Question 1

a) Written in sonnet form, Anthem for Doomed Youth serves as a dual rejection: both of the
brutality of war, and of religion. The first part of the poem takes place during a pitched battle,
whereas the second part of the poem is far more abstract and happens outside the war, calling
back to the idea of the people waiting at home to hear about their loved ones. Anthem for
Doomed Youth opens, as do many of Owen’s poems, with a note of righteous anger: what
passing-bells for those who die as cattle? The use of the word ‘cattle’ in the opening line sets the
tone and the mood for the rest of it dehumanizes the soldiers much in the same way that Owen
sees the war dehumanizing the soldiers, bringing up imagery of violent and unnecessary
slaughter. The first stanza of Anthem for Doomed Youth continues in the pattern of a pitched
battle, as though it were being written during the Push over the trenches. Owen notes the
‘monstrous anger’ of the guns, the ‘stuttering rifles’, and the ‘shrill, demented choirs of wailing
shells’. It’s a horrible world that Owen creates in those few lines, bringing forward the idea of
complete chaos and madness, of an almost animalistic loss of control but in the same paragraph,
he also points out the near-reluctance of the soldiers fighting.

Ironically, the use of onomatopoeia for the guns and the shells humanizes war far more than its
counterparts. War seems a living being when reading this poem; much more so than the soldiers,
or the mourners in the second stanza, and the words used – ‘monstrous anger’, ‘stuttering’, ‘shrill
demented choirs’ – bring forward the image of war as not only human, but alive, a great monster
chewing up everything in its path, including the soldiers that poured out their blood into shell
holes. The quiet of the second stanza, and the use of softened imagery, brings out in sharp relief
the differences between war and normal life, which has ceased to be normal at all.

In the second stanza, Owen moves away from the war to speak about the people who have been
affected by it: the civilians which mourn their lost brothers, fathers, grandfathers, and uncles, the
ones who wait for them to come home and wind up disappointed and miserable when they don’t.
Owen also frames this second stanza in the dusk. This is to signify the end, which of course for
many of the soldiers it was their end. The second stanza is also considerably shorter than the
first. It contains only six lines compared to the first which contains nine

1
The final line ‘And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds‘ highlights the inevitability and
the quiet of the second stanza, the almost pattern like manner of mourning that has now become
a way of life. It normalizes the funeral, and hints at the idea that this is not the first, second, nor
last time that such mourning will be carried out.

b) “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is another poem written by Owen that was inspired by his
experience of World War 2 in which he puts across a sense of the horror and inhumanity of war.
The title refers to “Doomed Youth” which suggests a whole generation of young men were led to
their inevitable deaths. An anthem is usually a hymn or song of praise, in this case Owen tries to
commemorate the thousands upon thousands of soldiers who died on the battlefield and never
received the proper and respectful ceremony of funeral. Owen also shows us the devastating
impact that such deaths in the war had upon the grieving families at home.

The last line is very poignant ( sadly moving) , Owen writes;

And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds

When a family got the news that someone in their family had been killed in the war they would
pull their blinds down to let people in the street know that the family had lost a loved on e and
that they were in mourning. The line suggests that entire streets in towns and cities were
receiving huge numbers of notices that a family member was dead and every house was lowering
a blind because of the scale of the death toll. It puts across how many lives were ended too young
and painfully. The line is also a metaphor that compares the darkness of night to the pulling
down of blinds. It suggests that all of nature is shocked and in mourning at an appalling waste
and loss of young life. This poem is a tribute to all the soldiers who died in World War1 and it
expresses the poets anger at the way the men lost their lives and the way their bodies were
treated after they died and how they and their families were not able to have a proper funeral to
mark the fact that they mattered and were important. This poem expresses the inhumanity of war
and makes the reader feel sympathy and pity for the soldiers and their families and friends.

2
c) Wilfred Owen, in Anthem for doomed youth has used simile to narrate the soldiers’ death in
battle. It also portrays the Western Front as an Abattoir. By its usage, Owen shatters all the
previous beliefs of glory, honor and self-worth. He mocks all the patriotic perception of warfare.
The cattle image dehumanizes the feelings of human beings. Harris says that various estheticians
and artists have recognized the fact that the artist must penetrate to reality and embody his
insight in his creation if it is to be worthy of the name of art. The mission of the artist is to reveal
reality of the ordinary man, who is such a superficial observer, that he does not penetrate to the
heart of things”.

He uses many images related to death, funerals and mourning such as ‘choirs’, ‘bugles calling’,
‘sad shires’, ‘pall’, ‘flowers’, ‘holy glimmers of good byes’, ‘bells’, ‘orisons’, ‘prayers’,
‘mourning’, ‘candles’, and ‘drawing down of blinds’. Pity of war is distilled into these poetic
images. These images inspire the thousands of doom young soldiers for whom something better
can be done. Anthem for Doomed Youth can be visualized as an expression of Wilfred Owen’s
struggle to live more extravagantly. In Anthem for Doomed Youth, the poet uses the technique
of rhetorical question. He uses rhetorical questions in the beginning of each stanza for
emphasizing the issue, for creating effects and to force the reader to ponder on the obvious
answer. This poem is a sonnet written in iambic pentameter; the seven lines after each rhetorical
question suggest the appropriate answers. It is also famous for its perfect usage of onomatopoeia.
Only the struttering rifles ra-pid rattle Can patter out their hasty Orisons In the above mentioned
sentence, the four alliterated r- sounds along with four hard a- sounds produce the ‘struttering’
effect of rifle fire. The combination of assonance and alliteration is functional in the illustration
of rifle fire. Each image in Anthem for Doomed Youth is replete with poignancy by the horrors,
futility and the pity of war.

3
Question 2

a) Social cohesion refers to the way sentences combine into text by means of textinternal ties.
The concept of cohesion is largely owed to Halliday and Hasan, whose seminal study of the
phenomenon, Cohesion in English (1976), has been greatly influential in stylistics as well as in
linguistics more generally. Halliday and Hasan (1976) identify five main types of cohesive tie in
English – four grammatical and one lexical. Grammatical ties are realized by conjunction,
ellipsis, substitution and reference. Conjunction and conjunctive expressions such as ‘but’,
‘then’, ‘accordingly’ and ‘nevertheless’ work by explicitly signalling how different parts of the
text relate to each other. Secondly, ellipsis links different parts of a text by means of omission as
in ‘I could offer her a lift. But no, I won’t_’ where a cohesive tie exists between the empty slot
following ‘I won’t’ and ‘offer her a lift’ in the previous sentence. Closely related to the cohesive
resource of ellipsis is that of substitution (Halliday and Hasan, 1976).

b) The concept of speech act is based on the assumption that when people say something they do
something. Austin (1962) distinguishes between two types of utterances performatives; acts that
describe constant information, and constatives; propositions which can be stated positively or
negatively; statements of facts which could be either right or wrong. In contrast to constatives,
Austin remarks that performative are used not to describe something but to achieve something
for instance, to promise is not to state something about the world rather it is to perform the act of
promising. Certain circumstances and conditions for the utterances to be felicitous calling them
the felicity conditions, which demand that there must be an accepted conventional procedure
having a certain conventional effect. The persons and circumstances fora certain speech act must
be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. The procedure must be
executed by all participants both correctly and completely.

c) Politeness is the action, linguistic or otherwise, that redresses the speaker's and the hearer's
'face' in situations whereby 'face' is threatened. They further add that attending to 'face' will
either minimize or avoid conflict during interaction. Yet, "politeness should also be regarded as
being aggressive and enhancing power where domination and manipulation occur"

4
Bayraktaroglu, & Sifianou, (2001) believe that both politeness and impoliteness constitute the
continuum of social interaction. A real picture of verbal interaction necessitates the inclusion of
the strategies of impoliteness in addition to those of politeness.

Politeness theory also relies on the assumption that speakers in any given language not only
convey information through their language but they use it to do things, such as achieving self-
esteem, approval and appreciation by others, gaining power via language, etc. Accordingly,
participants construct and build personal relationships through the dialogue they have with each
other (Brown, & Levinson, 1987).

d) The concept of poetic function was first formulated by the 'formalist' programmes of the
Moscow group of the 'twenties, resurfacing in the 'slructuralist' debates of the Prague Circle
during the 'thirties, and more recently amidst the Paris group of litcrary theorists in their
'semiotic' and 'post-structuralist' guises. Jakobson believes that. In differentiating 'verbal art in
relation to other arts and other kinds of verbal behavior', the study of poetics principally deals
with 'problems of verbal structure' in the same way that an 'analysis of painting is concerned with
pictorial structure'. At the same time, though by no means obviously connected with the
foregoing, Jakobson also considers that poetics poses the question, 'What makes a verbal
message a work of art?' (Bach, and Harnish, 1979).

5
 References

Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. 2 ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bach, K. and Harnish, R. M. (1979). Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. London: MIT
Press.

Bayraktaroglu, A. & Sifianou, M. (2001). Linguistic politeness across boundaries: The case of
Greek and Turkish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.

Brown, P & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. New York: Longman.