Miners - Synopsis and commentary

Synopsis of Miners

Sitting by his coal fire Owen hears the sounds the coals make. He imagines the coal seams are remembering their formation over geological epochs. However he realises that their whispers and moans are for the men and boys killed in the coal mines. This leads Owen on to compare their deaths with those of the men and boys at the Western front who have suffered and died mining Death in order to extract Peace. He sees a future comforted by the fires of the sacrifice ‘we’ made, thereby including himself.

Commentary on Miners

Context

Owen says of this poem that it ‘wrote itself in half an hour’ whilst he was training in Ripon before returning to the Western Front. It was prompted by the colliery disaster at the Minnie Mine in Halmer End, a village in Staffordshire, which occurred on the 12th January 1918. Of the 155 killed, 144 died of gas poisoning and 44 were boys of sixteen years of age or under. The next day Owen wrote Miners and sent it to The Nation, a journal which published poems which were critical of war. The poem appeared in print on the 28th January 1918 and was the first of Owen’s poems to earn him money. His cousin Leslie Gunston, a conventional poet who didn’t go to war, wrote to Owen that the rhymes offended his musical ear. In response Owen said:

He may have been thinking of the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) which was creating a stir in conventional musical circles before WWI.

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