Wilfred Owen (1893
1918)
What
passing-bells for these who die as cattle? 1
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; 5
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 10
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
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
http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen2.html
This poem talks about the lack
of spiritual rituals that didnt take place during the deaths that occurred
during World War I. The title refers to a song that condemns the deaths of
innocent people during that war.
The poem is a sonnet, so it is
divided into two stanzas with eight verses the first one (two quatrains), and
the second one has six verses. The first quatrain has an abab
rhyme, the second quatrain rhymes cdcd, and
the six final verses have an eff rhyme.
We can also find some rethorical figures, which emphasise the action and the
description of the setting, as in the first verse: these who die as cattle (l. 1), here Owen makes a comparison between the people who
die at war and are like cattle, because people die because of the animal
thinking that some persons have. In the second verse there is a personification
of the guns: the monstrous anger of
the guns (l. 2). In the third
verse there is an alliteration: stuttering
rifles' rapid rattle, where the repeated
sound of the letter t and then the letter r
reminds us of the real sound of the rifles.
Throughout this quatrain we can
also deduce that Owen is using a sound and a vocabulary that immerses us in a
place where the action is occurring rapidly. Sound is present in both
quatrains, while in the first we imagine the sounds of the war, in the second
there is an absence of sound.
During the second quatrain the
author remarks the meaning of the whole poem: the loss of rituals when a
soldier dies and the need for it within the soldiers families. There was a whole generation in which women couldnt be
married to someone. Throughout the sextet Owen, in a way, laments the
unnecessary deaths that took place during that dark period of our history. He
also uses some vocabulary that makes us think about death (candles, pallor
). In the final verse we find the word dusk, and
we can establish a relationship of meaning between this word and death.
Wilfred Owen is seen as the
leading World War I poet (Wikipedia, Wilfred_Owen). Owen based all his war poetry on his
four-month war experience, and after living all the horrours
of the war, he went to Craiglockhart War Hospital
near Edinburgh (Wilfred
Owen: War Poet, eric.laermans@intec.rug.ac.be).
It was in this Hospital where Owen wrote Anthem for Doomed Youth, and in
this moment of his life was when he had his close relationship with Siegfried Sassoon, who colaborated in some
aspects of the poem, as for example the title (salempress.com).
Although Owens poetry is usually seen as parallel
to Sassoons poems (one of the reasons is because Sassoons
promoted Owen's poetry, both before and after Owen's
death), they are very
different, and Owens poetry has been seen during the past century with much more
acclaim (Wikipedia, Wilfred Owen Biography).
According to some
critics, Wilfred Owen wanted to be a poet from the age of nineteen, and his
influences were based on Keats and Shelleys poetry (David Roberts,
Introduction to Wilfred Owen).
To sum up, my personal opinion
is that through his poetry (and of course through all the other war poets poetry), we can understand, at the same time,
the thinking about this matter of the people who were inside the world of
culture, and also the way of criticising (through poetry) a so peculiar issue
as the First World War of our history.
Sources:
-http://www.salempress.com/display.asp?id=313&column=Sample_Article; 5
April, 2006.
-Wilfred Owen: War Poet; eric.laermans@intec.rug.ac.be: April 2, 2006; http://users.fulladsl.be/spb1667/cultural/owen.html
-Wilfred Owen; Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Owen;
April 2, 2006.
-Introduction to Wilfred Owen; David Roberts and Saxon Books 1998 and 1999; http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owena.html; April 4, 2006.