INTRODUCTION
In this paper we are going to analyse a poem by Wilfred Owen in order to
know how life was in World War One times and how people felt about it,
especially those who fought and were in the trenches laying down his life. We
are going to analyse this period with a religious point of view to observe the
evolution of the religious ideas in these difficult moments, when perhaps was
easy to loose faith.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
World War One also known as the Great War, was a global military
conflict that took place between 1914 and 1918.
In that time, there were lots of battles and of course lots of deaths of
soldiers, who went there to defend their country and lived the horrors of war
and lots of difficult situations, which weren’t easy.
One of these soldiers was the poet Wilfred Owen, who is one of the most
famous poets of the First World War. Inspired by his experiences on the front
lines in
AT A
At a
One ever hangs where shelled roads part.
In this war He too lost a limb,
But His disciples hide apart;
And now the Soldiers bear with Him.
Near
And in their faces there is pride
That they were flesh-marked by the Beast
By whom the gentle Christ's denied.
The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate.2
Before we analyse this poem it is important to provide
some information about the location which inspired it in order to understand
the poem better.
The Ancre was a valley
where the last phase of the
ANALYSIS
The poem compares the
situation in the Ancre with the biblical passage of the New Testament, which
told the detention and Calvary of Christ. Owen created a parallelism between
his experience of the battle and his religious ideas to criticise the pure
patriotism.2 He compares the suffering of Christ when he was going to be crucified
and the suffering of the soldiers at the battlefield, which was something
terrible and an extremely hard experience.
According to Kenneth
Simcox, the biblical influence could be not only his religious education but
the fact, that in
In the first stanza, the
poem starts describing the situation of the battle, where as we have said
before, lots of shell-attacks took place and destroyed everything they touched,
not only environment but the soldiers, this is a representation of the terrible
experience that Owen as a soldier had to live at this battle.
In the second verse, he
compares Christ with the soldiers, as if he were one of them, telling us that
even He lost a part of his body in these extremely dangerous shell-attacks:
In this war He too lost a limb
In the next verse, we
found a clear relation with the Biblical passages we have mentioned before:
But His disciples hide apart
and now the Soldiers bare with Him
When Jesus was arrested,
his disciples abandoned him so he was alone in his own “battle” of suffering
(Mt 26, 56 “Then all the disciples
abandoned Him and ran away”) 5. The Soldiers feel the same as Jesus because
they have been abandoned by the priests and the politicians, those people who
have power but prefer to be far from the conflict because it is easy that
others go to battlefields. The only ones who are there giving their lives are
the soldiers who are with Him.
In the second stanza, he
speaks again of the priests who are sinners because of their pride and because
they have felt to temptation with the Beast who could represent the Devil in a
Biblical context.
Near
And in their faces there is pride
That they were flesh-marked by the Beast
In the Biblical context,
that means that the priests, who were seeing the Calvary of Christ made
anything because they were frightened of the authorities. In the war context
the Beast are the Germans, who were the enemies the soldiers should be opposed
to in order to save the honour of their country.5
In the last stanza, he
speaks about the politicians. They manipulated the soldiers to defend their
country, convincing them of how bad the enemy was and telling them they should
have allegiance to the state, but they have forgotten Christ, because:
But they who love the
greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate.
The soldiers fight because of the love they
feel to this country, because they are supposed to do it, but not because they
hate others. As well as Jesus died for us, the soldiers died for their love to
their countries. That could sound very patriotic, but the real Christian is not
a pure patriotic person, because Christianity and hate are not the same thing.
In relation to the rhyme,
the poem presents a cross rhyme, as we can observe:
One ever hangs where shelled roads
part. A
In this war He too lost a limb, B
But His disciples hide apart; A
And now the Soldiers bear with Him. B
The language he
uses is quiet easy and simple to understand and the metaphor between war and
CONCLUSION
We have studied the
evolution of religious ideas through different periods founding different
reactions. The reaction of this time of war could be a reaction against
religion but we found that Owen, instead of loosing his faith in the face of so
difficult moments plenty of horror, death and fears, he tried to tell people
that the way the authorities had taken was a wrong one, one way apart from
Christianity and His universal love message.
This perfect combination
relating a battle with the Calvary of Christ, tries to reflect that nobody wins
a war, and that patriotism tarnish the mind, because a war such as WWI with
hard battles and lots of deaths, is a
A good example of that,
are literary pieces from German writers and poets, which also speak about the
atrocity of wars. One good example could be “Im Western nichts Neues”
(All quiet on the Western Front) from Erich Maria Remarque which relates the
difficult and horrible moments that the German soldiers have to live in the trenches
during a battle, thinking how senseless the war was and trying to return alive.
That makes us understand
that British or German soldiers both were people, both had feelings, both felt
fear.
Perhaps, that was the
message that Owen tried to express with this poem, bringing back Jesus, because
Jesus loved all men not only the British or the Germans, His message of eternal
love was of course universal.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.
“Biography Wilfred Owen”.
HTML Markup Paul
2.
“Wilfred Owen, At a
3.
“
4.
“At a
5.
La Santa Biblia (Ediciones Paulinas)
1988