A New Heaven
"A New Heaven" is a sonnet by Wilfred Owen, written in England before Owen had seen active service in the trenches of France, probably in September 1916. Some MS drafts bear differing dedications (To — on active service or To a comrade in Flanders). The poem was probably written in Milford Camp, Surrey, which was a part of Witley Camp.
The poem's title echoes a line from Revelation 21:1, "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth". The poem is written from the point of view of a soldier (or soldiers) in France wondering about death; since they have no chance of gaining entry into any mythological afterlife (or even the Christian Paradise), they call on the English Channel ferry - rather than that over the Styx - to take them home and find remembrance and wholeness in their mothers' tears.
Owen's biographer Dominic Hibberd draws parallels with Owen's 1917 poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth", finding a Romantic nostalgia in both which was only expunged in the later poems written at Craiglockhart and after.[1]
References
- ^ Dominic, Hibberd (2002). Bloom, Harold (ed.). Poets of World War One. Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg. Infobase Publishing. pp. 46–49. ISBN 0-7910-5932-4. Retrieved 2011-05-01.
External links
- A New Heaven: draft manuscripts and full text at Oxford University First World War Poetry Digital Archive
- v
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- "A Terre"
- "Anthem for Doomed Youth"
- "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo"
- "Arms and the Boy"
- "The Dead-Beat"
- "Disabled"
- "Dulce et Decorum est"
- "Futility"
- "Insensibility"
- "Mental Cases"
- "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young"
- "Spring Offensive"
- "Strange Meeting"
- "Wild with All Regrets"
- "1914"
- "Asleep"
- "At a Calvary near the Ancre"
- "Cramped in that Funnelled Hole"
- "Elegy in April and September"
- "The End"
- "Has Your Soul Sipped?"
- "I Saw His Round Mouth's Crimson"
- "The Last Laugh"
- "The Letter"
- "Miners"
- "A New Heaven"
- "The Next War"
- "Soldier's Dream"
- "Sonnet On Seeing a Piece of our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action"
- "To Eros"
- "Training"
- "With an Identity Disc"