"I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth..."

Oxford, Magdalen College- obviously, my top choice.  I did the ELAT admissions test and I must have done well enough to not be in the bottom 20% because I have my interview NEXT FREAKIN' TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY AND I WILL DIE. 

York- My second choice after Oxford.  Haven't visited it but the place is lovely- campus not so much.

Warwick- I don't really want to go here, even though it's where JRT went.  I mean, if I got rejected from the lovely dreaming spires of Oxford, i don't think I could face the grey, concrete campus of warwick, which isn't even in Warwick but, in fact, is in Coventry.  I would literally be sent to Coventry.

Birmingham- This time it's a lovely campus and a not so lovely city but, hey, that's fine.  I shall practise my Brummie accent a lot.

UEA (University of East Anglia)- Horrible campus I'm told but one of the best creative writing sourses in the country.

NB For Birmingham and UEA, I have applied for English Literature with Creative Writing- for the other three, just English.

York- AAA, which I should get because I got good AS levels and racked up lots of lovely points, but still...Anyway, if I don't get into Oxford, I'd like to go here.

Birmingham- AAB BUT that includes Critical Thinking, so I shall probably accept them as my back-up.

UEA- AAB but without C.T. and they are a bit grey and are in Norwich, so...

In light of all this War Poetry business, the new light of my life is none other than the darling Wilfred Owen.  Oh yes, joining the long list of Keats, Hamlet...um...right, so possibly not that long a list, but there we go.  Anyway, I never thought I'd love a man called Wilfred, so it just goes show.  Something.

But he died young! And he wrote such piercingly lovely poetry, that was somehow awful and terrible and made you shake all over at the same time!  And we were reading "Not About Heroes"- a play with only two characters, about the relationship between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen- and I was reading Owen's part and he's so shy and stammers and adores sassoon, when really Sassoon sees that Owen will be the one to show them all- him, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves- the way to what can be said, and what can be remembered. 

Because Owen is the better poet, after all, something that he didn't see.  And because he so adamantly rejected the idea of "heroes"- for him, there was only War- but he became a hero himself.  Even today, Owen is the voice of the soldier.  Owen makes me accept that i cannot know, cannot possibly understand the horrors that those poor men and boys suffered through, and yet still makes me feel some small part of it.

Oh, look, I can't explain.  Here's my favourite:

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Then again, I'm also pining after Keats again because my Shelley book has arrived and I've been reading "Adonais", which was, of course, written on his death.  And, of course, the relationship between Shelley and Keats parallels that of Sassoon and Owen, and, in a way, that of Horatio and Hamlet, so there we go.  "Order out of disorder, into disorder."  (Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, the other Man of the Moment.)