veterans who lost their lives, and it doesnt matter what war or conflict gave a me a new respect for him, thank you Sean andthank you for those who gave all, SEMPER FI
"On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live. " Eric Burdon . . . . . Amen, Will
a true hero . a man who fought and wrote about what he saw and experienced. a patriot of the highest order . rip my hero . till we muster for the last time brother .
The Power of the spoken Poetic word which can cast a spell to give you a glimmer of what they faced, may God have granted safe passage to all those English men.
long ... looooong time sean bean fan just read that this be 1st peom we studying as part of my english lit portion of course ... i think i might have this on repeat for a while
What can you say about Sean Bean's reading of this epic poem - nothing other than the awful experience of what that past generation went through is in his voice. If there is a God may it never happen again.....but as we know it does.
God bless the war veteran and may they find peace in their minds and in their hearts, after seeing such casual carnage. And after they are used as such pawn to the powers of this world, and after the guns of August and the blood curdeling noise of drum beat end in a hushed, murmering, silence. And after we will blindly parrot out and perpetuate the past mistakes of wars myth and of victors strength making wars carnage inevitable again.
The more I grow older the more annoyed I am by actors. At least the video inspired me to read it instead. Better read as it was meant to be, practically like a message in a bottle from an alien world to the future.
I did a fair few of these poems at school but for me, reading them had nothing like the impact of listening to this. Could you explain in what way his reading was not "as it was meant to be"?
@@dorsetgirl9667 he turned it into a gross performance. The music is supposed to flow like listening to someone who’s really good at talking. Listen to Christopher Hitchens recite from memory a Wilfred Owen poem.
After one drum beat and cymbel clash of war's thundering end another grim symphony will surely began. As ships pass in the night so began again our macabre pantings for blood lust and war.
Thank you for the reference and link. I went to have a listen but for me it doesn't begin to compare with what Sean Bean has done here. Personal taste, obviously, but I found Fry's voice too light and impersonal and the music very distracting. (For a fair comparison I didn't look at the images while listening.)
Compare this brilliant performance to the overacted travesty that was Charles Dances rendition of Siegfried Sassoon's brilliant poem 'Aftermath' at the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. Like chalk and cheese.
His letters. He was 25. As a lay preacher at Dunsden Vicarage (1912-13), in South Oxfordshire, Owen lost his belief in God and became attracted to the company of some of his young parishioners, treating one 13-year-old boy ‘to a secret tea at the Vicarage’ and enjoying a tryst in the woods where the two ‘lay in hawthorn glades’. Owen later wrote: ‘I fall in love with children, elfin fair. Poetry of Wilfred Owen Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (18 March 1893 - 4 November 1918) was an English poet and soldier, regarded by many as one of the leading poets of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trench and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend Siegfried Sassoon and sat in stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written earlier by war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Some of his best-known works-most of which were published posthumously-include Dulce et Decorum Est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility and Strange Meeting. Wilfred Owen was killed in action at the Battle of the Sambre just a week before the war ended, causing news of his death to reach home as the town’s church bells declared peace. (edited from the Wikipedia article on Wilfred Owen) Over the past few years, I have come to find great admiration for the poetry of Wilfred Owen. In my every day life and in the writing of this blog I find myself thinking of his poems. As the above mini-bio indicates, Owen is chiefly remembered for his poetry about war, and indeed those poems move me as deeply as a person who has never experienced war can be moved. Those poems are, I believe, vital in that they counter the popular, glamorous (though less so now than in the past) image of war with a stark and horrifying image founded on honesty. Despite its relevance to our current times, it is not Owen’s collection of war poems that I think of on an almost daily basis, but his smaller in number (and more often neglected) poems about boys! I suppose I am in no position to make statements about Owen’s sexuality, but it seems to me that he had an admiration for boys and their beauty that is very much in line with my own. I am hardly the first person to suggest that he was a pedophile, and if I may be so bold I would say that his poetry about boys is not neglected for its immaturity or weakness (it is often dismissed as such in scholarly works) but because it inspires uncomfortable questions that cannot be answered. (Owen’s mother burned a bag of his personal papers after his death at his request, and his brother removed “discreditable” lines from his letters and diaries.) I have collected here a number of Owen’s poems dealing with boys, along with some small commentary, so that you may decide for yourself if this is the poetry of a man who loves boys, or sees them merely through artistic eyes. Sonnet To a Child Sweet is your antique body, not yet young. Beauty withheld from youth that looks for youth. Fair only for your father. Dear among Masters in art. To all men else uncouth Save me; who knows your smile comes very old, Learnt of the happy dead that laughed with gods; For earlier suns than ours have lent you gold, Sly fauns and trees have given you jigs and nods. But soon your heart, hot-beating like a bird’s, Shall slow down. Youth shall lop your hair, And you must learn wry meanings in our words. Your smile shall dull, because too keen aware; And when for hopes your hand shall be uncurled, Your eyes shall close, being opened to the world. WHO IS THE GOD OF CANONGATE? Who is the god of Canongate? I, for I trifle with men and fate. Art thou high in the heart of London? Yea, for I do what is done and undone. What is thy throne, thou barefoot god? All pavements where my feet have trod. Where is thy shrine, then, little god? Up secret stairs men mount unshod. Say what libation such men fill? There lift their lusts and let them spill. Why do you smell of the moss in Arden? If I told you, Sir, your look would harden. What are you called, I ask your pardon? I am called the Flower of Covent Garden. What shall I pay for you, lily-lad? Not all the gold King Solomon had. How can I buy you, London Flower? Buy me for ever, but not for an hour. When shall I pay you, Violet Eyes? With laughter first, and after with sighs. But you will fade, my delicate bud? No, there is too much sap in my blood. Will you not shrink in my shut room? No, there I’ll break into fullest bloom
You seem to dislike him. It also seems you appear to have copied large reams of text from a daily mail article published with the sole aim of discrediting him for book publicity.
Owen died in the horror of battle after writing the most affecting and moving poems. And yet here, we see one 'Seanio Casey' criticising the man 98 years later from behind a screen. Just... fuck off. You sad, pointless little specimen.
Sean Bean could make reading a grocery list exciting.
He'd be dead before he'd read as far as the biscuits
He spoilt that poem by being over dramatic
One hundred years ago today since Wilfred Owen died. I'm proud to have named my son after him.
Wilfred or Owen, may I ask?
@@tomweston3239either are good names as long as your sons nickname is will
I have visited his grave in France, close to where he died. A great hero. RIP Wifred Owen.
As the bells rang throughout London marking the armistice ending WWI, Wilford Owen’s family received notice that he had been killed in action. He was himself, a doomed youth.
He was really unlucky. He survived most of the war only to be killed a week before the end.
How beautifully poignant. Well put.
I imagine him being the dead boy they flung into the back of that wagon.
Yes, it's almost too much to think about for me. Fortunately for us at least, he didn't procrastinate committing to paper the ingenious verses buzzing about in his head "until the war is over."
@SimoLInk1698 for unlucky substitute tragic
Your unlucky if you lose a prized possession but losing life is both tragic and heinous in this case
Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori NOT 😢
What a fantastic reading, beautifully chilling stuff. Glad I came across this.
Wow, what an outstanding read and performance for this poem! Thank You.
The best rendition of one of Wilfred Owen's best war poems. Said with such feeling. The pity of war.
Bloody hell, he's good at this.
He really, *really* is.
I love the War Poets and, in particular, this poem by Wilfred Owen. The imagery is so powerful, that I use it in my public speaking training. Superb recital by Sean Bean. Brings the text to life.
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Gareth King It is sweet and glorious to do for one's country.
@@Jack-vp9kl pro tip: its not
@@Jack-vp9kl to "do" maybe. To "die" is another matter indeed. One needs more assurance than just the mere prattle of some petty deceiver, ardent to enlist bodies for liquifying in the cuisinart of war, regardless of moral intentions or outcomes.
@@BrucknerMotet That’s the ‘old lie’ the initial comment was talking about. It’s a line from the Roman poet, Horace. Wilfred Owen quotes it in the poem ‘dulce et decorum est’ calling it a lie.
ive always like sean bean, but this reading of a very haunting poem to veterans who lost their lives, and it doesnt matter what war or conflict gave a me a new respect for him, thank you Sean andthank you for those who gave all, SEMPER FI
"On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live. "
Eric Burdon
.
.
.
.
.
Amen, Will
Literal Chills heard this 5 years ago and still can't get it out of my head 🥶
Perfection in the recitation of fine verse is indeed possible, as Sean Bean demonstrates definitively and convincingly.
One does not simply listen to this unphased.
Gives me goosebumps to listen to Sean Bean reading this classic.
superb .gone for ever are the men with hearts of oak ..we shall remember them
My Grandfather was at Mons... Nothing more moving than: The bugles calling for them from sad shires...
Absolutely brilliant! Sean wears this amazing poem on his face.
a true hero . a man who fought and wrote about what he saw and experienced. a patriot of the highest order . rip my hero . till we muster for the last time brother .
The Power of the spoken Poetic word which can cast a spell to give you a glimmer of what they faced, may God have granted safe passage to all those English men.
Sean Bean defiantly channeling a bit of Sharpe there. D:
Yes indeed! And I saw many images of Sharpe's battles while listening to this. Very moving.
Wonderful poetry and the perfect reader
haunting... men and women with much more courage than us are remembered by this.
To hear a voice I identify with Richard Sharpe, so brave and reckless, reciting this with such horrified sorrow... it chills the blood.
I've spent ten minutes trying to add something to this, but I think you've captured the character and said it all.
@@dorsetgirl9667 That's high praise. Thank you.
simply beautiful
Thank you, Major Sharpe!!
Sean is soo amazing.
long ... looooong time sean bean fan just read that this be 1st peom we studying as part of my english lit portion of course ... i think i might have this on repeat for a while
Just superb!
Excellent reading !!!!
'Oohhh, Sharpie - I were despairing . . .'
Wonderful
My favorite AMA
The ability to fire three rounds a minute in all weather, sir
IS THE BEST SEAN BEAN
I am 52 springs young , and i know this poem thanks to mR Thatham in my Polish borading school in Pitsford Northampton. I now live in the Netherlands
Beautiful.
Powerful stuff.
Well said my friend.
I was so lucky to have an English lit teacher who took us to all sorts of live shows. 1973
What a voice
Originally called anthem for dead youth, until Sassoon changed it.
I love the name Sean bean
Lord Stark seems upset about his son's defeat
Superb ..
Major sharp
Sean bean could make a school assignment exiting
SEAN BEAN !!!
he is in it
This man needs to do there will come soft rains.
I had to look it up but yes. He would magnify the bleakness and our insignificance to something quite unbearable.
What can you say about Sean Bean's reading of this epic poem - nothing other than the awful experience of what that past generation went through is in his voice. If there is a God may it never happen again.....but as we know it does.
See what you can do-at o2?
Perfection.
a drawing down of blinds
Never heard Mr Bean speak before
I get shudders all over whenever I listen to this.
As Gen. William T. Sherman once said, war is hell.
One can not simple 😊😊😊😊😊
Is this taken from a movie ?
A poem of Wilfred Owen.
A documentary: THE GREAT WAR POETS brought me here.
i HATE how they added sound in the bacground. That kind defetes half the point of the poem
The Telegraph dares to publicize it? It is a treachery.
You do know it is public knowledge?
"come now wee hobbarts...
0:17
o...k
Best Yorkshire accent
God bless the war veteran and may they find peace in their minds and in their hearts, after seeing such casual carnage. And after they are used as such pawn to the powers of this world, and after the guns of August and the blood curdeling noise of drum beat end in a hushed, murmering, silence. And after we will blindly parrot out and perpetuate the past mistakes of wars myth and of victors strength making wars carnage inevitable again.
+mathew idicula Dulce et Decorum est, pro patria mori
The more I grow older the more annoyed I am by actors. At least the video inspired me to read it instead. Better read as it was meant to be, practically like a message in a bottle from an alien world to the future.
I did a fair few of these poems at school but for me, reading them had nothing like the impact of listening to this. Could you explain in what way his reading was not "as it was meant to be"?
@@dorsetgirl9667 he turned it into a gross performance. The music is supposed to flow like listening to someone who’s really good at talking. Listen to Christopher Hitchens recite from memory a Wilfred Owen poem.
Rob Dougan brought me here!
Big up hampton
I've always thought most choirs were demented.
We are when people talk all the way through the anthem we've spent weeks practising.
After one drum beat and cymbel clash of war's thundering end another grim symphony will surely began. As ships pass in the night so began again our macabre pantings for blood lust and war.
This sounds so timeless, unlike his roles.
hey, it's a poem about death and destruction. This guy knows a thing or two about dying.
ST JOSEPH AND THAT
Stephen Fry read it better.
ruclips.net/video/h6IzPoDxAq0/видео.html
Thank you for the reference and link. I went to have a listen but for me it doesn't begin to compare with what Sean Bean has done here. Personal taste, obviously, but I found Fry's voice too light and impersonal and the music very distracting. (For a fair comparison I didn't look at the images while listening.)
Owen was what a poet should be. If you can recite his work with any justice at all, you should be able to cut the atmosphere with a knife.
2024
Compare this brilliant performance to the overacted travesty that was Charles Dances rendition of Siegfried Sassoon's brilliant poem 'Aftermath' at the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. Like chalk and cheese.
PROLIX!
Him vs Morgan Freeman XD
James O'Sullivan I like them both, but Sean Bean (he’s got a Yorkshire accent 😍)
a teenage wasteland
Why does he look like Ned Stark from GOT?
What a waste of a generation
Owen knew a lot about youth, self confessed "boy lover" a ,paedophile. Just to put things on context.
he was a youth himself, no?
His letters. He was 25.
As a lay preacher at Dunsden Vicarage (1912-13), in South Oxfordshire, Owen lost his belief in God and became attracted to the company of some of his young parishioners, treating one 13-year-old boy ‘to a secret tea at the Vicarage’ and enjoying a tryst in the woods where the two ‘lay in hawthorn glades’. Owen later wrote: ‘I fall in love with children, elfin fair.
Poetry of Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (18 March 1893 - 4 November 1918) was an English poet and soldier, regarded by many as one of the leading poets of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trench and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend Siegfried Sassoon and sat in stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written earlier by war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Some of his best-known works-most of which were published posthumously-include Dulce et Decorum Est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility and Strange Meeting.
Wilfred Owen was killed in action at the Battle of the Sambre just a week before the war ended, causing news of his death to reach home as the town’s church bells declared peace.
(edited from the Wikipedia article on Wilfred Owen)
Over the past few years, I have come to find great admiration for the poetry of Wilfred Owen. In my every day life and in the writing of this blog I find myself thinking of his poems. As the above mini-bio indicates, Owen is chiefly remembered for his poetry about war, and indeed those poems move me as deeply as a person who has never experienced war can be moved. Those poems are, I believe, vital in that they counter the popular, glamorous (though less so now than in the past) image of war with a stark and horrifying image founded on honesty.
Despite its relevance to our current times, it is not Owen’s collection of war poems that I think of on an almost daily basis, but his smaller in number (and more often neglected) poems about boys! I suppose I am in no position to make statements about Owen’s sexuality, but it seems to me that he had an admiration for boys and their beauty that is very much in line with my own. I am hardly the first person to suggest that he was a pedophile, and if I may be so bold I would say that his poetry about boys is not neglected for its immaturity or weakness (it is often dismissed as such in scholarly works) but because it inspires uncomfortable questions that cannot be answered. (Owen’s mother burned a bag of his personal papers after his death at his request, and his brother removed “discreditable” lines from his letters and diaries.)
I have collected here a number of Owen’s poems dealing with boys, along with some small commentary, so that you may decide for yourself if this is the poetry of a man who loves boys, or sees them merely through artistic eyes.
Sonnet
To a Child
Sweet is your antique body, not yet young.
Beauty withheld from youth that looks for youth.
Fair only for your father. Dear among
Masters in art. To all men else uncouth
Save me; who knows your smile comes very old,
Learnt of the happy dead that laughed with gods;
For earlier suns than ours have lent you gold,
Sly fauns and trees have given you jigs and nods.
But soon your heart, hot-beating like a bird’s,
Shall slow down. Youth shall lop your hair,
And you must learn wry meanings in our words.
Your smile shall dull, because too keen aware;
And when for hopes your hand shall be uncurled,
Your eyes shall close, being opened to the world.
WHO IS THE GOD OF CANONGATE?
Who is the god of Canongate?
I, for I trifle with men and fate.
Art thou high in the heart of London?
Yea, for I do what is done and undone.
What is thy throne, thou barefoot god?
All pavements where my feet have trod.
Where is thy shrine, then, little god?
Up secret stairs men mount unshod.
Say what libation such men fill?
There lift their lusts and let them spill.
Why do you smell of the moss in Arden?
If I told you, Sir, your look would harden.
What are you called, I ask your pardon?
I am called the Flower of Covent Garden.
What shall I pay for you, lily-lad?
Not all the gold King Solomon had.
How can I buy you, London Flower?
Buy me for ever, but not for an hour.
When shall I pay you, Violet Eyes?
With laughter first, and after with sighs.
But you will fade, my delicate bud?
No, there is too much sap in my blood.
Will you not shrink in my shut room?
No, there I’ll break into fullest bloom
You seem to dislike him. It also seems you appear to have copied large reams of text from a daily mail article published with the sole aim of discrediting him for book publicity.
Owen died in the horror of battle after writing the most affecting and moving poems. And yet here, we see one 'Seanio Casey' criticising the man 98 years later from behind a screen. Just... fuck off. You sad, pointless little specimen.
Indeed! One Barry Mathews or Mathew Barry as he often calls himself. Yet another one finding solace behind a keyboard.