Wilfred Owen

Task 1:

The Next War

The author portrays Death as a personified character who does not cause the soldiers fear
or grief. Although death has come in many forms the soldier has accepted that it is
everywhere and has become unaffected by it. This is emphasised in the epigraph in the first
stanza and further supported in the first line of the second stanza “we’ve walked quite
friendly up to Death, sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland”. This highlights the
soldier’s acceptance of death and war and how they relate. The soldier has ‘leagued with
him’ and so the soldiers laugh as they have killed just like Death has.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

This poem draws an analogy between the death of the soldiers and a traditional funeral. It is
ironically titled an ‘anthem’ which is usually praiseful or celebratory. The author makes a
direct comparison between the ‘choirs’ and the wailing of Shells, and prayers to the rapid
sounds of machine guns and rifles. The opening line the soldiers are referred to as cattle,
which emphasize how insignificant each live is in the war scene. There are no prayers or
choirs mourning for the soldiers who are slaughtered on the battlefield. It is only in the last
few lines that the author portrays the silent grieving of the families and loved ones at home.
The mood of the poem changes as the author then contrasts the emotion felt back home
compared to the ‘cattle’ like death of the soldiers who are around other men whose death
mean as little as their own.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

The first stanza represents the soldiers self image and view of their roles as devalued by
others including themselves. The author refers to the young men as emasculated figures
such as beggars and hags. The use of exclamatory dialogue to open the second stanza builds
the climax and dramatically emphasizes the suddenness of the war. The repetition of ‘Gas!’
echo’s in the readers mind as the imagery builds of the man who was unable to put his gas
mask on in time. The metaphor of ’under a green sea' allows the reader to understand the
horrific situation and imagine a suffocating or drowning feeling due to the chlorine gas. This
dramatic nature is continued in the second half of the poem building imagery and climax as
‘before my helpless sigh, he plunges at me’ dying an agonizing death. The last stanza
particularly has an effect on the reader as it is directed to the audience. The author asks the
audience to imagine the horrific ‘smothering dreams’, which I did as I read through the
descriptions in the previous stanzas. Most significantly for me, was the closing line of the
poem where the author directly and sarcastically quotes ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ aimed at
the youth back home sheltered in the propaganda of war.

Insensibility

The poem reflects the many different perspectives of the men who are experiencing life on
the front line. It shows the different ways that the men suffered, emotionally, spiritually and
physically and contrasts the effects of the war on different individuals. The men are
contrasted as, ‘happy’, ‘wise’ and ‘cursed’ in the first six stanzas. The author describes the
effects of their perspective on their humanity and sanity as some ‘some cease feeling’ and
can ‘laugh among the dying, unconcerned’. This is contrasted with the oblivious nature of
‘happy the solder home, with not a notion’ where ‘men attack, and many sighs are drained’.
These references and metaphors describe the effects of the brutality and sadness of war,
causing the soldiers to be ‘insensible’.

Futility

The description in the opening of the poem allows the audience to imagine an early winter
morning. The first line is almost a command, either by the author or a commander telling
soldiers to move the body into the sun. The metaphoric link to the farm allows the audience
to connect with the dead soldier and understand a little about his life. Just as flowers in a
field, the sunlight is personified to wake the soldiers up until that point. The soldier has
passed and not even the sun can wake him anymore. It is possible that the metaphoric link
to the ‘fields unsown’ suggests the soldier was a farmer before the war. The second stanza
becomes less specific. No specific setting is described as the previous stanza had. The author
reflects on the death of the soldier by considering universal issues and questioning the point
of existence. It was the death of the soldier and the absent power of the sun, the light and
foundation of life that made him question life and its purpose.
Strange Meeting

This poem is written in a narrative like structure and it almost seems like it was a dream or
hallucination as the poem opens with ‘It seems like that out of battle I escaped’. The poem is
split into two perspectives, the first being Owen’s as he describes the setting as an
underground tunnel where he met a dead man in Hell. From the third stanza till the end of
the poem the other person or the dead man speaks and sheds light on the truths of war. He
criticizes the war and shows the audience how their lives were wasted as there is only
‘hopelessness’ and ‘undone years’. The soldiers were once hunting the ‘wildest beauty in
the world’ and laughing with courage and wisdom. Now they are ‘weeping’ and dying as ‘the
pity of war, the pity war distilled’. It is ‘that sullen hall’ and the final stanza that reinforce the
idea of Hell, or a hallucination as the man says ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend…as you
jabbed and killed’. By referring to Owen as his ‘friend’ the reader is able to relate the two
characters by their common destiny, motive and role in the war and so even though they
are on opposing sides they are the same.

Task 2:

Wilfred Owen’s War Poems express outrage at the horrors of war and pity for young
soldiers who sacrificed their lives on the frontline. Owen uses a range of techniques in his
poems to engage the audience and to express the horrific experiences that the soldiers
endured during the war. The audience is able to relate to the soldiers through the literary
structures and techniques used in the poem which present the physical and psychological
effects of the war in a memorable way.

Owen often makes reference to metaphors in order to support the reader to visualize and
understand the extents of the psychological and physical damage that the soldiers
experienced. Through the use of metaphors, the audience is able to directly link the
experience Owen is describing to an event or situation that they can relate to. For example
in ‘Dulce Et Decorum’ Owen describes a scene where a Chlorine Gas attack took place and a
soldier was ‘yelling and stumbling, And flound’ring like a man in fire’. He continues to use
metaphor to describe what he could see ‘As under a green sea, I saw him drowning’.
Through the use of metaphor, the audience is able to imagine and visualize the horrific
physical pain that the soldier experienced as well as the brutal psychological effects it had
on Owen who had to witness such a gruesome scene.

Symbolism and Imagery are important aspects of Owen’s poems as the audience can relate
the experience to other themes or contexts. For example in ‘Strange Meeting’ the soldier,
who assumingly is Owen, finds himself escaping into an underground tunnel. The tunnel is
filled with ‘sleepers’ and corpses of soldiers who have died. “One sprang up… and by his
smile I knew that sullen hall, by his dead smile I knew we stood in hell’. This reference from
the second stanza is a perfect example of imagery used by Owen along with symbolism to
emphasize the psychological impact of the war on the soldiers.

Although the soldier is alive and has survived war to this point, the soldier is in ‘hell’ and the
corpse refers to him as his ‘friend’. This emphasizes the similarities they shared as humane
individuals with a desire to hunt the ‘wildest beauty in the world’ but the realistic nature of
their situation in ‘hopelessness’ and ‘the pity of war’. In the last stanza the audience realise
that the corpse is an enemy that Owen, or the character had killed. Through this, and the
use of literary techniques, Owen is able to highlight the harsh realities of the war and the
mockery and criticism the soldiers had towards the war.

‘The Next War’ is a unique poem by Owen which streams a strong use of personification
throughout the whole text. Owen has included an epigraph at the beginning of the poem to
set the scene for the audience. ‘It’s a joke for me and you’ works well with the rest of the
poem as it reflects a mood of fearlessness and optimism. The soldiers represented in this
poem are proud fighters who look forward to the next war and constantly face deaths
proximities without any fear. Owen uses personification to describe the many ways death
approaches the soldiers although it does not seem to cause them any grief.

‘We’ve walked quite friendly up to Death; sat down and eaten with him… sniffed the green
thick odour of his breath’. This personification of the horrors of war allows the audience to
understand that Death and the experiences of war have become a norm to the soldiers and
they have accepted that death is all around. The soldiers are also portrayed as ruthless as
they have ‘leagued with him’ and so the soldiers laugh as they have killed just like Death
has. This nature of ruthless, careless and emotionless perception of the soldiers is also
reflected in ‘Insensibility’ as the author describes that soldiers ‘cease feeling’ some ‘some
cease feeling’ and can ‘laugh among the dying, unconcerned’ whilst other feel like
emasculate, inhumane animals and beggars.

Wilfred Owen has used a range of literacy and poetic techniques to emphasize the harsh
realities of the war. He has drawn on the use of imagery, metaphors, symbolism and
personification to relate the horrific experiences of war to the silent mourning or oblivious
individuals back home. Through the use of the language features, techniques and subject
matter Wilfred Owen has presented a voice for the soldiers and expressed the physical and
psychological traumas they experienced at war.

Question 1:

Wilfred Owen enlisted in the army in October 1915, which was influenced by heroic war
propaganda. At first Owen felt emotions of optimism and excitement as he was finally
posted to the front trenches in France at the beginning of 1917. Owen witnessed and
experienced continuing gunfire, gas attacks and severe weathers leading to death and brutal
physical impairments. The emotions of optimism and excitement were quickly replaced with
shock and horror. Owen suffered a concussion injury during his time in the trenches and was
diagnosed with shell shock. He was then moved to the War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he
met Siegfried Sassoon and began his writing.

Owens’ letters provide evidence of his motivation and influences of his writings and the
developments of different emotions and beliefs. His conflicting feelings of war lasted for a
few years during his service. I agree with the above statement as it was through the first
hand experiences in the trenches and on the battlefront that Owen developed feelings of
anger and indignation towards bureaucrats and war propagandists. This is evident as Owen
expresses the idea that propagandists think that soldiers are equated to those of ‘cattle’ in a
slaughterhouse in Dulce Et Decorum Est. There are many other references to men as
animals in this poem such as the man regurgitating his ‘cud’, and also in Strange Meeting
where he creates imagery of hunting and predation in the third stanza.

Many of Owens poems show resentment towards the propagandists and military authorities
as they glorified and drew in young men to enlist as soldiers. Dulce Et Decorum Est presents
the brutal and horrific vision of a soldiers agonising death after being gassed ‘under a sea of
green’. The poem is then concluded with ‘tell with such high zest, to children ardent for
some desperate glory, the old lie: Dulce est decorum est pro patria mori’. This ‘old Lide’
addresses the ignorance and propagandists who glorifying death for ones country in war.
This clearly shows Owens anger and indignation towards bureaucrats and war propagandists
as he directly addresses their ignorance and presents a realistic and horrific view of the war.

Owen also shows sympathy to the soldiers in ‘Insensibility’ and ‘futility’ as he presents a
completely different perspective in mood in these poems. These poems reflect the
psychological effects of the war on Owen and other soldiers and it highlights his empathy
towards the men who fight beside him. In ‘Insensibility’ the men are portrayed as careless
and not to have any compassion. This is evident through the descriptions that ‘some cease
feeling’ and ‘laugh among the dying, unconcerned’. These descriptions highlight the effects
of the brutality and sadness of war, causing them to be insensible. The empathy Owen feels
towards his fellow soldiers is also evident in ‘Futility’ as he describes the body of soldiers
who was once a farmer lying dead in the winter snow. Without the power of the sunlight,
the foundation of life and the world, he began to question the purpose of life, and how
wasteful it was for this man to be lying dead.