fAnthem for Doomed Youth Anthem for Doomed Youth is a Petrarchan sonnet written by Wilfred Owen about the horrors of war. Owen himself, had fought in World War I and wrote about his first hand experiences as a soldier. In this poem, you can see a sense of irony in the fact that it is a sonnet. Other established poets such as Shakespeare had used sonnets to mainly write about love. Going on to the title, it can be seen as a strong contradiction by coupling together the phrases ‘anthem’ and ‘doomed youth’.
His aim is not poetry, but to describe the full horrors of war. In this essay I have firstly decided to analyze two poems by the war poet Wilfred Owen, taken from his writings on the First World War. Both 'Dulce et Decorum est' and 'Disabled" portray Owen's bitter angst towards the war, but do so in different ways. Then I will analyze a very different poem 'Who's for the Game?' written by Jessie Pope, and finally contrast this with the poems by Owen.
Not only are their lives wasted, gone without the holy ritual of funeral, but the lives of their loved ones at home are also ruined. This poem starts off at a quick pace, and then continues to decelerate throughout the poem, drawing to a slow, solemn and sombre close. Throughout this poem the traditional feel of an elaborate ceremonial of a Victorian style funeral is constantly compared and contrasted to the ways in which men died in the war. The title 'Anthem for Doomed Youth,' with anthems usually being associated with love and passion, is very deliberately ironic. It is a way in which Owen shows how ridiculous he really thought the war was.
The poet suggests the inhumanity of the soldier’s death by comparing them to cattle. Many are sacrificed without a second thought and many young soldiers don’t know what they are walking into until they are slaughtered. 5. The poet hints that prayers and bells are mockeries because the mourning cannot begin to resemble the real terrors of war. He is asking us all if the religious mourning rituals are really enough to honor those who were sacrificed in war as “cattle” 6.
One of the soldiers fails to fit the gas mask in time, and Owen masterfully describes himself witnessing the soldier’s gruesome death. Owen ends the poem with the Latin proverb from Horace's Odes (III.2.13) ‘Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori’, meaning 'It is sweet and proper to die for one's country' (Dr. Stuart Lee, 1997). With those last few lines, Owen expresses his deepest disapproval of the war. He is rejecting the traditional view that glorifies war, calling it ‘The old Lie’ (line 27). Owen is addressing the reader, who possibly doesn’t have the first hand experience of the war, and criticising the enthusiasm with which the war is described, particularly to vulnerable children (BBC, 2013).
So he raised the question: what does it help to ring the bell for men that die as “cattle”? When he describes the men as “cattle” he suggests that their life has no worth. In doing so he creates the impression that they are just animals that are controlled and cannot think for themselves. They are merely pawns used by their country to get what they want. They will die in the war for a cause they don’t fully understand or necessarily support and will soon be forgotten… In doing so Owen provokes the thought whether war is really worth going to as it degrades the life of millions of men as they get obliterated for their country.
Owen depicts the human cost of war and the social and religious ritual’s inability to commemorate properly the dead. In the following essay we will be discussing, four literary devices that support the thesis statement, first, the irony in the tone, second, the use of personification, third, the use of metaphors and similes and finally the significance of the title. Paragraph 1 The ironic tone of the poem indicates Owen's intention to oppose two ideas: the honor in religious and social rituals that commemorate war casualties and the actual dishonor of dying in combat. To begin, the Shakespearean sonnet is usually about love, on the other hand, Owen's poem is filled with hatred. Youngsters should be spending their lives free, instead they are confined to the trenches away from their loved ones, for those who survive, must live with the burden of war and its different psychological and physical scars.
This positive representation of conflict could be linked to Tennyson’s role of Poet Laureate under Queen Victoria’s reign. On the other hand Futility could be considered as an elegy for the unnamed solider and opens with a tender and sad tone shifting to pointlessness in the second stanza. The use of the pronoun him in the opening line suggests this could be any soldier from World War one demonstrating the number of men who would remain unnamed and unclaimed during this conflict and how bad it was that so many people died, and even the most patriotic soldiers would still die, unnamed in the end. The Charge of the light Brigade comprises of six stanzas, of varying in length from six to twelve lines and goes in chronological order. This could offer the reader the sense of riding in to the battle with the soldiers.
This poem serves a great purpose in Canadian History and represents the millions of dead soldiers asking to carry on what they started. “take up our quarrel with the foe:” (McCrae) The poems three verses are significantly different. In the first stanza the poem starts off easy and uses symbols to portray the positive side effects with no relevance to military force. The second stanza portrays the hopeless soldiers message and the third stanza urges others to persist. This is the greatest poem in the world due to effective use of poetic devices in order to touch on the themes of death, honor and revenge.
He is trying to get the reader to feel as he felt when he went through the hardships in his life. His writings could also cause the reader to look deeper at death, lost love, and the darker side of situations. Edgar Allan Poe often develops the theme of lost love leads to severe depression through using imagery, motifs, and irony in the text “Annabel Lee”. Edgar Allan Poe uses imagery in “Annabel Lee” to show how lost love leads to severe depression. In “Annabel Lee” the speaker says, “Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.” The reader can imagine the demons under the sea that want to tear the speaker and Annabel Lee apart.