Daily Inspiration Quote by Wilfred Owen

There is a startling lift in Owen's phrasing: not just that he wants to fly, but that flying is the only active profession he can imagine doing "with enthusiasm" once the War is over. In a life being ground down by mud, terror, and institutional slaughter, the sentence reads like a flare of oxygen - a craving for motion that isn't dictated by shells and orders. The word "active" is doing quiet work here. Owen isn't daydreaming about comfort or retreat; he's admitting he still needs intensity, speed, risk. He just wants those sensations divorced from mass death.

The subtext is cruelly double-edged. Aviation in 1917-18 carried its own romance - the lone pilot, the clean sky, the idea of chivalry above the trenches. Owen is reaching for a modern myth of purity, a way to convert militarized adrenaline into something that feels personal and even beautiful. Yet he's also revealing how war rewires desire: after enough exposure to extremity, ordinary civilian life can start to look like a kind of numbness. "Continue" suggests he has already tasted that attraction; the War hasn't only traumatized him, it has educated his nerves.

Context sharpens the line's tragic irony. Owen is the poet who made the Great War's machinery morally unbearable on the page, and he dies in it days before the Armistice. The dream of flight becomes less an escape plan than a glimpse of what the War stole: a future in which his appetite for danger might have found a different shape - or at least a different target.