YAK 821.111-1 An Analysis of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by Wilfred Owen David Grylls Oxford University Wellington Square, Oxford, United Kingdom, OX1 2)D: david grylls@conted.ox.ac.uk A detailed analysis of Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. The article is a lucid example of the British approach to reading and analyzing poetry. Key words: Wilfred Owen, poem, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? - Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, - The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes. The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. In Britain Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) is probably the best-known poet of the First World War - but one needn’t know anything about his life, or indeed much about that war, to appreciate what is perhaps his best-known poem, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. The poem has an immediate, visceral impact. It stimulates feelings of anger and pity; it forces us to think about death in battle and how the dead may be remembered. Although the poem is powerful on a first reading, it is also complex © David Grylls, 2012 65and subtly structured: it withstands the pressure of re-reading, it repays careful analysis. Its form, we might notice, is that of a sonnet (a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter concluding with a rhymed couplet). In its rhyme-scheme it is more like a Shakespearian than a Petrarchan sonnet, but it is not identical with either: the rhyme-scheme of its last six lines differs from Shakespeare’s normal pattern. However, it resembles Shakespeare’s sonnets (and many others) in falling clearly into two parts - the first eight lines (the octave) and the last six (the sestet). Perceiving the poem’s overall structure is crucial to appreciating its meaning, which emerges from a series of contrasts. The sestet is contrasted with the octave (in mood, tone and type of imagery) but there are also contrasts within each sub-division. In the octave these contrasts are expressed as sounds. The octave is noisy, disturbing, discordant. Two different kinds of sound compete for attention, but one is drowning out the other. A clue to the incongruity occurs in the first line: ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ The question startles us by bringing together a funeral (‘passing-bells’) and an abattoir (‘die as cattle’). Funerals are appropriate for humans, not animals; but in this war men are being slaughtered like beasts. Normally, too, a funeral requires a body; but for most of those who died on the Western Front - blown to pieces or buried in mud - no bodies were available. The authorities would nevertheless commemorate the dead with formal services back in Britain. But how horribly remote, the poem implies, are these rituals from the realities of battle. Grotesque incongruity is suggested in the octave by the use of contrasting auditory effects. The sounds of a Christian burial service are intercut with the bedlam of a battlefield. Thus the sonorous resonance of church bells gives way to explosions from massive guns; the formulaic chanting of prayer is replaced by the mechanical crackle of rifles; the harmony of trained choirs turns into the shriek of shells. One ‘soundtrack’ is superimposed on another: the sounds contrast but also merge. Two different worlds are violently colliding, a point epitomised by the well-chosen rhymes (‘guns’ / ‘orisons’; ‘bells’ / ‘shells’). But it’s the sounds of battle - as evoked, for instance, by the literary device of onomatopoeia (‘the stuttering rifle’s rapid rattle’) - that predominate in this uproar. And the 66implications of the contrast are clear: the traditional forms of Christian remembrance - solemn, dignified, consolatory - are wholly inadequate to the horrors they commemorate. Given the extraordinary carnage of war, conventional responses seem preposterous. That war is extraordinary, outlandishly horrible, is suggested in the octave by the adjectives Owen chooses. If we omit ‘passing’ (as being part of a compound noun, ‘passing-bells’), the adjectives are: ‘monstrous’, ‘stuttering’, ‘rapid’, ‘hasty’, ‘shrill’, ‘demented’ and ‘wailing’. Two of these (‘rapid’ and ‘hasty’) are in the same semantic zone: they deliberately contrast with ‘slow’ in the last line of the poem. All the other adjectives in the octave describe or evoke the sounds of battle and all express abnormality, deviation from natural or conventional forms. This of course is the meaning of ‘monstrous’ (a monster being a prodigy - usually frightening - outside the natural order). ‘Stuttering’ and ‘shrill’ both imply deviations from normal patterns of human speech - the first on the horizontal plane of rhythm (stuttered speech is both too rapid and too slow), the second on the vertical plane of pitch (a ‘shrill’ voice is high-pitched, sharp and piercing). ‘Demented’ literally means out of one’s mind, while ‘wailing’ suggests disturbing cries of grief (often of course in funeral lamentations). Taken together, these adjectives are eloquent of the poet’s feelings about war. They fit in with headings he sketched out for a projected Table of Contents for his poems: ‘Madness’, ‘Inhumanity of war’, ‘The unnaturalness of weapons’. The poem’s first section employs sonic dissonance to suggest what would not be an appropriate commemoration - a conventional, large-scale public funeral of the kind held, for instance, at Westminster Abbey (including ‘choirs’, as well as prayers and bells, implies a more formal ceremony). The octave opens with a question, then answers it with a series of relentless negatives (‘Only’, ‘Only, ‘No’, ‘no’, ‘nor’, ‘Nor’). The sestet also opens with a question, thus implying a parallel structure (there are only two questions in the poem), and an alteration of mood (in sonnets the ‘volta’, or turn in thought, often comes in the ninth line). But this time, after an initial negative (‘Not in the hands of boys’), the mood becomes tentatively affirmative (as suggested by the change of tense to ‘shall’). Simultaneously, the sound is switched off. In fact the earlier 67discordance had already modulated, by the end of the octave, into the mournful sound of ‘bugles’ - military instruments which, playing ‘the last post’, announce either evening or funeral remembrance. In the sestet this quieter mood continues. Now, instead of auditory effects, we have a series of visual images (evoked by words such as ‘eyes’, ‘shine’, ‘glimmers’, ‘pallor’ and ‘dusk’). Given that the sestet is more affirmative, the suggestion seems to be that grief for the dead cannot be adequately voiced or made public. More fitting is a private and personal response, manifest only in the glistening eyes, pale faces, or loving minds of those left bereaved. None of these responses is noisy or public; all are emotional and silent (in an earlier draft, ‘patient minds’ was ‘silent minds’). If there is any way of commemorating men slaughtered in hideous circumstances, it must be through the feelings of individuals personally affected by loss. . The sestet leaves behind the sounds of warfare, as it moves from the battlefield to the lives of the bereaved. It also leaves behind the sounds of a funeral, though not all reference to religion. In fact, by mentioning candles and flowers, the pall on a coffin and the drawing-down of blinds, it seems to be alluding to a different kind of service, the personal, domestic rituals of a wake. A ‘wake’ is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘Abstinence from sleep, watching, practised as a religious observance’. In wakes, once common in rural Britain, the coffin, covered by a canopy or ‘pall’, adorned with flowers, surrounded by candles, would retain the dead body at home before burial. Blinds would be closed at the afflicted house; friends and relatives would pay their respects. In the circumstances envisaged in Owen’s poem, no literal wake is being described. For those who died on the Western Front, there could be no coffin, for there was usually no body. But the feelings and actions of those left behind are presented as equivalent to those at a wake. There may be no candles but there are lights in people’s eyes; no canopies or flowers, but significant looks and thoughts. And just as the bugle at the end of the octave suggested both evening and remembrance of the dead, so the poem’s final line, ‘And each slow dusk a drawing- down of blinds’, conflates the solemn rituals of a wake with 68routine preparations for nightfall. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ is a powerful poem, but it is also subtle and carefully structured. It is evidently written by a poet who cares about contrasts, sensory effects and the implications of metaphor. Owen was also highly sensitive to the nuances of individual words, alert to their etymologies. Consider, for example, the word ‘patter’ in the line ‘Can patter out their hasty orisons’. Its first meaning, deriving from ‘pat’, denotes a rapid succession of light taps (as in ‘the patter of raindrops’). In this sense it calls forth the ‘rapid rattle’ of the rifles. But a second meaning is a kind of facile speech, a jabbering (as in ‘a conjuror’s patter’). This meaning has a different derivation: it comes from the Latin ‘Paternoster’, the first words (‘Our Father’) of the Lord’s Prayer. In this sense it originally meant to gabble out the Lords’s Prayer (or any prayer) mechanically, without thought for its meaning. How appropriate for the context here - the ‘hasty’, perfunctory prayers back home or the last-second prayers of dying soldiers. The word is both evocative and ironic (as indeed is ‘orisons’, an archaic word for prayers that suggests their outmoded futility). Another example of precisely chosen diction is the word- play in the line, ‘The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall’. Explaining how a facial expression must substitute for a canopy, Owen picks a word for the first (‘pallor’) that literally subsumes the second (‘pall’). It’s as though the thought is enacted in the language. A final example is the word ‘Anthem’ in the title. Owen admitted that this was supplied by his friend (and fellow-poet) Sassoon, but added it was ‘just what I meant it to be’. An anthem is a song of devotion or a musical composition for a choir. But it’s also an alternative word for ‘antiphon’, defined as ‘a piece of music with sung responses, consisting of alternate parts, where some parts are answers or responses to others’. The aptness of this definition for a poem in which sounds echo one another, and the sestet thematically ‘answers’ the octave, should now be obvious. Since this sonnet speaks so well for itself, we don’t need to know about Owen’s life to appreciate its meaning. As it happens, however, his biography confirms what we might infer 69from the poem. We might, for example, infer a speaker who is angry about conventional religion but knowledgeable about its terms and trappings. This was indeed the case with Owen. Influenced by an evangelical mother who wished him to become a clergyman, he later lost his faith and, when war broke out, hated the way in which the churches ignored Christ’s essential teachings. ‘Thus you see’, he concluded, ‘that pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.’ We might also infer that the poem is a plea on behalf of slaughtered soldiers and again Owen's letters confirm such a reading. Hospitalised for six months at Craiglockhart near Edinburgh (where in 1917 he completed the poem), he could have accepted a home posting but chose instead to return to the Front. ‘I shall be able’, he told his mother, ‘to cry my outcry, playing my part’, adding later: ‘I came out in order to help these boys - directly as well as an officer can [Owen was a Captain]; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can’. Owen was killed, aged 25, on 4 November 1918. His parents received the telegram announcing his death as the Armistice bells were ringing out on 11 November 1918. Owen was a great poet of the First World War, but his poetry transcends that conflict. He was, as Dylan Thomas remarked, a poet ‘of all times, all places, and all wars’. As this analysis has aimed to show, he was a master of both power and precision. 0 craxorsopenun «Fumi o6pe4eHHoii ioHocrH» YuspHza OysHa ApsuaTpuaas Oxctbopackuii yrnpepenrer Wellington Square, Oxford, United Kingdom, OX1 2)D; david.grylls@conted.ox.ac.uk B cratbe JaH noqpoOubiii aHanua cruxorsopenua Yuspuya OysHa «PuMH o6peveHHoii iHocTH». CraxoBequecknii anam3 — apKHit o6pasunk nogxoga aHraniickux aMTepaTypoBesoB k aHaIN3y 1oasHH. Kmouepnie cosa: Yunprig Oyax; crHxoTBopeHHe, cTHXOBeAYecKHii aasng; «'iMH o6pexeHHoii 1oHocTH» * 70A Poem by Ian Parks Ian Parks was born in 1959. He is the author of several books of poetry including his Collected Love Poems 1979-2009, and recent collections, The Landing Stage (2010) and The Exile's House, (2012). He was the 2012 writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library, and is the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester. At present he is working on an anthology of Chartist poetry: An Imprisoned Fire: Chartist Poetry 1838-1848. Since was first published in the Times Literary Supplement in November 2011. Our thanks to the author and to the TLS for permission to reprint it. Since Since then I've crossed a flooded continent and dreamt a better ending: one in which the door was never opened, never closed; where the false intelligence was never sent and the road not taken was the taken road. Since then I've found another way of saying all the things I should have said about the impulse and the laws imposed: the freedoms we once had and where they went. We welcome detailed comments on this mysterious poem for the next issue of Footpath. One allusion: ‘the road not taken’ refers to the title of a short and famous poem by Robert Frost. * a