User:MinorProphet/A New Heaven

A New Heaven is a sonnet by Wilfred Owen, probably written in September 1916 in England before Owen had seen active service in the trenches of France. Some MS drafts bear differing dedications, (To &mdash; 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 Revelations 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.