Wilfred Owen: Final Version

Wilfred Owen was born on 1893 and died on 1918 and he was a war poet, he was a soldier and he wrote about the World War I ( 1914- 1918) as his experience. I am going to analyse his poem Soldier’s Dream that he wrote “ in a letter he sent to Siegfried Sassoon the 27^th of November on 1917” ( http://www.1914-18.co.uk/owen/soldiersdream.htm).

The title of the poem seems to mean what the soldiers wanted, what they dreamed, and I suppose that was freedom, the possibility of returning at their homes. They were scared about being killed and about all the horror that involves a war, with arms, bombs, poverty, death…. And when I read the poem the first time, the impression I had was that the poet dreamed that Jesus stopped the war and He gave them peace, but God did not want that His son made everything and He sent the archangel Michael to repair the damages.

The World War I confronted the Allied Powers ( Britain, France, Russia and United States) with the Central Powers ( the German Empire, Austria- Hungary and the Ottoman Empire). Wilfred Owen was from Britain and he fought with the Allied Power, that was the Christian group. I explain that to understand the roll of God, Jesus and Michael. This archangel was the defender of God’s country and Christian army’s keeper, he defended the Christians against the Devil, and I think that Owen compares the Devil with the Central Power.

The poem has eight lines, divided into two paragraphs of four verses each one. The rhythm is A- B- B- A- C- D- D- C. I have found the vocabulary very difficult at first, but when I have looked for the words in the dictionary I have found that all the words I did not understand referred to arms, a normal thing when we read a poem about war. We can found lots of synonyms that refer to arms: big- gun gears ( line 1); Mausers that “ is a type of automatic pistol” ( Collins Dictionary) ( line 3); Colts that “ is a type of revolver” ( Collins Dictionary) ( line 3); bayonet (line 4); bombs ( line 5); old flink- lock ( line 6). And one thing that surprised me were the verbs related with Jesus: fouled ( line 1); caused ( line 2); buckled ( line 3); rusted ( line 4), because He made everything with love, he did not use violence, he only smiled or cried and He incited everything. But I thing that the main topic in this war poem is the religion and the Faith of the soldiers, they thought that their Creator came and He would save them.

The poem started with the affirmation that it is a dream, and if we know something about the Great War, we will know that all the hopes the soldiers or the civil people had, these hopes were simply dreams, I would say good dreams in a real nightmare. The poet dreamed Jesus, because He and God were who could stop the war, because They love men and women and people only hated each other.

In the first paragraph the poet tells us what Jesus made to stop the war, He cried and He smiled and with this he eliminated the arms. And in the second paragraph, the two first verses ( 5 and 6), I think that they are from part one of the poem, after the apparition of Jesus there were no more arms or bombs. In line 5 when the author says “ of ours or Theirs”, he tells us that there were no arms of “ ours” the Allied Power, and “ of Theirs” referring to the enemy, the Central Power.

I think that the second part of the poem are the two last verses ( 7 and 8), when God realised that Jesus came to the Earth to bring peace between the people, and he became angry because it was not a work of His son, God has His own “ boss or head of the celestial militia”, and he is the archangel Michael, he was who must go to defend the Christians against the evils. And last line when the poet woke up, Michael had helped them.

In conclusion I think this is a poem that talks about the hopes of the soldiers, they are afraid but they must fight, and the only thing they have is to dream with the Salvation, with the end of the war. The poet was Christian and he dreamed that one day God would come there, where the war was, and put an end to the suffering of the people. As we know, it was only a dream, because Wilfred Owen died in combat on 1918.