“Anthem For Doomed Youth”
By: Wilfred Edward Salter Owen
Index
1.-INTRODUCTION:
2.-ANALYSIS:
3.-CONCLUSION:
4.-BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1.-INTRODUCTION:
I have tried to represent at least one of the styles that are the main part of the World
War I,
for that I have chosen the poem “Anthem for doomed youth”
of the greatest war poet writing in the English language, Wilfred Owen.
Through this paper I am going to make its analysis focussing my attention on the most important aspects.
2.-ANALYSIS:
Through this analysis I have a carefully look at the historical background (the events during the time his poem was written) which I think it is so important to understand the poetry of this time and specially this poem.
World War One announced the century
of wars. It was to be a century in which whole nations would suffer and support
war and the destructive power developed by scientists would create death,
misery and brutalisation, on a new and quite astonishing scale. The human race
had moved into the era of scientific savagery.
The poets played their part in this
war as promoters of it, on lookers, soldiers and victims. What sets them apart
is that the poets were those most gifted to express the experience of those
shocking years. And their work includes some of the greatest poems in the
English language.[1]
For that reason I have chosen this
poem to reflect every savagery elements of a War.
ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH[2]
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 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.
September - October, 1917
This poem begins with the word “Anthem” (in the title) which perhaps is best
known in the expression "The
National Anthem;" also, an important religious song (often expressing
joy); here, it perhaps is a solemn song of celebration.
Another expression that attracted my
attention was “passing-bells” (verse
1). It is because a bell was tolled after someone's death to announce the death
to the world.
Later we can see in the verse number
four “Can
patter out their hasty orisons” which can symbolize a rapidly speak because it is caused by a
War which was not bad for the people but here there are prayers, here are the
funeral prayers.
In the fifth verse we can see how to
them there are no “mockeries”, because those are ceremonies which are insults.
Here Owen seems to be suggesting that the Christian religion, with its loving
God, can have nothing to do with the deaths of so many thousands of men.
A good example of the problems that
caused the War was “The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells” (verse 7) “And
bugles calling for them from sad shires” (verse
8). A “bugle” is played at
military funerals (sounding the last post) and “shires”
are the English counties and countryside from which so many of the soldiers
came.
Reading the verse number nine “What candles may
be held to speed them all?” we can understand as “candles” the
church candles, or the candles lit in the room where a body lies in a coffin.
And finally, he ends this poem
saying “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.” (Verses12, 13, 14) Here we can see how “pallor” symbolises the paleness of the bad moment that they are
living, how “dusk” has a symbolic
significance here and that “drawing-down
of blinds” normally is a preparation for night, but also, here, the
tradition of drawing the blinds in a room where a dead person lies, as a sign
to the world and as a mark of respect. The coming of night is like the drawing
down of blinds.
After having done this analysis of
the general meaning of the poem I can focus my attention on its structure, its
rhyme, the type of verses, the type of metre and other elements that the author
used.
This poem is composed by fourteen sonnets.
Their rhyme’s structure followed is
A / A / B / B. For example:
What passing-bells for these who die as
cattle?
A
Only the monstrous
anger of the guns. B
Only the
stuttering rifles' rapid rattle A
Can patter out
their hasty orisons. B
Althoug his poetry
has a short extension, Owen was an innovator in rythm and the use of semi-rhyme.
Talking about the verb tense I can
say that the author uses the present tense because it is a recent event. And
the ironic tone is noticeable during the poem but sometimes it is not easily
appreciable because he is trying to show us the truth of the war.
If we have a look through his life
we can see that from the age of nineteen Owen wanted to be a poet and immersed
himself in poetry, being especially impressed by Keats and Shelley. He wrote
almost no poetry of importance until he saw action in
He also was a committed Christian
and became lay assistant to the vicar of Dunsden near
His main
purpose is toshow how the world became suddenly more uncertain, more
out-of-control, more dangerous, more godless than it had ever seemed before;
and at the centre of the problem was modern man himself, unleashing power and
destruction which he could neither understand nor handle. [3]
The First World War was one of mankind's greatest tragedies - and the poets were those most gifted to express the experience of those traumatic years. 3
The experience of the front line war poets was more overwhelming, more prolonged and more intense than for any previous generation of soldiers. Few can be unimpressed by their suffering, their endurance, by the appalling tragedy which was their lot.
They were victims of the grossest abuses by the countries which they served and so often loved [4] and it can be observed during this poem because it has a very patriotic tone. He was a soldier and he knows very well the cruelty of being a soldier. But another peculiarity is that some poets, as for example Owen, wrote their poetry partly out of an anger with the press and the distorted, cosy pictures the press created of the soldiers' lot.[5]
Owen's plea for
the truth was probably a reaction against "press-lies", and his poem,
Smile, Smile, Smile, was written in direct response to an article in the
Daily Mail.
A desire to respond to what the poets believed were the attitudes of civilians, was another stimulus to their poetry - evident, for example, in the bitter didacticism of Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est and Apologia pro Poemate Meo. "Cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns," he moans in the last verse of Insensibility. 5
Owen is widely
accepted as the greatest writer of war poetry in the English language.
3.-CONCLUSION:
What I want to reflect here are the feelings and all the thoughts that can come to a soldier’s mind during this kind of conflict. In order to do that, I had a carefully look to the context (the events during the time his poem was written) which I think it is so important to understand the poetry of this time.
The war poets,
as all poets, brought, to everything they wrote, their education, their life
experience, their character. They wrote in the context of momentous events and
intense national feelings. But more importantly, poets wrote mainly in response
to personal experiences. 5
As I see, this poem reflects the cruelty of a war where there are families without a member who now is dead, carrying flowers, listening the passing-bells , …
I want to sum up in a sentence which I just invented after having read this poem, the worst thing of a war is the war itself, because nobody wins.
4.-BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1
http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/introdk.html
Introducing the First World War and the poets.
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2
http://www.poemtree.com/poems/AnthemForDoomedYouth.htm
"Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen
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3 http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/warpoets_knew.html
War poetry. Wilfred Owen. Poet of the First
World War. Saxon Books 2006.
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4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
Wikipedia. World War I
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5 http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/owen/
Wilfred Owen (1893 -1918
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