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The RUSI Journal
ISSN: 0307-1847 (Print) 1744-0378 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rusi20
A Candle for Wilfred Owen
Douglas Kerr
To cite this article: Douglas Kerr (2018) A Candle for Wilfred Owen, The RUSI Journal, 163:5,
86-88, DOI: 10.1080/03071847.2018.1552461
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2018.1552461
Published online: 06 Dec 2018.
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2. 86 © RUSI Journal Vol. 163, No. 5, October/November 2018 pp. 86–88
Conflict, War and Culture
The RUSI Journal
A Candle for Wilfred Owen
Douglas Kerr
November 1918 marks not only the centenary of the end of the First World War, but also of the death
of one of the war’s leading soldier-poets, Wilfred Owen. Serving as a lieutenant in the Manchester
Regiment, Owen was killed in the attack on the Sambre-Oise Canal, in the last days of the war. The
telegram bearing news of his death reached his family in Shrewsbury on 11 November, the day of the
armistice.

3. 87
DOI: 10.1080/03071847.2018.1552461
T
he artist and poet Isaac Rosenberg wrote this
in a letter from the Western Front where he
was serving as a private in the King’s Own
Royal Lancaster Regiment:
We are now in the trenches again and though I feel very
sleepy, I just have a chance to answer your letter so I
will while I may. Its [sic] really my being lucky enough
to bag an inch of candle that incites me to this pitch of
punctual epistolary. I must measure my letter by the
light.1
The letter, to his friend and patron Edward
Marsh, is dated 28 March 1918 and postmarked
2 April. Rosenberg was killed on 1 April, All Fools’
Day, 1918, so when the letter was sent he was
already dead. The cadged candle is a small detail of
1. Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Letter to Edward Marsh’, 28 March 1918, in Ian Parsons (ed.), The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1979), p. 272.
2. Wilfred Owen, ‘Letter to Susan Owen’, 31 October 1918, in Harold Owen and John Bell (eds), Collected Letters (London:
Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 590–91.
the living conditions of an infantry soldier on the
Western Front. You could only write if you had a
candle to see by. In another sense of course, it seems
an enormously symbolic and poignant observation,
the doomed poet on borrowed time, making shift to
express himself before the precarious light goes out.
Life on the Western Front was not continuous
battle. There was a practical, even domestic side to
everyday life in the army, and no doubt many soldiers
carried with them a bit of candle-end, and a box of
matches (or ‘lucifers’) to produce a light. Almost
everyone smoked. Wilfred Owen’s own last letter,
written to his mother on the evening of 31 October
1918 from ‘The Smoky Cellar of the Forester’s House’,
evokes a scene which is warm, companionable, even
cosy.2
‘So thick is the smoke in this cellar that I can
Military personnel hold candles during a service for the Commonwealth to commemorate the 100th
anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Courtesy of Russell Cheyne/PA Images

4. 88
A Candle for Wilfred Owen
© RUSI Journal October/November 2018
hardly see by a candle 12 ins. away’, he writes, but
he goes on to detail the activities of the soldiers
crowded together in the dimly lit cellar – some
joking together, some cooking, others dozing – as if
he were describing some genre painting of idealised
family life.
‘It is a great life’, he tells his mother, and concludes
that ‘you could not be visited by a band of friends half
so fine as surround me here’. However, in this case
the candlelight was deliberately deceptive. Owen’s
company of the Manchesters was preparing to take
part in an attack across the Sambre-Oise Canal, and
casualtieswould be inevitable. In the cellar theycould
hear the bombardment outside. But the purpose of
Owen’s letter was to reassure his mother and the
people at home. The true poets were not always
entirely truthful. ‘There is no danger down here’, he
told her, ‘or if any, it will be well over before you read
these lines’. Within a week he would be dead.
Owen’s letter was to reassure
his mother and the people at
home. The true poets were not
always entirely truthful
Light and dark are constant themes in Owen’s
writing. You could say that all art is about the struggle
between light and dark. But in the poetry of war
these themes are particularly dramatic. In his sonnet
‘1914’, before he had any first-hand experience of
warfare, it seemed natural to Owen to liken war
itself to darkness. ‘War broke: and now the winter of
the world / With perishing great darkness closes in’.
That perishing great darkness here is something of a
cliché: at the fin de siècle both artists and scientists
were preoccupied with imagining how the world
would end, with the extinguishing of heat and light
in the universe. But perishing darkness became
3. Wilfred Owen, ‘The Sentry’, in Jon Stallworthy (ed.), The Complete Poems and Fragments. Volume 1. (London: Chatto and
Windus, 2013), pp. 188–89.
a reality for Owen in the trenches of the Western
Front in the winter of early 1917, and in poems like
‘Exposure’ in which he remembers it. Darkness
might be a sentimental resource – ‘And each slow
dusk a drawing-down of blinds’ – but more often, in
memory and dreams, it was the setting for nightmare
experience, desperate encounters, like the one
imagined in ‘Strange Meeting’: ‘I am the enemy you
killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark’.
Poets, we like to think, are on the side of light.
Certainly they often celebrate its power to dispel
the darkness. ‘How far that little candle throws his
beams!’ exclaims Shakespeare’s Portia. ‘So shines a
good deed in a naughty world’. But in the profoundly
tragicworld of Owen’s poetry, darkness seems to have
prevailed. More often than not, light is discredited.
When, in the poem ‘Futility’, ‘the kind old sun’ rises
on the battlefield, for all its history of awakening all
life on the planet, its light and warmth cannot rouse a
single dead soldier.
Then there is ‘The Sentry’, in which a patrol
takes refuge in an underground dug-out during
a bombardment, and the sentry is blown up and
blinded. The explosion has blown out their candles,
leaving them all in the dark, but someone seems to
have retrieved and lighted one. The officer holds a
flame close to a wounded man’s eyes, and tells him
that, if he can see the light, he will recover his sight.
But he can see nothing. Teeth chattering, sobbing
and twitching, the blinded man continues to moan
piteously, as for hours the terrifying bombardment
thunders overhead. The end of the poem, when it
comes, is cruel:
Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout
‘I see your lights!’ – But ours had long gone out.3
Douglas Kerr is the author of Wilfred Owen’s Voices
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) and is a former
Professor of English and Dean of Arts at the
University of Hong Kong.