anthem for doomed youth analysis
Anthem for the doomed youth
Wilfred Owen seeks to highlight the horror of war in “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” No matter how much we memorialize, tribute, or honour the fallen, we can’t ever really know what it was like for the soldiers in those horrible moments before death. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” strives to make it impossible for us to ignore those realities, and to realize that in the face of all that horror, our anthems might ring hollow, no matter how much we seek meaning in them.
Choirs, candles, palls, and bells? "Anthem for Doomed Youth" is full of religious imagery, but it lacks the peaceful, contemplative feel you might expect. Instead, our speaker is bent on comparing religious rituals to the weapons of war, which is an alarming, but effective way of getting us to face facts. “Nor any voice of mourning saves the choirs, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells.” We hear about the choirs and we picture a choir in a church singing a beautiful hymn to mourn the sacrifice the dead soldiers have made. Then we find out that the choir our speaker is referring to is actually the freaky noise made by incoming shells. Our speaker might be suggesting that this is the very same thing that soldiers get. They hear all the pomp and rhetoric, the prayers for victory. Then when they arrive in the war zone:; dying for their country is a little more awful, and senseless, than it first sounded.
Wilfred Owen never says the words soldier or war. He never names a country or particular dispute. In a way, he's signalling to us that this poem is not about specific battles or individual loves lost, but Owen is writing all about a much more universal topic: the terrible costs and realities of all wars, and the inability of our rituals to weaken the death and suffering it brings about. On the first stanza, line one- “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” People are dying and Owen asks us, what sound is there to mark their deaths? The words “passing bells” are
Wilfred Owen seeks to highlight the horror of war in “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” No matter how much we memorialize, tribute, or honour the fallen, we can’t ever really know what it was like for the soldiers in those horrible moments before death. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” strives to make it impossible for us to ignore those realities, and to realize that in the face of all that horror, our anthems might ring hollow, no matter how much we seek meaning in them.
Choirs, candles, palls, and bells? "Anthem for Doomed Youth" is full of religious imagery, but it lacks the peaceful, contemplative feel you might expect. Instead, our speaker is bent on comparing religious rituals to the weapons of war, which is an alarming, but effective way of getting us to face facts. “Nor any voice of mourning saves the choirs, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells.” We hear about the choirs and we picture a choir in a church singing a beautiful hymn to mourn the sacrifice the dead soldiers have made. Then we find out that the choir our speaker is referring to is actually the freaky noise made by incoming shells. Our speaker might be suggesting that this is the very same thing that soldiers get. They hear all the pomp and rhetoric, the prayers for victory. Then when they arrive in the war zone:; dying for their country is a little more awful, and senseless, than it first sounded.
Wilfred Owen never says the words soldier or war. He never names a country or particular dispute. In a way, he's signalling to us that this poem is not about specific battles or individual loves lost, but Owen is writing all about a much more universal topic: the terrible costs and realities of all wars, and the inability of our rituals to weaken the death and suffering it brings about. On the first stanza, line one- “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” People are dying and Owen asks us, what sound is there to mark their deaths? The words “passing bells” are