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 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

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[1] 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.

Poems by Wilfred Owen
Poems (1920)	"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"
Other poems	"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"