Explore "Poems: Insensibility" by Wilfred Owen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I / Happy are men who yet before they are killed / Can let their veins run cold. / Whom no compassion fleers / Or makes their feet / Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers. / The front line withers, / But they are troops who fade, not flowers / For poets' tearful fooling: / Men, gaps for filling / Losses who might have fought / Longer; but no one bothers.
II / And some cease feeling / Even themselves or for themselves. / Dullness best solves / The tease and doubt of shelling, / And Chance's strange arithmetic / Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling. / They keep no check on Armies' decimation.