Wilfred Owen was born on March 18th 1893, to an apparently wealthy family; however, within two years his grandfather died on the verge of bankruptcy and, missing his support, the family were forced into poorer housing at Birkenhead. This fallen status left a permanent impression on Wilfred's mother, and it may have combined with her staunch piety to produce a child who was sensible, serious, and who struggled to equate his wartime experiences with Christian teachings. Owen studied well at schools in Birkenhead and, after another family move, Shrewsbury - where he even helped to teach - but he failed the University of London's entrance exam. Consequently, Wilfred became lay assistant to the vicar of Dunsden - an Oxfordshire parish - under an arrangement designed so the vicar would tutor Owen for another attempt at University.

Although commentators differ as to whether Owen started writing at the age 10/11 or 17, he was certainly producing poems during his time at Dunsden; conversely, the experts agree that Owen favoured literature, as well as Botany, at school, and that his main poetic influence was Keats. The Dunsden poems exhibit the compassionate awareness so characteristic of Wilfred Owen's later war poetry, and the young poet found considerable material in the poverty and death he observed working for the church. Indeed, Wilfred Owen's written 'compassion' was often very close to morbidity.

It was after this latter battle, when Owen was caught in an explosion, that soldiers reported him acting rather strangely; he was diagnosed as having shell-shock and sent back to England for treatment in May. Owen arrived at the, now famous, Craiglockhart War Hospital on June 26th, an establishment sited outside Edinburgh. Over the next few months Wilfred wrote some of his finest poetry, the result of several stimuli.

The following is a poem that he wrote:
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 by 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 weighed with snow.'
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
'My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.'

Summary
The poem is pessimistic about the end of war. Even after war, the people who died can never be revived. Anything to say?