“It seemed as though it was happening to somebody else. He heard the rattle of German machine guns and believed they were aimed elsewhere. He pitied the unfortunate comrades who fell into the mud and filthy water, yet silently thanked the Lord that it was them and not him. Surely He had made him immune to this brutal enemy. He was too young to die.

“Then his tunic exploded before his eyes. Chunks of blood, cloth and gore splattered across his chest and stomach like enormous raindrops. There was no pain. Not at first. Then came the realisation that these were the very bullets meant for somebody else. After that came the searing pain—sharp, sudden, inexplicable. His insides had exploded. The Lord had deserted him after all.

“Those were his final thoughts as he fell to his knees: that he was going to die, and his secret would remain with him on the banks of the Sambre–Oise Canal at Ors.“

*****

I am one of those who subscribes to the view that the poet was homosexual. Others, of course, suggest otherwise. His connections with a homosexual literary circle that included Siegfried Sassoon, Robbie Ross, Osbert Sitwell and Scottish writer C.K. Scott Moncrieff is well documented. 

The truth of the matter died with Owen at Ors in November 1918.

Wilfred Owen had only five poems published during his lifetime. The vast majority of his work was published posthumously, much of it written between August 1917 and September 1918 during his stay at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh and a subsequent period in Scarborough.

One such poem, Who Is the God of Canongate?, is believed to have been written at Scarborough in November 1917, when Owen joined the Manchester Regiment, billeted at the Clarence Gardens Hotel (now the Clifton Hotel), where he spent much of his free time writing in a turret bedroom.

The poem has often been interpreted as an evocation of male prostitution in Canongate, Edinburgh, and Covent Garden, London, collectively represented as a “little god” who walks the pavements barefoot. This “lily-lad” is visited up “secret stairs” by men who “lift their lusts and let them spill”.

Did Owen write from experience? Or had he merely heard stories that inspired the poem?

Alas, we shall never know.