Miners (poem)

Owen wrote the poem in direct response to the Minnie Pit Disaster in which 156 people (155 miners, 1 rescue worker) died.

[1] After his discharge from Craiglockhart and a short spell of leave, Owen rejoined his army unit (the 3/5th battalion the Manchester Regiment) in Scarborough.

He wrote Miners in under an hour[5] in response to the Minnie Pit Disaster of 12 January 1918, in which 156 men and boys lost their lives as a result of a firedamp explosion, including 40 pit-lads under 16.

(But I would trust them to advance under fire and to hold their trench;) blond, coarse, ungainly, strong, 'unfatiguable', unlovely, Lancashire soldiers, Saxons to the bone.

But his traumatic experiences on the Western Front intrude on his somewhat romantic meditation: "Wrote a poem on the Colliery Disaster: but I get mixed up with the War at the end.

"[8] The gently hissing coals recall the moans of the dying miners "writhing for air"; Owen intertwines their deaths with those of soldiers at the front, imagining charred bodies reduced to ash.

Owen laments that though people over the coming years will live on peacefully and doze by fires, their coals will have been formed of the toils of the dead soldiers and miners, now buried under the earth and forgotten.