The Send Off Annotated

The author of “Anthem for Doomed Youth” leads his reader through his personal struggle and frustration of war. Owen has an abrasive approach when describing the death all around him and clearly expresses his anger with the “hasty orisons” for the dead. He speaks directly of battlefront in the first octet and then includes the home front in the second half of his sonnet. Owen’s purpose is not a commemoration of fallen soldiers. Rather, he divulges the disgust and disappointment of war. Like McCrae, Wilfred Owen paints a picture of the multitude of deaths. Back at the home front, “…each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.” We can construe that the author is not simply talking about preparing for bed in the evening, but rather lowering the blinds in a room where yet another dead soldier lies, as an indication to the community and out of respect for the soldier. There is a lack of “passing-bells for these who die as cattle….no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs.” Owen writes as though he feels that there is indifference among the death of his fellow soldiers.

Wilfred Owen’s poetry effectively conveys his perspectives on human conflict through his experiences during The Great War. Poems such as ‘Futility’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ portray these perceptions through the use of poetic techniques, emphasising such conflicts involving himself, other people and nature. These themes are examined in extreme detail, attempting to shape meaning in relation to Owen’s first-hand encounters whilst fighting on the battlefield.

As an anti-war poet, Wilfred Owen uses his literary skills to express his perspective on human conflict and the wastage involved with war, the horrors of war, and its negative effects and outcomes. As a young man involved in the war himself, Owen obtained personal objectivity of the dehumanisation of young people during the war, as well as the false glorification that the world has been influenced to deliver to them. These very ideas can be seen in poems such as 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' and 'Dulce ET Decorum EST Pro Patria Mori'. Owen uses a variety of literary techniques to convey his ideas.

Poetry composers evoke ideas of truth to help individuals and readers understand their ideas that have been portrayed through their work. Wilfred Owen was a war poet who served in world war one. In Owens poems of “Dulce Et Decourm Est” and “Anthem for Doomed youth”. Both poems explore the ideas of meaningless sacrifice and suffering as wells as the horrors of war. Owen used many poetic techniques to help him convey his ideas of war.

From another perspective, the simile in the line further indicates that the soldiers had also lost their human rights, not to mention their basic funeral rights. The soldiers had been brutally slaughtered like cows. This hints at the extreme brutality and savagery of the war. Pointing out this fact, Owen reveals his dismay about the reality of war. In conclusion, using the rhetorical question and simile, he portrays the war as a place, where innocent youths are being wasted and discarded. He implies his negative and skeptical perspective on this aspect of

This image is definitely not the glamorous picture of glory that, say army recruitment presents; worse, the soldiers are doing worse than civilians. As soon as the next stanza “[m]en marched asleep. Many had lost their boots” (5). They have lost their usual awareness and move mechanically; that doesn’t sound appealing! It gets worse: “[b]ut limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind” (6). So now they’re limping, apparently wounded, covered in blood, and can’t even see? It worsens further, “[d]runk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots/ Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind” (7-8). The soldiers are so exhausted it incapacitates them, and they can no longer hear the bullets being fired. This poem sounds like a distorted nightmare, except the speaker is living it, and even reliving the torment of the soldier’s death while he is unconscious. Owen’s wording expresses that the soldiers are merely men, deteriorating and inconceivably overwhelmed the opposite of positive war poetry containing glory and honor.

Throughout Wilfred Owen’s collection of poems, he unmasks the harsh tragedy of war through the events he experienced. His poems indulge and grasp readers to feel the pain of his words and develop some idea on the tragedy during the war. Tragedy was a common feature during the war, as innocent boys and men had their lives taken away from them in a gunshot. The sad truth of the war that most of the people who experienced and lived during the tragic time, still bare the horrifying images that still live with them now. Owen’s poems give the reader insight to this pain, and help unmask the tragedy of war.

Wilfred Owen can be considered as one of the finest war poets of all times. His war poems, a collection of works composed between January 1917, when he was first sent to the Western Front, and November 1918, when he was killed in action, use a variety of poetic techniques to allow the reader to empathise with his world, situation, emotions and thoughts. The sonnet form, para-rhymes, ironic titles, voice, and various imagery used by Owen grasp the prominent central idea of the complete futility of war as well as explore underlying themes such as the massive waste of young lives, the horrors of war, the hopelessness of war and the loss of religion. These can be seen in the three poems, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and

There are several image groups used in this poem, two of which I will be reviewing. The first image group is “Sleep or Dreams”. Owen often refers to many subconscious states like the afore mentioned one, the reason why he uses these references so frequently is that war is made apparent to the reader as being a subconscious state as the realities often seem to be too hard to except, an example which backs up my opinion is: “Men marched asleep”. The poet often refers to dreams. I believe part of the reason for this is that by dreaming you are escaping from the physical reality and surroundings and due to the horror and constant threat of death the soldiers would constantly be dreaming of home and their loved ones. However,

Owen manifests the soldiers’ ferocious emotions through their guns to demonstrate the dehumanization they experienced when killing someone. When Wilfred says “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / - Only the monstrous anger of the guns,” it strips the soldiers of their identity and humanity just as killing someone in war did to them (1-2). By taking away the soldiers’ identities and channeling their emotions through their weaponry and deeming them “monstrous” it makes it more difficult for the audience to develop a personal connection to the soldiers and their feelings, which is exactly what Owen wants. People back home during the war could not possibly relate or put themselves in the shoes of these soldiers, which Owen highlights to the reader through this method. To be able to kill someone, they had

“In his poetry, Wilfred Owen depicts the horror and futility of war and the impact war has on individuals.”

However, the result of the War had produced some outstanding poets and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was a of the war poets who was widely regarded as one of the best poets of the World War One period. He wrote out of his intense personal experience and memory as a soldier and wrote with unrivalled power of the physical, moral and psychological trauma of the First World War . Heavily influenced by Keats and Shelly, a young Owen intrigued to become a poet began to absorb himself in poetry. He did not go into religious life like his mother. Instead, he left for Bordeaux, France to teach English in the Berlitz School after the war had erupted. Although he thought of himself as a `Pacifist', he enlisted in the Artist's Rifles in October 1915 and later in 1917 changed to France. There he began writing poems about his war experiences. Owen finally suffered from shell-shock in the summer of 1917 and was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital and met his friend Siegfried Sassoon, who shared his feelings about the war and who became interested in his work. Reading Sassoon's poems and discussing his work with Sassoon revolutionized Owen's style and conception of poetry .

The initial bout of sympathy is created in the first stanza, “He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark.” The word “wheeled” is quite symbolic as it symbolizes that the subject is unable to move independently. He is reliant on others to move him around. Owen’s use of “he” rather than a specific name implies that this “he” is potentially one of many. This expresses how misery was common amongst other soldiers and how the horrors of war could affect anyone, not just the subject of the poem. Furthermore, in the line “and shivered in his ghastly suit of grey.” Wilfred’s use of the words “ghastly suit of grey” depicts a suit of death which is relatable to depression and misery. This gloom is most likely due to the fact that the soldier is so dependent on others and the emotional damage the war has inflicted upon him. The last stanza of the poem creates an enormous sense of pity for the secluded life that the soldier now has to tolerate because of his heroics as seen in “now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes”. This sympathy and pity towards the subject shows how horrifying the upshot of the war

In both poems Owen shows us the physical effect of war, Wilfred starts the poems showcasing unendurable stress the men were going through. Appalling pictures are created and expressed through similes and metaphors. Owen’s lexical choices link to the semantic field of the archaic which conveys the atavistic effects of war. The men are compared to old beggars, hags, the once young men have been deprived of their youth and turned into old women, the loss of masculinity express the how exhausting and ruthless war was. The men were barely awake from lack of sleep, they “marched in sleep” their once smart uniforms resembling “sacks”. He also expresses how

In majority of Owen’s poem, he demonstrates the true image of war and the impact it has on the soldiers rather than masking it with the lies of pride