1] Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen

As the First World War raged on to its completion, Wilfred Owen, the poem, spent the final days of the
war incarcerated in Craiglockhart, suffering from an acute case of shellshock and trying to write through
the trauma using poetry. It marked a turning point in his career. Working with Siegfried
Sassoon (read Sassoon’s poetry here), Wilfred Owen produced the majority of his writing while
convalescing at Craiglockhart, and the poems that he wrote there remain among the most poignant of his
pieces. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ was written from September to October 1917.

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 rattleCan 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
eyesShall 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.

Summary of Anthem for Doomed Youth

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. It was Siegfried Sassoon who gave the poem the title ‘Anthem’.
This poem also draws quite heavily on Wilfred Owen’s love of poetry.

Analysis, Stanza by Stanza

First Stanza
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.
‘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 – it dehumanizes the soldiers much in the same way that Owen
sees the war dehumanizing the soldiers, bringing up imagery of violence and unnecessary slaughter. 
Owen made no secret that he was a great critic of the war; his criticism of pro-war poets has been
immortalized in poems such as Dulce et Decorum Est, and in letters where Wilfred Owen wrote home.
In ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth,’ Owen makes no secret of the fact that he believes the war is a horrific
waste of human life.
The first stanza of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’  continues in the pattern of a pitched battle, as though it
were being written during the Pushover 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.
At this point, a great deal of the British Army had lost faith in the war as a noble cause and was only
fighting out of fear of court-martial, therefore the rifles stutter their ‘hasty orisons’. Orisons are a type of
prayer, which further points out Owen’s lack of faith – he believes that war has overshadowed faith, that it
has taken the place of belief. As he says in another poem, ‘we only know war lasts, rain soaks, and
clouds sag stormy’.
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 nature
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.

Second Stanza
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 the second stanza, Owen moves away from the war to speak about the people who have been affected
by it: the civilians who 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. The acute loss of life that
Owen witnessed in the war is made all the more poignant and heartbreaking in the second stanza, which,
compared to the first, seems almost unnaturally still. He speaks about the futility of mourning the dead
who have been lost so carelessly, and by making the mourners youthful, he draws further attention to the
youthfulness of the soldiers themselves. Note the clever use of words like pallor most often associated
with death or dying. 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. The meter is far more even in the
second stanza as well. This is only subtly different but the net effect is while the first stanza creates a
frenetic, disjointed feel the second is more reflective of a solemnity.
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.
Throughout ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ there are heavy allusions to a great variety of writers.
 Lines 6 to 7 reference the poem ‘To Autumn‘, by John Keats (read more of Keats’ poems)
 Lines 10-11 reference ‘The Wanderings of Oisin‘, a poem by William Butler Yeats (read
more Yeats’ poetry)
 Lines 10-13 also references ‘A New Heaven‘, a poem by Wilfred Owen himself.

Historical Background
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born at Plas Wilmont on the 18th of March, 1893. He remains one of the
leading poets of the First World War, despite most of his works being published posthumously. He was a
second lieutenant in the Manchester regiment, though shortly after, he fell into a shell hole and was blown
sky-high by a trench mortar, spending several days next to the remains of a fellow officer. Soon afterward,
he was diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia and was sent to Craiglockhart, where he met Siegfried
Sassoon. This was the point where Owen began to work on his poetry.

Dalli, Elise. "Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen". Poem Analysis,
2] Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen immortalized mustard gas in his indictment against warfare, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est.’ Written
in 1917 while at Craiglockart, and published posthumously in 1920, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ details what
is, perhaps, the most memorable written account of a mustard gas attack. The year was 1917, just before
the Third Battle of Ypres. Germany, in their bid to crush the British army, introduced yet another vicious
and potentially lethal weapon of attack: mustard gas, differentiated from the other shells by their
distinctive yellow markings. Although not the effective killing machine that chlorine gas (first used in 1915)
and phosgene (invented by French chemists), mustard gas has stayed within the public consciousness as
the most horrific weapon of the First World War. Once deployed mustard gas lingers for several days, and
anyone who came in contact with mustard gas developed blisters and acute vomiting. It caused internal
and external bleeding, and lethally-injured took as long as five weeks to die.
 
Dulce et Decorum Est
 Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through
sludge,Till on the haunting flares we turned our backsAnd towards our distant rest began to
trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had lost their bootsBut limped on, blood-shod. All went lame;
all blind;Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hootsOf tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped
behind.
 Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;But
someone still was yelling out and stumblingAnd flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...Dim,
through the misty panes and thick green light,As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
 In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
 If in some smothering dreams you too could paceBehind the wagon that we flung him in,And
watch the white eyes writhing in his face,His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;If you could
hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,Obscene as cancer,
bitter as the cudOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—My friend, you would not tell with
such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro
patria mori.

Summary
There was no draft in the First World War for British soldiers; it was an entirely voluntary occupation, but
the British needed soldiers to fight in the war. Therefore, through a well-tuned propaganda machine of
posters and poems, the British war supporters pushed young and easily influenced youths into signing up
to fight for the glory of England. Several poets, among them Rupert Brook, who wrote the poem ‘The
Soldier‘ (there is a corner of a foreign field/ that is forever England) used to write poetry to encourage the
youth to sign up for the army, often without having any experience themselves! It was a practice that
Wilfred Owen personally despised, and in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est,’ he calls out these false poets and
journalists who glorify war. The poem takes place during a slow trudge to an unknown place, which is
interrupted by a gas attack. The soldiers hurry to put on their masks, only one of their numbers is too slow
and gets consumed by the gas. The final stanza interlocks a personal address to war journalist Jessie
Pope with horrifying imagery of what happened to those who ingested an excessive amount of mustard
gas.

Stanza One
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
British soldiers would trudge from trench to trench, seeping further into France in pursuit of German
soldiers. It was often a miserable, wet walk, and it is on one of these voyages that the poem opens.
Immediately, it minimizes the war to a few paltry, exhausted soldiers; although it rages in the background
(’till on the haunting flares we turned our backs / and towards our distant rest began to trudge’). Owen
uses heavy words to describe their movement – words like ‘trudge’, ‘limped’; the first stanza of the poem
is a demonstration of pure exhaustion and mind-numbing misery.

Stanza Two
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
The second stanza changes the pace rapidly. It opens with an exclamation – ‘Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!’ –
and suddenly the soldiers are in ‘an ecstasy of fumbling’, groping for their helmets to prevent the gas from
taking them over. Again, Owen uses language economically here: he uses words that express speed,
hurry, and almost frantic demand for their helmets. However, one soldier does not manage to fit his
helmet on in time. Owen sees him ‘flound’ring like a man in fire or lime’ through the thick-glassed pane of
his gas mask.

Stanza Three
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
For a brief two lines, Owen pulls back from the events happening throughout the poems to revisit his own
psyche. He writes, ‘In all my dreams,/ before my helpless sight’, showing how these images live on with
the soldiers, how these men are tortured by the events of war even after they have been removed from
war. There is no evading or escaping war.

Stanza Four
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie:  Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. [In illac]
In the last paragraph, Owen condenses the poem to an almost claustrophobic pace: ‘if in some
smothering dreams you too could pace’, and he goes into a very graphic, horrific description of the
suffering that victims of mustard gas endured: ‘froth-corrupted lungs’,’ incurable sores’, ‘the white eyes
writhing in his face’. Although the pace of the poem has slowed to a crawl, there is much happening in the
description of the torment of the mustard gas victim, allowing for a contrast between the stillness of the
background, and the animation of the mustard gas victim. This contrast highlights the description, making
it far more grotesque. Owen finishes the poem on a personal address to Jessie Pope: ‘My friend, you
would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et
decorum est / Pro patria mori.’ Jessie Pope was a journalist who published, among others, books such as
Jessie Pope’s War Poems and Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times. The Latin phrase is from Horace, and
means, ‘it is sweet and right to die for your country’. The earliest dated record of this poem is 8. October
1917. It was written in the ballad form of poetry – a very flowing, romantic poetical style, and by using it
outside of convention, Owen accentuates the disturbing cadence of the narrative. It is a visceral poem,
relying very strongly on the senses, and while it starts out embedded in the horror and in the narrative, by
the final stanza, it has pulled back to give a fuller view of the events, thus fully showing the horror of the
mustard gas attack.

Historical Background
While at Craiglockhart, Owen became the editor of the hospital magazine, The Hydra. Through it, he met
the poet Siegfried Sassoon (read Sassoon’s poetry here), who later became his editor, and one of the
most important impacts on his life and work. Owen wrote a number of his poems in Craiglockhart, with
Sassoon’s advice. After his death in 1918, aged 25, Sassoon would compile Owen’s poems, and publish
them in a compilation in 1920.

3] Exposure by Wilfred Owen

‘Exposure’ offers an in-depth view of life in the frosted winter of Northern France, where soldiers on duty
would be left exposed to the elements.
Sometimes soldiers would march during the night, and given the frigid temperatures that beset Northern
France in the winter, would be in danger of frostbite and pneumonia. It is one of Wilfred Owen’s last
poems, written in September 1918, a few weeks before he was killed. The coldest winter was 1916-17.
The winter was so cold that I felt like crying. In fact the only time… I didn’t actually cry but I’d never felt
like it before, not even under shell fire. We were in the Ypres Salient and, in the front line, I can remember
we weren’t allowed to have a brazier because it weren’t far away from the enemy and therefore we
couldn’t brew up tea. But we used to have tea sent up to us, up the communication trench. Well a
communication trench can be as much as three quarters of a mile long. It used to start off in a huge dixie,
two men would carry it with like a stretcher. It would start off boiling hot; by the time it got to us in the front
line, there was ice on the top it was so cold.
— NCO Clifford Lane.

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us . . .Wearied we keep awake because the
night is silent . . .Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient . . .Worried by silence, sentries
whisper, curious, nervous,But nothing happens.Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the
wire,Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery
rumbles,Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.What are we doing here?The poignant misery of
dawn begins to grow . . .We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.Dawn massing in the
east her melancholy armyAttacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey,But nothing
happens.Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.Less deadly than the air that shudders
black with snow,With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew,We watch them wandering up
and down the wind's nonchalance,But nothing happens.Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for
our faces—We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,Deep into grassier
ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.Is it that we
are dying?Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozedWith crusted dark-red jewels;
crickets jingle there;For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;Shutters and doors, all
closed: on us the doors are closed,—We turn back to our dying.Since we believe not otherwise can kind
fires burn;Now ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.For God's invincible spring our love is made
afraid;Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,For love of God seems dying.To-night,
this frost will fasten on this mud and us,Shrivelling many hands, and puckering foreheads crisp.The
burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp,Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,But
nothing happens.

Stanza One
Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us . . .
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . .
Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient . . .
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
But nothing happens.
The beauty of Owen’s poetry lies in the simplicity of his words: he does not need to tangle himself up in
words to show what he means. The opening stanza delivers us to the bleak French landscape without
delay, and Owen brings the surroundings alive by using action verbs. For example, ‘our brains ache, in
the merciless iced east winds that knive us’. Not only that, the use of his language shows that the soldiers
are truly alone in a hostile environment. Even nature has turned against them. Even nature is angry at
them. They exist in their own world, and yet, as we can see from the stanza, they seem to scarcely exist
at all. Tired and aching, they trudge onwards – the silence offering them enough threat to stay awake, and
thus, through Owen’s description, we, as well, are afraid of the silence. There is so much in the first
stanza that is building, the atmosphere pushing up to an almost tangible point by the end line ‘but nothing
happens’, and while the phrase helps to entrench the idea of immovability, of soldiers, stuck, it seems to
hint that something is on its way to happening.

Stanza Two
Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,
Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
What are we doing here?
In the second stanza of ‘Exposure,’ Owen introduces the war: always present, even when it is not visible.
The phrase ‘twitching agonies’, although simple, helps to nudge the reader into the poem. Also, note the
distant prevalence of war; although not immediately there, the presence of it is felt in the simplest of
words – ‘the flickering gunnery rumble’, ‘the dull rumour of some other war’. Once more, Owen shows the
confusion of soldiers by asking, ‘what are we doing here?’ near the end. It is no secret that this war was
not meant to last as long as it did and that by the time it was in its second year, many soldiers were
fighting not for king or for country, but because they were there.
About Wilfred Owen Poet. Soldier. Although these do not appear to be two sides of the same coin, they
are the two halves of Wilfred Owen.

Stanza Three
The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow . . .
We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey,
But nothing happens.
The awful continuation of war seems to be a cycle – ‘we only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag
stormy’, an inevitable fact of life, a piece of nature that the soldiers have now taken to be as accurate as
possible. Everything is war. Dawn masses her melancholy army, ‘attacks once more in ranks on shivering
ranks of grey / but nothing happens’. Again, the use of ‘but nothing happens’ works twofold: to heighten
the atmosphere of ‘Exposure,’ and also to show the terror of living, day in, day out, waiting for death. It is
a simple mechanism, but it works especially well in this part of ‘Exposure.’

Stanza Four
Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.
Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,
With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew,
We watch them wandering up and down the wind’s nonchalance,
But nothing happens.
Nature, here, seems to be an attacking force itself – the bullets are ‘less deadly than the air that shudders
black with snow’, the wind is nonchalant at their suffering. Owen gives the impression that the soldiers
have been lost in a drifting, desolate land, where everything at their beck and call is going to attack them,
where everything strives to see them hurt.

Stanza Five
Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces—
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.
—Is it that we are dying?
Note the misery inherent in these few stanzas. The soldiers have been beaten – not by the Germans, but
by the weather, the awful, crushing weather that has left them unable to fight, that has dazed their minds
to days of brighter futures, that has left them in a shell-hole of misery. They have reached the point that
the despair they feel feels almost like death, and there is no way out of it, not for these soldiers. There is
no stanza that helps to lift the poem, ‘Exposure,’ up; it is singularly and wholly sad, reflecting the soldiers’
situation.

Stanza Six
Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed
With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,—
We turn back to our dying.
Even in peace, there is exhaustion – ‘slowly our ghosts drag home’. And there is the sense, here, that
peace is not really for them. It is glimpsed, not attained. ‘Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors
are closed’, Owen writes, and this shows the distance between soldier and civilian, that the soldiers
cannot envisage, anymore, a state of peace. They are at war, and thus their lives have been completely
swallowed up by the presence of war.

Stanzas Seven and Eight

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
Now ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.
For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid;
Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,
For love of God seems dying.

Tonight, this frost will fasten on this mud and us,

Shrivelling many hands, and puckering foreheads crisp.
The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens.
The despair reaches a point in the final two stanzas of ‘Exposure.’ This is where action, should it happen,
must happen – however, nothing does. The soldiers die alone, in a field, frozen, and are found by the
members of the army that bury the dead. They come across them in this field, and wait for something to
happen – but nothing does. All of the soldiers have died miserable and far away from home, scared and
in pain, and the final ‘but nothing happens’ seems to serve as an idea that these things cannot be
changed now. This is the way that life is. There is no way out of this life but through death.

Historical Background
We were behind the line; we were in reserve, we were at Mametz Wood. We were under canvas in the
middle of winter, this was December and I’d been down on a course and had come back. And my kit had
gone on up, I knew where the battalion was, I was there before I left, I knew the way up to the battalion
and had left my kit to be sent on, my valise, to be sent up with the rations. But my kit never arrived and I
had no cover and the battalion had only one blanket per man. It was a very hard frost and I arrived at this
place very hot and sweaty and got a chill and was carried down from that to hospital.
– Charles Wilson, September 1917.