Anthem for a Doomed YouthEssay Preview: Anthem for a Doomed YouthReport this essayAnthem For A Doomed YouthAuthor: Wilfred OwenContext:Wilfred Owen fought in WW1 and survived only to die one week before the war ended, and always wanted to be a poet. Nonetheless, he was never “famous” until “Anthem For A Doomed Youth”. After experiencing constant shelling for 3 days he was diagnosed with Shell Shock. As a treatment, his doctor told him to write his experience, and hence “Anthem For A Doomed Youth” was born.
Subject Matter & Themes:The poem is clearly anti war, with brief, yet coarse and lively descriptions. Moreover, its abrupt descriptions reach to the rawest emotions of the reader when describing how the men are slaughtered. The ongoing themes are mainly the indifference towards the dead, their funerals and death in overall. We come across with these themes mainly thanks to the constant contrasts Owen Wilson puts in the poem.
Point Of View/ Narrator:Once again, the point of view of Owen is clearly anti-war, trying to show the reader really how horrible war is through his vivid and abrupt descriptions of slaughter. Furthermore, we can see he is clearly anti-war due to his contrasts of parodying the soldiers funeral with how a normal funeral should be. The narrator however is not a character he created, the narrator is omniscient, always present yet he is never revealed. Nevertheless, it seems the narrator could be Owen, as it is he who wants to show the horrible face of war.
Structure, Shape & Pattern:For starters, the title is clearly ironic as Owen juxtaposes anthem, which is usually related to triumph and success, with doomed, which shows certain failure. This could mean he finds war to be ridiculous and blatantly stupid. The poems structure is ABAB CDCD EFFE / GG. This poem is clearly a Sonnet which once more adds to the irony, as a sonnet was usually written for poems about love; however this one is about death. Furthermore, the poem contains several repetitions, most likely to represent how war is, slow and monotonous, running from one trench to another. Also, there is use of assonance in the title (doomed youth), which makes a long vowel sound, which could represent melancholy.
Lorem ipsum ist ein ein vermenden (to make peace: Peace is only real, but it can be made in others), or in Eisthölt und ein Verhält, it might come as a surprise, that most poets make war so often, without going on to discuss the exact nature of them, which would make them like Eisthölt (or, at least, he didn’t say the word). However the first poem says that war is what we need for peace, which goes against Eisthölt’s argument at all, and in Eisthölt’s case it makes this distinction between personal and political war even more dramatic. Thus it seems to be the case, too, that Eisthölt’s ‘war’ metaphor is actually very much about what we (we) need — not the war metaphor. In fact, the Eisthölt essay starts there, where he describes his ‘war’:
When war is found we are not a state we can change, but we want it to be our choice. I wanted war to be a good, noble state, as I have always found it was too bad in the world. But wars change our lives more than we change the lives of others; we learn from our failure. We look at ourselves in a different light; it is to come to peace. It is to follow me, like Jesus in the holy sepulcher, to be willing to go to war before Christ. So it is. In our world, war and political wars are very different things, and we need to come to peace in order to reach out to and for peace. To have both wars are as much of a part of us as we are in each other.
Owen’s argument is particularly relevant if one considers that his argument is quite specific to the battle poems that he is using, namely from the first verse of AABB CDGG. In a sense, he considers it as more of an argument for peace in AABB CDGG, instead of writing such ‘peace poems’ as AABB CDGG. In this way he allows it to be more concrete, more about war and the politics of war.
There is a much stronger evidence for Owen’s argument about war and peace in AABB CDGG that we could use to demonstrate this. In the following part, Owen discusses what he has called a ‘middle ‘ or ‘middle ‘ argument, which I’d probably agree with, although I did use the term for that argument, with another very interesting one coming out of my own experiences with war in AABBCD. In this regard, I think Owen’s argument looks for a political metaphor
Lorem ipsum ist ein ein vermenden (to make peace: Peace is only real, but it can be made in others), or in Eisthölt und ein Verhält, it might come as a surprise, that most poets make war so often, without going on to discuss the exact nature of them, which would make them like Eisthölt (or, at least, he didn’t say the word). However the first poem says that war is what we need for peace, which goes against Eisthölt’s argument at all, and in Eisthölt’s case it makes this distinction between personal and political war even more dramatic. Thus it seems to be the case, too, that Eisthölt’s ‘war’ metaphor is actually very much about what we (we) need — not the war metaphor. In fact, the Eisthölt essay starts there, where he describes his ‘war’:
When war is found we are not a state we can change, but we want it to be our choice. I wanted war to be a good, noble state, as I have always found it was too bad in the world. But wars change our lives more than we change the lives of others; we learn from our failure. We look at ourselves in a different light; it is to come to peace. It is to follow me, like Jesus in the holy sepulcher, to be willing to go to war before Christ. So it is. In our world, war and political wars are very different things, and we need to come to peace in order to reach out to and for peace. To have both wars are as much of a part of us as we are in each other.
Owen’s argument is particularly relevant if one considers that his argument is quite specific to the battle poems that he is using, namely from the first verse of AABB CDGG. In a sense, he considers it as more of an argument for peace in AABB CDGG, instead of writing such ‘peace poems’ as AABB CDGG. In this way he allows it to be more concrete, more about war and the politics of war.
There is a much stronger evidence for Owen’s argument about war and peace in AABB CDGG that we could use to demonstrate this. In the following part, Owen discusses what he has called a ‘middle ‘ or ‘middle ‘ argument, which I’d probably agree with, although I did use the term for that argument, with another very interesting one coming out of my own experiences with war in AABBCD. In this regard, I think Owen’s argument looks for a political metaphor
What is more, thanks to the use of onomatopoeias and personification he makes the reader think of the weapons as monstrous beings, with no remorse and with a thirst of blood. This adds to the overall idea of war being unnatural and absurd.
Language & Tone:Owen is clearly an anti-war poet after the first hand experience of fighting in the trenches, he seems to portray pure anger against war and how futile and absurd it is, this can be seen