Biography | Wilfred Owen — The Line Shrewsbury Chose to Carve

On 11 November 1918 the church bells of Shrewsbury rang for the armistice. A telegram reached the Owen family in the town that same day. Their eldest son, Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen of the Manchester Regiment, had been killed a week earlier at Ors, during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal. He was twenty-five. Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, near Oswestry; by the war his family were living in Shrewsbury, close to the abbey. What the town later put up for him stands on the abbey lawn, on Abbey Foregate. The Wilfred Owen Association commissioned it for the centenary of his birth. The sculptor Paul de Monchaux made it, and it was unveiled on 12 June 1993. The Imperial War Museum's memorials register puts the cost at £17,600, raised by public sponsorship. It is called Symmetry. Pale granite blocks sit on a circular York stone base a little over six metres across, folded so that the piece is at once a low passage and a bench. De Monchaux built the reference two ways: to the pontoon bridges thrown across the Sambre canal on the morning Owen died, and to the tunnel in "Strange Meeting", where a soldier goes down into a dug-out and meets the man he killed. One line from that poem is cut into the front face in red letters, with the poet's name and dates below it: I AM THE ENEMY YOU KILLED MY FRIEND The words belong to the German soldier, spoken to the British soldier who killed him. Shrewsbury chose them for its own poet, and left the rest of the poem off the stone. The granite weathered, and the association was written to about its condition for years. The Shropshire Star reported a repair costing about £6,500, paid for by the environmental services company Veolia, by association members, by the family of Owen's nephew Peter Owen, and by de Monchaux himself. The same paper reported a rededication on 6 November 2020, the 102nd anniversary of Owen's death, with around thirty people laying silk poppies outside after a service in the abbey. The abbey is a working parish church; the ground around it is open, and the memorial stands on the lawn beside the road. It was made to be sat on. 📸 Cover: "Symmetry, Wilfred Owen memorial - geograph.org.uk - 1071597.jpg" by Stephen Craven, 20 November 2008, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph Britain and Ireland and Wikimedia Commons. Also shown: "Shrewsbury Abbey, West front - geograph.org.uk - 7084345.jpg" by John H Darch, 29 January 2022, CC BY-SA 2.0 — an area view of the abbey, not of the memorial.