Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

Winter Song

1893 –

1918

The browns, the olives, and the yellows died,
And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed
Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide,
And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed,
Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.

From off your face, into the winds of winter,
The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing;
But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter,
When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing,
And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 30, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

One of the most admired poets of World War I, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen is best known for his poems "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum Est." He was killed in France on November 4, 1918.

Occasion

Themes

About this Poem

“Winter Song,” unpublished at the time of Wilfred Owen’s death, was first collected in The Poems of Wilfred Owen (Chatto & Windus, 1931). In “Wilfred Owen’s Influence on Three Generations of Poets,” published in The Modern Review, vol. 242, no. 3 (September 1978), Sasi Bhusan Das, former director of the Institute of English in Calcutta, writes, “[T]he idea of spiritual rebirth in Owen’s ‘Winter Song’ is confirmed by the next few lines of its first stanza: ‘And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, / Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.’ [. . .] It will be further noted that in his ‘Winter Song’ Owen also sings of a symbolic spring [. . .] in the same manner as [T. S.] Eliot in the opening passage of ‘Little Gidding’ does of the ‘Midwinter spring.’ Thus, in a sense, Owen’s ‘Winter Song,’ like Eliot’s passage, is a song of ‘Midwinter spring’ which is ‘sempiternal’ for it is not in ‘time’s covenant’ but ‘suspended in time.’” Jon Stallworthy, professor emeritus at the University of Oxford, notes in his titular biography of Owen that the poem is one of two “addressed to Arthur Newboult, the seven-year-old son of Edinburgh friends.”

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

More by this poet

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Wilfred Owen

1920

The Unreturning

Suddenly night crushed out the day and hurled
Her remnants over cloud-peaks, thunder-walled.
Then fell a stillness such as harks appalled
When far-gone dead return upon the world.

There watched I for the Dead; but no ghost woke.
Each one whom Life exiled I named and called.
But they were all too far, or dumbed, or thralled;
And never one fared back to me or spoke.

Then peered the indefinite unshapen dawn
With vacant gloaming, sad as half-lit minds,
The weak-limned hour when sick men’s sighs are drained.
And while I wondered on their being withdrawn,
Gagged by the smothering wing which

Wilfred Owen

1933

The End

After the blast of lightning from the east,
The flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot throne,
After the drums of time have rolled and ceased
And from the bronze west long retreat is blown,

Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?
Or fill these void veins full again with youth
And wash with an immortal water age?

When I do ask white Age, he saith not so,—
“My head hangs weighted with snow.”
And when I hearken to the Earth she saith
“My fiery heart sinks aching.

Wilfred Owen

2018

Poems

Page submenu block

Winter Song

More by this poet

Newsletter Sign Up